Our second day in Beijing ahead of our honeymoon cruise in 2008 included the place we were most excited to be visiting, the ever-so-famous Great Wall of China. Our morning trip was an early one as the distance was around eighty kilometres and would take about an hour each way. There were some surprisingly quiet bits of road in Beijing.
But there was also a fair bit of early traffic too, as you’d expect from a country’s capital. The video below includes clips of city traffic, some of the countryside north of Beijing, and some of the Great Wall as viewed from our bus.
The part of China’s arguably most famous landmark we visited was the Great Wall of Badaling, the most visited section of the wall, likely due to its proximity to Beijing, and the first part to be opened up for tourism in 1957. The area around Badaling these days sports hotels, restaurants, and train stations. In 1972 it was at Badaling that Nixon walked upon the Great Wall during his historical visit to China and it’s interesting comparing the images of it in the video below with the photographs we took afterwards.
From our bus we walked onto a flat part of the wall and gathered around our guide to hear a little more of where we were. The Great Wall isn’t a single wall at all but many connected ones that partitioned off sections of the land and served multiple purposes: defence, immigration control, border controls for taxation, and quicker and more direct transportation across the land. The Badaling Wall was built in the early sixteenth century during the Ming Dynasty when most of the more well-known sections were constructed, although walls were built in China from as far back as the seventh century BCE, typically in localised sections until the first Chinese emperor connected them around five hundred years later.
It was during the Ming Dynasty that the Great Wall began to be truly fortified following defeats against and an inability to truly suppress the Mongols to the north of the country. Bricks and stone began to be used for the first time, turning the wall into a formidable and impressive defence against raids. Large watchtowers were built to allow for rapid signalling of attacks, and barracks and garrisons were put in place to allow for rapid deployment of troops.
After our guide had completed her general talk about the Great Wall she gave us a time to all meet up and indicated that there were options to either head up the wall on our own or to take a look at the visitors centre and shops. We hadn’t come all this way just to stand on a small section of wall – fabulous though that was – and, while we’d have loved to see the visitors centre if we had more time, this would be a fairly fleeting trip to this site and we wanted to make the most of it. From memory I would say that around half our bus opted not to walk along the wall and that can be explained by age with the pair of us at the time being the youngest on that pre-cruise tour by a couple of decades.
There were a couple of surprises with this part of the Great Wall of China. The first was just how wide it was in places; you could easily get eight to ten people abreast. You know that the wall is on a huge scale (even if the claim that you can see the Great Wall of China from space is only true with high magnification) but you only think of that in terms of length until you’re standing there. Secondly was the steepness and surface. The steepness varied as the wall followed the contours of the surrounding mountains, of course, but at times there were steps and others sloped paving. We found the sloped paving particularly awkward to walk up and quite how tricky it would be in the rain or if any part of it snowed over or iced over beggars belief.
At one point on the walk along the wall, as we stopped to give our aching calves a rest and catch our breath, I caught the eye of a Chinese man, a little younger than us and also standing with hands on hips and puffing slightly. Our view was briefly interrupted by another man, probably in his seventies or eighties, stomping between us upwards at a tremendous pace with no sign of effort on his face at all. My fellow rester and I both looked at each other, smiled, and shook our heads with admiration. Climbing the Great Wall of China was not a task for the young, it seemed.
Knowing how long we had until we needed to return to meet our guide, bus, and fellow travellers we allowed ourselves twenty five minutes of walking – with several rests and not a very high rate of speed, naturally; we’re not fit now and we weren’t fit then either – to get as far and as high as we could along the Great Wall of China at Badaling. The views were fabulous when we finally decided we’d need to head back.
We probably had enough time to make it another one or two fortified towers further along the Great Wall and I recall seeing at least one person from our tour bus doing just that but we were happy enough with the short distance we’d managed to cover. I absolutely wouldn’t hesitate to come back for a visit with more time to head along further or to see another part of the wall but we were extraordinarily pleased with what we achieved at Badaling. Only a couple of days before this point neither of us had left the country together nor had we done so separately without parents, and it was quite remarkable to find ourselves standing on a section of the Great Wall of China, seeing hazy mountains disappearing in folds towards the horizon.
We headed back down, taking care especially on the sloped sections of the wall, and I made sure to grab photos along the way of the surge of tourists from all over China doing just what we’d done.
Our descent took around fifteen minutes which is testament to just how much more effort we’d expended heading up. At the base we had a chance to stand around and wait for a few minutes while our group of fellow, pre-cruise passengers slowly congregated, and for our guide to do a head count half a dozen times. On the hillside nearby there was a sign of the recent Beijing Olympic Games that had taken place; we’d visited the National Aquatics Centre and the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium just the day before.
From our meeting point at the base of the wall we were then led to where the bus would swing around to pick us up, an area featuring a contrast of architecture with the modern eruption of buildings to service the tourism industry in this part of the world.
The bus ride back to Beijing took another hour and afforded us a different view of the Chinese landscape as we headed away from the incredibly impressive Great Wall of China. I’ve never been one to take many photos from buses because I don’t like the dirt and reflections and inevitable issues with ensuring fast enough shutter speed that come from accounting for motion but there were a couple of interesting views I snapped on the journey too.
Our immediate next stop was to a restaurant which, like most it seems, was guarded by a stone lion. A combined post about the meals in Chinese restaurants that were included in this pre-cruise tour can be found here: Beijing Restaurants.
The afternoon of this second day in the Chinese capital would see us pay a visit to The Summer Palace.