Victor Travel Blog

 

Jinshanling Great Wall

Most tourists wanting to see the Great Wall of China visit Badaling, the part of the wall which is located not far from Beijing. If you want to just look at the wall and take your photo with it behind you, Badaling will be the right decision. However, note that about 30,000 visitors go through this section of the wall daily. Sure enough, a couple of thousand of them will be on your photo along with you.

This is a big problem for us because we always want not only to see, but to feel any ancient construction. So we started to seek unreconstructed parts of the Great Wall. For us, two of them were appropriate: Jiankou Great Wall and Jinshanling Great Wall.

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Have not you been to China yet? That is unfortunate. This country is worth a visit, if only for one thing: the Great Wall. We visited China two times with a break of ten years, but we were still shocked by some things.

The country is unique. Think paper, gunpowder, compass, porcelain—all these things were invented here. Ten years ago, I would not have imagined it, but now, I write this blog post on a tablet PC made in China, and drink coffee brewed in a coffee machine also made there. The citizens of Beijing joke that new electronic devices appear in their home more often than in Bill Gates’ home and become obsolete in two weeks. That may be, but many things in China are immutable. The country of liars is waiting for you.

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Sanya Marriott Resort & Spa. Hainan Island, China.

Today, China is experiencing a tourist boom even in the outermost provinces. Hainan Island is the smallest and most remote province of the Celestial Empire, and it is as different from the Chinese mainland as Beijing is from Shanghai. Gorgeous beaches, extinct volcanoes, hot springs, sea pearls, coconut groves, plantations of coffee, tea, mangoes, and bananas – all these things are there, on Hainan. However, the island has known bad times. For example, in imperial China, except for the death penalty, the strictest punishment was exile to Hainan Island for the offender and his entire family.

We were there for the first time ten years ago, when my Victor Travel Blog was not even a project yet. Sanya City—the tourist capital of the island—did not impress us, and squalid houses built on its outskirts were in stark contrast to a chain of luxury hotels on the half-empty Yalong Bay beach. Today, ten years later, Hainan Island is different, and its capital, Haikou, is looking more and more like Hong Kong.

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