I kind of felt like the Great Wall should be an easy half-day trip from Beijing. It's not. It's a very long day trip from the city.
This unfortunately meant we had to be out of the hotel at 6 in the morning. It was very cold. We ran around picking up people from other hostels and then went to the tour bus. Then we drove for four hours. It wasn't much warmer inside the bus. Our destination was the Jinshaling section of the wall. From here we were going to walk a 10 km section to the Simitai section of the wall. It sounded like a grand adventure to me. Erin was considerably less excited. Unsurprisingly, it was still very cold when we got off the bus. Hiking uphill helped. We were accompanied by our own little honor guard of people selling things. We ended up with a very helpful "Mongolian farmer." That is until Erin got fed up with him and in no uncertain terms told him that no money was forthcoming. He left after that.
When we finally got to the wall we could see it snaking off in either direction. The sky was blue (rather rare in Beijing) and the scenery was breathtaking. I took lots of pictures. Erin complained about the stairs a lot. It was a pretty hard climb. The wall seemed to follow the curve of the hill regardless of how steep it was. That meant we often plunged down and then climbed steeply heavenward. I wish I could show you pictures but the other wall, the Great Firewall of China, is preventing me from uploading them. In any case, this was one of the highlights of the trip for me, and the hike meant that for great big sections we had the entire wall to ourselves and I could clamber in and out of watchtowers and pretend to defend from Mongol hordes. Parts of it were pretty unrestored (meaning we had to leap from a couple watchtowers) but that just added to the sense of adventure.
It took us about 3 hours to get to the Simitai section, which we could see towering on the nearby hills. In spite of the cold, there was a guard waiting up there to check our ticket. Erin decided to shave the final five minute walk downhill and take the zipline. Then we met the rest of the group and got taken to a pretty nice buffet lunch. Then a long ride back to Beijing. All in all, a great day. ~Travis More thumbnails ...
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