Awoke to the homestay owners preparing breakfast for a group of mountaineers around 3 am.  Had a difficult time getting back to sleep due to the barking dogs and then the roosters.  Finally, the Chinese mountaineers showed up around 5:30 or so and were noisy eating breakfast. 

We had a nice breakfast with some great egg, vegetable pancake things before getting in the bus to head to the trail – a few minutes from the homestay.   Hiked almost a thousand metres up to the wall on an okay trail.   It was a warm day today – close to 30 – so it was a pretty hot walk up.  

Once on the wall we walked for a while on some crumbling sections.   Wasn’t too bad – just warm.   We then carried on towards the touristy section, meeting more and more tourists.   Finally, we got to a section where someone was selling tourist trinkets, water and cold beer!  Definitely a change from yesterday, where we only saw a couple of people. 

We then carried on to the tourist section near a gondola.   Had to go down about 500 steep steps.   One of the girls in our group hurt her knee so some of us opted to join her and take the gondola down the last bit instead of doing an additional tourist infest area and 1000 steps, which aren’t a part of the wall.   Was definitively glad I did as the tourists were not enjoyable and the sun was getting to me.

Had some lunch at the bottom and then we got in the bus for the 2.5 hour drive to our next homestay.   This place was in a nice village, which appeared to be modeled after a historic village.  Did a brief walk to a gate to watch the sunset over the Wall.

Got back to the homestay and had a beer before dinner beside the river.  Had dinner and then a shower and to bed.