A Great Holiday
Anusha Jacob, Group 2: Fiction, Peak School
hen we reached the Great Wall of China my family was agog with excitement. “I cannot wait to
walk on the longest wall in the world,” said my brother Ryan. Our family bid the taxi driver
goodbye at the Mutianyu section and bought tickets, grudgingly, to get to the top for hundred
Yuan each. In the cable car ride to one of the higher sections of the Great Wall I realized that the
magnificent view was priceless.
Once at the top we set out to explore the sections on foot. I saw that there were many hawkers
selling snacks and water to the tourists. After an hour my brother started complaining of thirst, and we halted in
front of a hawker to buy water. The hawker was an old man with a big grey beard. Although frail, he replied
cheerfully, “Four Yuan for one bottle of water.” My dad picked out a note from his wallet and gave it to the old
man. “Keep the extra money,” said my dad. With an extremely surprised look on his face, he asked my Dad,
“
You sure?” and my dad nodded. Then the hawker immediately replied saying, “God bless you.”
W
After the water break, Dad said to me and my brother, “We are going to do something fun on the Great
Wall soon.” I instantly became very curious. “Is the surprise spot nearing us?” I asked my dad. “Yes it is. I
think it will probably just take five more minutes to reach there,” he replied. I started looking around to guess
what dad had planned. Shortly, we approached a spot which had a sign that said ‘tobogganing’, my brother saw
the sign and asked Dad, “So is this the surprise?”
“
Yes it is. Come on kids, let’s go and lineup,” said Dad. Soon enough we reached the front of the line and
we were seated in toboggans.
I was about to start when an instructor stopped me. “Wear helmet for safety,” said one of the instructors,
passing me a helmet; I quickly wore it and set off. A few seconds later my dad came zooming down from
behind followed by my mum and brother. “You are never going to catch up with me,” I yelled and started racing
down as fast as I could. When I was racing down, I realized tobogganing was exactly like go-carting. The view
of the Great Wall was splendid from here; you could see the ancient coffee brown wall snaking across the
landscape.
Suddenly I had to look away, break and stop with a jerk because there was a little girl in front of me who
was tobogganing really slowly. So, while the little girl slowly moved aside, I looked up and saw the hawker we
met looking at us. Then after what seemed like ten seconds my dad also stopped behind me, but with a huge jerk
and fortunately, before my mum and brother caught up, the little girl had cleared out of the way. I slowly looked
up at the hawker again but this time I saw him scrambling down the wall with a worried look on his face.
When my whole family had reached the finish line we took off our helmets and started to head back to the
main area of the Wall. But before we actually moved on, I asked my parents if we could take one last picture at
the finish line. “Sure sweetie. The camera is in the side pocket of your dad’s backpack,” replied my mum. I
searched the side pocket of the backpack but it was not there. So I searched through all the pockets thoroughly
but still could not find it. “The camera is missing!” I exclaimed. “The camera must have slipped out of the
pocket,” said dad. Then he asked me, “Peter did you see anything unusual when we were tobogganing?”
“
Well yes I did see something weird. I saw the hawker looking at us cheerfully the first second and the next
he was rushing down the Wall with a worried look on his face,” I replied.
“
Come on let’s go back to the place where we met the hawker,” said dad immediately.
So my family took the cable car back to the top and there we started walking as fast as we could to the spot
we met the hawker. Since we were we were walking really fast, pushing people out of our way, we reached the
hawkers spot in ten minutes, but when we reached there the hawker was missing. My dad wasn’t going to give
up so easily. So this time he started running across the Wall keeping an eye out for the hawker. After an hour
we gave up searching and dejectedly headed back to the hotel. I concluded that the hawker must have kept the
expensive camera, poor as he was. More than the cost of the camera what hurt me most was that we’d lost all
the pictures capturing our holiday in Beijing.
So we took the cable car back to the starting point and headed back to our hotel car in the parking lot.
When we were nearing the car we saw a familiar face talking with our driver and showing him a camera. We
were overjoyed and touched by the poor man’s integrity. We thanked him profusely and dad pulled out 200
Yuan to reward him. He declined the offer and said that he wanted us to leave with a good memory of his
country and people! I felt humbled and felt ashamed for being judgmental.
A truly memorable trip it was for all of us.
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