Continuing Day 3- A long day

We had just finished climbing the Great Wall, and all of us were tired, but raring to do more. Saimiya had planned out so much for us to do, to visit all these national monuments of Emperors, Temples and more. Since I have procrastinated, I don't remember where we went on this one, but it is a tomb of a Great Person in China from millions of years ago. Okay, maybe just hundreds of years ago, but it is very ancient! The grounds of this tomb were beautiful and vast.



We got to the main building, which housed this tomb. The building is in the picture, to the right. The tomb is underground. Some body discovered the tomb many years before. My audio guide wasn't working, even when Saimiya gave me new batteries, so I don't really know much about it. Sorry. We we told that the exhibition was only 7 floors underground, and since all of our calves were pretty tight from climbing the Great Wall, none of us were too excited about going down. Especially when we had to climb back up. But, we trudged down the stairs, looked at all the displays and the final resting place, and lo and behold, we had to walk back up the stairs. It seemed more like 28 floors up than seven. Oh, my aching calves!


Anyway, we still had more time for more climbing! Really, the day was still young, warm and sunny. We were off to the Summer Palace, which I had looked forward to since the states. We didn't get to spend near enough time there. The grounds were, again, huge and held many acres, gardens and buildings. Too many for just one afternoon. But, here are the highlights.





This is the entrance to the Summer Palace. This leads up to Longevity Hill, which dominates the Summer Palace, and overlooks Kunming Lake. Kunming Lake was dug entirely by hand, and the excavated soil became Longevity Hill. It is 60 meters high. Very high for climbing. Kunming Lake covers 2.2 square kilometers. Not small, so you can imagine how much dirt they excavated. It appears that they like to make man-made hills. The other one we saw was at the Forbidden City, remember?

More stairs to climb. Bob is not happy. I was. Yeah! More exercise. Yes, it was many many steps. And these were just the first set of steps we had to climb. After the Great Wall, and the Tomb of many floors. But the weather couldn't have been better. In fact, our whole vacation we had only one day of rain, and that lasted only half a day. Otherwise, great sunny Spring weather.

The Summer Palace has caves to climb through and some very large rocks. I am guessing that these rocks were hauled out of the area they built the lake on. A Buddhist Temple sits at the top of the Hill as well, with quite a few different Buddhas in it. I was unaware that there were more than one Buddha. Chalk it up to my falling asleep in every history or geography class I ever took.

The Summer Palace was our last stop of the day, and as it closed at 5 or 6 p.m., we didn't have time to explore the rest of the Palace. Another excuse to go back to Beijing, I guess.