The Great Wall

Here I am at The Great Wall of China, the last of the 4 Seven New Wonders Of The World that I am visiting on this trip. The first thing to note is that The Great Wall isn't actually one really long wall, instead it is many quite long walls used to link up natural defences like impassable mountainsides.

I visited the Mutianyu part which is over 3,000 metres long and has 26 watchtowers (You can spot some of them in the photo). It was a truly impressive sight and there were lots of steps as the wall rose and fell with the hillside. They were those tiny types of steps that feel like you are doing lots of small footsteps in quick succession, so quite tiring!

Despite all the effort that went into building it though, it actually became pretty useless once invaders to China decided to come from the sea and even more useless once planes were invented. Funnily enough, if it wasn't for tourism it might not even exist like it does today and even now there are stretches that have totally collapsed and piles that are still illegally plundered for building materials!

Did You Know?: The Wall being visible from space is a myth and not true. It might be long but it's simply not wide enough!

Christ The Redeemer

The big man is the last of the five '7 New Wonders of the World' I will see until I get to China in May. It is one of the most famous statues in the entire world, it looks over nearly all of the city of Rio De Janeiro and it is very tall!

To see this huge version of Jesus meant getting a train that went up the side of a very steep mountain and it took about 20 minutes to get to top. Once at the summit the views were incredibly impressive and I could see Sugarloaf Mountain, the Maracanã Football Stadium, The Sambadrome and lots of beaches.

Did You Know?: The hands on the statue are modelled on the hands of a woman. The artist who made that specific part of the statue used her own hands to make sure she got the shapes right.

Rubbish

This is a photo of some of the many bits of litter I saw that had been thrown into the jungle on the way back from Machu Picchu. I also saw lots of tiny bits of plastic washed up on a beach that turtles use to lay their eggs on at Mayan ruins in Mexico (It would have broken off the masses of plastic floating in the sea).

The saddest thing is that these bits of plastic will take longer to break down and disappear than the age of the sites that I have visited!

I am going to make sure that I take more care to recycle my plastics when I get back home. If you want to learn more about recycling so that you can keep the planet cleaner ask your school eco-leader (That's Miss Townsend if you go to Weobley Primary).

Machu Picchu

Today was a long day! We travelled up to the top of Machu Picchu which is one of the 7 New Wonders Of The World (Including Chichen Itza, I'll have visited five of them by the time I get back) and there was a lot of walking in both sunshine and pouring rain!

Machu Picchu is a famous city that was lived in by Incas hundreds of years ago in The Sacred Valley and it is unusual because it is built on the top of a mountain in The Andes. There are two parts of it; the bit behind me in the photo is where everyone lived and there is also another part that was used for farming crops and is made of lots of flat levels built into the mountainside (They look like giant steps). I also spotted some wild llamas and chinchillas as I wandered around which was cool.

Did You Know?: All of the houses at Machu Picchu were built in a certain direction so that they got the most amount of sunshine each day. By building them into different levels it also meant that one house never cast a shadow on another!

Chichen Itza

Hola all, I am really geeking out on all the Mayan stuff in Mexico. Today we visited Chichen Itza, the most famous of all the Mayan sites. It was incredible and apart from the famous 'El Castillo' (The Castle) pyramid in the photo the huge site had loads of different ruins including 'The Temple of 1000 Columns', the stone hoops on walls that are early origins of basketball and an important cenota (Large water filled hole in the ground) that people were sacrificed and thrown into.
We have also moved from Cancun for a few days and are currently staying in Valladolid. This place is much more like the Mexico I expected to see with music playing, busy streets and old, plastered colourful buildings. I can't wait to do some more exploring in the next few days and tuck in to traditional burritos, tacos and fajitas etc.
Did You Know?: The steps on 'El Castillo' plus the platform on the top adds up to exactly 365. The same amount of days in a year! This isn't a coincidence as the Mayans had worked out, by mapping the sun, that there were 365 days in a year and this was an important part of their religion. Clever eh?