Some of the photographs from my recent trip to China are beginning to trickle through the processing & reach the site.  There’s just under 5,000 photographs to get through, though some of those are my holiday shots so will end up printed for my albums & wont be going into the gallery.

First to go up are the photographs from the Mu Tian Ya section of the Great Wall of China.  Mu Tian Ya is about a 2.5 hour drive from Beijing, though that’s certainly dependent on the time of day & amount of traffic. Peak Hour in Beijing is second to none.

It was beautiful up there; sunny & hot, roughly a 34 degree day (that’s 93.2 fahrenheit for those of you not using the metric system) but the shade inside the guard towers was at least 10 degrees less, the ancient stones keeping the cool. The smog/haze wasn’t the greatest, but certainly wasn’t as bad as Beijing was 6 days later.  The Chinese characters painted on the mountain [apparently] read “Honest Mu Tian Ya” – while I can speak a little Mandarin, I cannot (yet) read it.

Mu Tian Ya has been open to the public for 12 years. It’s not overly touristed, like Ba Da Ling is, but it’s definitely getting there. Read the rest of this entry »