The Great Wall of China and the Summer Palace

The Great Wall of China

We had two days left in Beijing, and it was time to tackle the Great Wall. There are several sections of the wall you can explore near Beijing so there was plenty to choose from, but we opted for Juyongguan, as it sounded quieter than the big tourist attraction of Badaling. Juyongguan also had some pretty steep sections to cover (a part of the guidebook I’d mentally glossed over) so we managed to get pretty high up into the hills!

The wall at Juyongguan has been restored so is in better shape than some of the quieter areas we had also considered visiting (places where whole sections of the wall have apparently disintegrated, so you scrabble over muddy ridges in parts!). It’s a shame we didn’t get to see these areas as well, but Juyongguan ended up being a good choice all round.

Getting to Juyongguan promised to be fairly straightforward from the guidebook – how wrong we were! We made it to the correct bus stop and queued for the right bus – but every time we tried to get on one we were told it doesn’t go to Juyongguan and we should go to Badaling instead. Maybe the buses have changed, probably the language barrier was causing us problems, or perhaps they just didn’t like the look of us (or figured that we should know our place and visit Badaling like real tourists), but every 919 bus that was supposed to be heading to Juyongguan seemed to be going elsewhere. The bus station was a frantic, madcap place and so, rather than queue repeatedly for this bus and wait until we got on one that would take us to Juyongguan, we made the rather reckless decision to just jump on a 919 that wasn’t in the queue, and hope that we got the destination right! We managed to get our ticket OK, but as we watched the destination whizz past us on the expressway on Bradley’s GPS, we realised that we might be going somewhere interesting, but it certainly wasn’t Juyongguan!

Eventually, the bus did pull up somewhere, and it was as we feared – we’d been diverted to Badaling! Now this stretch of wall looked brilliant as we approached, but the crowds of visitors made our hearts sink as we really wanted to explore somewhere a bit quieter. So we started to walk toward the entrance, when we decided to see if the train from Badaling stopped at Juyongguan. Apparently not! Though considering they are on the same train line we thought that sounded bizarre. Or we were probably misunderstanding something again!

We did look at getting a bus to Juyongguan, but as in Beijing the bus stops made very little sense to us. However, a little bit of good fortune led us to a taxi driver who offered to take us to Juyongguan. We haggled a reasonable fee and off we went, feeling a bit frustrated at this roundabout route (and feeling weird leaving behind one section of the Great Wall for another) but excited to finally be headed where we had intended to go.

We finally reached the Great Wall at Juyongguan before midday, and it looked much less crowded than Badaling. It did look steep though! We began the ascent with as much water as we could carry - it was blisteringly hot up there, and with very little shade it was quite tough going at times. Bradley soldiered on but I had to stop a few more times – it’s a long time since the marathon, I think I stretched out my recovery time a bit too much to the point of unfitness! ;o)

The views were worth stopping periodically for though (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it). Every few steps that you take it does look different, as some sections are so steep that you’re often revealing different parts of the mountainside each time you stop. It is quite dizzying to be so high up and to be always climbing, but the views are worth it! And you do wonder just how the guards on the Wall traipsed up and down here back in the day… they must have been VERY fit. The first section of the wall was the toughest as it was all uphill, and when we got to the top we realised we’d taken over 1500 steps so far! This was less than half way round though (this section of wall was a nice convenient circuit) so after stopping for some lunch (bread and nuts, yum!) and appreciating the quiet (not everyone goes all the way up, so there were less and less people the further we went)  we started to head down the next section.

You’d think going downhill would be easier, which I suppose it was at first, but after a while your legs begin to shake with each step – it’s steep both ways! It is however much quicker going down (you need be careful not to let your momentum take you too quickly forward though!). Eventually we reached a flatter section of the wall, and it was lovely to just stroll along, enjoying the view on this high promenade, and not being surrounded by people (the later sections of the wall were really quiet). Toward the end we managed to take some great photos with hardly any people in – you’d think we were up there on our own!

It took us just over three hours to do the whole circuit, which was great exhausting fun (and we earned our bread and nuts!). We managed to get a local bus back into Beijing, and drove through some great neighbourhoods we wouldn’t have seen otherwise, so avoiding the expressway bus was a massive bonus in the end (though it took twice as long to go half as far!). We had a great day and slept well that night!

 

 

Summer Palace

The next day we had considered visiting another section of the Great Wall, but as the previous day had been quite strenuous we decided we’d potter around the Summer Palace instead, which had beautiful gardens surrounding a huge lake north of the city.

We explored the temples and palace buildings but

mostly enjoyed spending the day walking along the lakeside and crossing the bridge to an island in the middle of the lake, where we stopped to relax and enjoy the beautiful views.

 

I’ve been missing water, so it was great to relax by a lake! You could easily spend a whole day there, and it’s exactly the place to have a family day out – you can buy an ice cream, go on a boat trip or hire a pedal boat, it sounds very British when you put it like that! It was a lovely way to end our time in Beijing.




































We have had a brilliant time in Beijing, it’s a crazy hectic city and the Olympic tattoo is everywhere still, so I’m sure London will also be riding high on that wave for some time. It has been a shame to miss the Olympics actually (well, the second half anyway) but we’ve been fortunate enough to have been able to follow most of it through the news, and in Bangkok most bars had the sport on the TV – it was like going to the pub in Bognor for sport! ;o) Go team GB – what a brilliant performance! And I think the Paralympics are about to start too, so we’ll be listening out for news on that too and hoping team GB keep on doing brilliantly.

One small negative about Beijing was the mouse that lived in our radiator at the hostel – oh dear! We only saw it once and it didn’t seem to leave any evidence of its presence, which was a relief. But just to be sure, we kept all our bags off the floor after seeing it (it was actually quite cute, and my theory is that it is best to personify creatures that otherwise might freak you out, so I unimaginatively referred to it as Mousey in an affectionate voice). Crisis averted!

Oh, and the other negative is that spitting is somehow perfectly acceptable social behaviour, so you can’t walk ten metres without someone spitting on the floor near you. I might have taken it personally, but the problem was so widespread that there was little chance it was aimed at us!

Next stop – Shanghai! Where we hope that spitting is a less acceptable pastime.

Music to blog to: we’ve been writing and photo-editing to a whole bunch of stuff, but notably PJ Harvey, Beastie Boys and Florence + the Machine J