Greetings from Beijing!

Well, it's day two of our trip and so far we're having a great time. We spent the day climbing the Great Wall, so we thought we'd post some photos.

One cool thing about the group we're traveling with is that instead of taking you to where all the tourists go, they try really hard to get you off the beaten path. So, instead of driving an hour to the most visited section of the Great Wall, we drove 4 and were lucky enough to have a section of the Wall almost to ourselves.

We're going to keep these travel updates pretty short on text, as now we're paying internet cafe fees, so enjoy the photos...

Here it is folks! These are but four of the twelve towers that we explored on this section.

A shot from inside one of those towers. Looks cozy.

Another shot looking to the next tower. The lady sitting there is one of many dozens that try to sell you everything from t-shirts to fans to leather-bound copies of Russian literature.

One of the great things about the section we visited is that is hasn't been heavily restored. A lot of it was crumbling, and we're probably lucky we didn't fall off at one point.

Look at meeeeee!!!!

Here we are celebrating making it to the top with our new friends, Sarah and Chris. We bonded over the fact that he works with "lazers"...have you ever noticed how many jokes you can make about lazers? (Jo's note: well, Shayne made about 436 today, so I imagine quite a few)

Victoryyyyyy!!!! (Note Jo's fabulous "I climbed the Great Wall" t-shirt)

There was a cool option to ride a zip-line on the way down, so of course we had to take it.

A shot of your heroic bloggers.

That's it for now. Tomorrow we see the Forbidden City, etc. For some reason it appears that our website has been blocked, so we can't respond to any comments. Please keep writing them, though, as we can read them in Shayne's email, and we'll respond in Hong Kong.

Cheers,

Shayne and Jo