Time for the Challenge to Begin

After a lovely long sleep it was time to check out of the hostel and head back to Beijing Airport to meet our fellow trekkers. We managed to negotiate another taxi fare of 100 Yuan to the airport and settled down for the 30 minute ride. As we were going we started to wonder what the rest of the group would be like, if we would get on and whether we would be trailing at the back. This was one of the things making me most nervous to be honest, what if everyone else was much fitter?! As we navigated ourselves to arrivals we spotted a guy wearing a Charity Challenge t-shirt so we went over and introduced ourselves to Michael, he would be one of our amazing guides for the week. After half an hour or so we spotted some of our fellow trekkers coming through as we recognised them from facebook! It was nice to meet them in person and they were all as lovely in real life as they had been electronically. After some introductions we were rounded up by Michael and Philip (who was the challenge leader and had travelled from the UK with the other trekkers) and put onto our coach which would be our taxi to and from the Wall for the week expertly driven by Mr Wong. We set off for Badaling which was to be our starting point for the week and arrived at our first night's accommodation 2 hours later. It was quite basic but I was pleasantly surprised by the standard. We all met up for dinner and had a beer or two to break the ice before we were debriefed about the challenge that lay ahead. Whether it was deliberate or not Philip put the frighteners on us all and warned us it was going to be incredibly tough and we should prepare ourselves for a very challenging first day. We would be trekking for 6 hours starting on a paved path but soon leading onto uneven crumbling wall before descending down a muddy, stony hill to the coach which would then transfer us to the next stage of the challenge. We were warned about the isolated locations we would be trekking in and told there would be stages where even the fittest person would be struggling, eeeek! No more beer for me after that and I then made a conscious decision to avoid alcohol for the week to make sure I was not compromising myself and ensuring that I would be in the best condition possible for the week. I feared I would need to be! After the chat we stayed up for a couple of hours and played some ice breaker games including one where we had to go round the circle and recite everyone's name. By the time we went round the entire 23 they were all pretty much drummed in! I called it a day about 10pm as we had a 6.30 start the next day, it would be a pattern for the next 5 days!