China's Great Wall
No trip to Beijing would be complete without a trip to the Great Wall of China, possibly China's most well known attraction. The wall was built and joined piecemeal over hundreds of years, with the well known areas being built later. Although supposedly to keep out invaders, it's currently a huge tourist draw, seeing crowds of people all the time and getting swamped during big holidays.
Sections
Since it's so long, the Great Wall is broken into sections, differentiating parts of the wall from each other. This way potential visitors can see how far away or how well maintained an area is. The most famous section is Badaling, not too far from Beijing. This is the section you've probably seen in pictures posted all over the internet. It's large and well maintained, but that's all I really know about it, since I chose to visit Mutianyu instead.
The Wall
I chose Mutianyu expecting it to be less crowded than Badaling. I'll never know if I was right or not, but there weren't too many people there. I never felt crowded or wished I had more space. I joined a tour and was brought right to the entrance on a bus. The entrance was well maintained and pretty straightforward, and we followed the guide to the ticket window. Getting out there from the city, unless you speak some Mandarin, would likely be pretty difficult, but you can probably save money if you can manage it. The entrance has some restaurants to eat at and the aforementioned ticket booth, but isn't overly excessive. You can hike from the entrance to the wall and back down again if you'd like, but there's also a cable car that goes up and down to save you a lot of time and, get this, a slide to take you back to the entrance.
Walking the Great Wall
The cable car takes you to about the center of the Mutianyu section of the wall. Walking in either direction you pass through towers that probably served as spots for the guards to get out of the rain or eat or sleep. A lot of these towers have steps up to the higher area that give a better view of the surrounding area. Walking east from the top of the cable car (tower numbers going down) will take you to the slide down and eventually a non tourist part of the wall. Walking west (tower numbers going up) takes you to the Jiankou section of the Great Wall. I've read that hiking from Jiankou is Mutianyu is popular, but as Jiankou is a non-tourist section of the wall I suspect it's illegal.
Where Mutianyu meets Jiankou
Although I assume Jiankou is illegal to walk on, the section of wall separating Mutianyu and Jiankou is easy to climb over or skirt around, and lots of people can be seen on the other side. That section of the Great Wall is probably less well taken care of and an interesting contrast to the mostly restored Mutianyu section but I can NOT suggest going there since it's off limits to tourists.
Advice
- If you go with a tour, keep track of how long it takes you to walk out from your start, so that you don't miss your ride back to the city.
- Decide which way you want to go if you use the cable car. If you're with a tour you probably won't have time to go both ways.
- Bring some snacks and water. Anything being sold on the wall will be more expensive than normal.
That wraps up my trip. I hope you all enjoyed it.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you on my next trip. Don't forget to click the links below and follow to stay up to date on what I'm doing and where I am and to see all the pictures and videos from the trips.