May 4 - May 5th Muscat - Doha- Beijing-Xian

May 4 - May 5th Muscat - Doha- Beijing-Xian

We had booked a one way ticket from Muscat to Beijing for a little over $500 each with a 23 hour layover in Doha so we could visit granddaughter Yasmine. We were able to checkin online and print both boarding passes and while we discussed luggage we thought we would have an option of collecting it in Doha and rechecking on departure for Beijing. If we had given it a few minutes more thought we would have realized that the airline would be losing stop-over revenue....when we checked the bags they were sent all the way to the final destination and we were told we needed to stay in the transit airport. That didn't happen so we had a lovely time with our family in Doha.

Flight to Beijing was a nice daytime flight of almost 8 hours arriving a little after midnight on May 5th. Luggage arrived with us so we were very happy and our day was made when the transport that our boutique hotel Shambhala at the Great Wall was waiting for us with a sign. We had a drive of over 45 minutes to the hotel which is outside of the city where a wilder part of the Great Wall runs through the property. This hotel is a sister hotel to one where we had stayed a week when we were visiting Lhasa. The Tibetan staff was sound asleep on our arrival so it took some time to get them awake enough to come and open the gate. It was dark so we did not really get a sense of the place other than a dark walk to our little cottage which had the heat on fortunately as it was very cold. The decor was Tibetan as we expected but the room was a little rustic. We slept for 5 hours and then had a shower and looked outside. Horses were grazing and up on the hills were remains of the Great Wall. What a lovely way to start our Silk Road adventure - horses, (from the Chinese standpoint, obtaining horses was their reason to travel West) and lovely vistas of the old wall and towers while we had our breakfast. It turned out that this section of the Wall was actually built in the wrong place so it did not connect to anything and the owners of the place had put up a plaque to that effect along with the fact that the errant contractor had been beheaded.


We had arranged to go to the restored Wall at Mu Tian Yu which is 30-40 minutes by car from the hotel. We were at Wall by 11 am and looking at it from the bottom brought back memories of almost 32 years ago when we were climbing up the very steep steps to get to the top of the Wall at another location. In 1982 we were carrying baby Aniesa in a snuggle and had Bosch Seniors with us. We also remembered how tall and uneven the steps were with out a handrail and succumbed to one of the collapsible cane vendors were selling on the pathway.

Varied step heights 

 Lucky for us at Mu Tian Yu there are 2 cable cars that take you up to and down from the Wall. We went to the furthest cable car and walked the steeper parts in hopes of fewer tourists. We spent 2 hours on the Wall which was built during the Qin dynasty 221BC to 206BC. We then headed the 70km to the airport from our flight to Xian for the start of our Silk Road Journey.

We booked ourselves First Class tickets, something we never do but thought we might need a quick checkin if there was traffic. after a 2 hour flight we were on the ground in Xian being met by our guide Selina and driven to the Bell Tower Hotel inside the old walled city of Xian. The hotel was centrally located near the Bell Tower from which the bell was hit in the morning to tell the time and near by was the drum tower where the drum was struck in the evening.