Great wall near Mu Tian Yu, Beijing, China
November 06, 2013
Well today was the day to pop along and see this big wall that they have here in China.
It’s close to Beijing in the grand scheme of things but it was still two and a half hours out of the city to get there. If you ever do come here and want to see the wall then avoid the over priced tours that get thrown in your face everywhere and do the trip yourself using the local transport. It’s very easy to do, so much cheaper and you can stay as long as you want as opposed to being thrown back on a tour bus at a set time. I went along with Sebastian the lad from Chile that I met on the train from Mongolia and it was a really good day out.
Just 20p got us a subway from the hostel to the Beijing bus station then £1.10 got us our one and a half hour bus ride out to the nearest bus station to the wall. Cracking value really. Lonely planet for some reason seem to deter you from using the local buses but I don’t see why as it was really good. Clean, efficient and full of locals as opposed to tourists which was nice. When we got off the bus one of the blokes who worked on the bus had a mini van parked up and ready to go. Obviously a daily sideline business for him and we agreed a price of £7 each for him to take us there, park up and wait then take us back to the bus station.
The section we went to was recommended by an English girl who lives in Beijing as it’s the quietest public section available with less tourists there. There is a cable car running up and down but we decided to do it all on foot and it was really worth it. A steep but fairly quick climb got us up to the wall and we headed off to the first tower over to the East.
There are 23 towers in total along this section with the last one being the highest at around a 3,000 ft climb. We could go a little way past the first tower so we clambered on to see what was there. Not that your supposed to as its closed to the public but there is no one there stopping you so we took a quick look at the sections that haven’t been restored and are crumbling and overgrown.
The wall really is an impressive sight in the flesh and it must have been some feat of construction hundreds of years ago to lug all those stone blocks up thousands of feet and build the thing. It was built to keep out the rampaging Mongolian hoards as they spread themselves across all of Eurasia. Some of the sections we walked were seriously steep to the point where we were climbing and trekking across the full range and all 23 towers took around 5 hours. It was a really good decision leaving the highest and steepest until the end and by 3pm all of the tour buses had departed which meant it was so much quieter with only a few locals dotted about here and there making it feel like you had the place to yourself.
The view of the mountain range around us from the wall was incredible and the sun was getting lower as we hit the summit of tower 23. It takes another good hour to trek all the way back down to the car park at the bottom and thankfully our driver was still there waiting to take us back to the bus stop.
It was a really cracking day. Tiring from what must have been thousands and thousands of steep steps but well worth it to see one of the must see sights of China while I’m here.
Xian is next on my list to visit which is a much more cultured city than Beijing apparently with a 15km ancient city wall around it and the Terra-cotta army not too far away. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Xian and some of the photos friends have shown me look amazing so I’m really looking forward to that next.
