The Great Wall at Mutianyu

There are many different sections of the Great Wall you can go see from Beijing. Badaling is the most popular because it is the closest. I went to Simatai last year, which was 3 hours drive out of town and very scenic and very few people. This time we opted for a middle ground, the section at Mutianyu. It is a little bit farther out than Badaling (more straight north, instead of northwest which Badaling is).

The drive out there was easy enough, part high speed highway (would be called a freeway in California, except they are not free in China), and some national highway. As we got closer, we saw LOTS of farm style restaurants and places to stay (not a hotel, but a way to experience the farm life!), orchards of peaches, apples and cherries where you can pick your own fruits and fish ponds where you can fish your own fish for dinner or lunch.

So I knew this was going to be a lot more commerical than Simatai. We got to the parking, and there were so many souvenir shops lining the walkway to the ticket office and then to the entrance of the cable car, it was quite amazing. The vendors all seem to sell the same stuff, t-shirts, some Chinese style dresses and pajamas, fans, statues of the terra cotta tomb soldiers (which is weird so far away from where they are representing, Xian's first emporer's tomb). And all the vendors seem to speak some English, definitely enough to be calling out to the tourists as they walk by.

We got both the entrance tickets (40RMB each) and the cable car round trip tickets (50RMB each), since I wanted to conserve the energy to spend on the wall itself. The walk to the cable car was a good indication of what's to come, pretty steep already! The cable cars are like ski lifts.

We went up the mountainside, and soon we were at the half way point in this section of the Great Wall, with watch tower 14 in front of us, and towers 15 to 20 to the left, going UP, and tower 14 to tower 6 to the right, going Down.

We turned left, going up, for the better view, and fewer crowds. It worked out that way, no big crowds, the upwards climb got harder and harder, until from tower 19, where we climbed a steel ladder to the top to start the 426 steps to tower 20! The slope was at least 45 degree most of the way, and the steps into the tower 20 was even steeper, with very high steps which I climbed by using my hands too. Since I was carrying a backpack of camera stuff, I would hate to fall and hurt myself or break anything!

We were rewarded with the feeling of accomplishing the climb and great view below.

We had the tower all to ourselves for a long time before another person showed up. He actually climbed past the gateway of permitted area of the Great Wall, beyond where the wall was quite crumbed and not restored. We headed down, down was much easier than up, by a large margin! And by the time we got to tower 14, it was late enough, we decided to take the cable car down instead of walking down to tower 6 and then have to climb back up to 14 before we can board the cable car again.

So we skipped/missed the chance to tobaggan down from the lower tower, which might have been fun, but to me not really an experience I want to associate with the Great Wall.

On the way back we detoured to take a look at the "bird's nest", the new stadium being built for the  2008 Olympics. It was a very interesting building indeed, but we couldn't get close, only saw it from the nearby bridge.