A bit of new and old...

Today's choice of blip was easy as our schedule today was somewhat easier than yesterday's (which you will hear about in due course in a back blip as I made a mistake in adjusting for the time difference and ended up with images dated for the next day which makes for difficulties if you are uploading from an iPad as the app does not account for wrongly dated images). Today we just covered two locations - the Olympic Park with lots of new architecture and the Great Wall which is probably one of the oldest architectural features in China. The bit of the wall we visited was the less crowded and more scenically interesting section at Mutianyu. It was a lovely clear sunny day so the views were stunning but the heat made it difficult for us to attempt the more mountainous section as it shoots up the hill at an alarming gradient.

We wondered whether it could possibly live up to picture you have built up in your mind of this wonder of the world but it really is amazing and struggling along the top your very conscious of the amount of human , blood , sweat and tears that had gone into building it. Evidently the many hundreds who died on the job were buried ' in the wall' itself. We passed a bit where they were repairing some of the top pavement and could see the wooden palettes on which they still carry the flagstones up on their backs and were made aware of the immensity of building such a massive structure in mountainous terrain.