Got to head out to the Great Wall and that was a pretty good trip. I went with my guide Roger and a Chinese run tour bus for the package tour of the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall.

According to Fodor’s, I shouldn’t have even bothered with the Ming Tombs and the portion of the Great Wall I was to go to was the “tackiest” of the bunch. Oh well, I’m going and this is my day to do it so let’s just see what it all is.

The first part of the trip was to haul all of us to the “jade factory” where they loaded us off the bus and into a very brief “history” of Chinese jade in the region and into the big store selling all sorts of overpriced jade trinkets. I looked a a couple of things, which were all production line pieces, and then headed up for our “lunch”. The food was pretty bad but we did meet a few Germans who were taking tour as well. We chatted for a bit about what events they were watching and then headed back to the bus.

At these stops, the tour guide gets a percentage of any sales, and for most of the tour guides that is all of the compensation that they receive. (That said, shuttling us into the shop was about the only thing that our guide did for us. The only other thing I saw her do during the day was count out the empty seats and go looking for the two people that had not gotten on the bus yet.)

After our “lunch” the bus took us to one of the Ming Tombs. This is a decent park area where you can see the mountains in the distance. More of the old imperial architecture is represented and then you go through a security checkpoint (the Chinese love their checkpoints it seems - like I’m going to bomb a stone tomb that’s underground for some reason) and then down to the tomb. There’s not much showmanship to the tomb. It’s pretty bare down there but the scale of the rooms is fairly large and is mapped out the same way as one of the courtyards in the Forbidden City.

more later on the Great Wall