A Whirlwind Tour of Beijing - Part 3

The Great Wall of China was one of my must-sees while visiting Beijing (the other was The Forbidden City).  Since we covered a lot of Beijing including The Forbidden City on day 2, The Great Wall was the plan for day 3.  But when planning a visit to The Great Wall, there are lots of decisions to make.

The first decision, was which part of the wall to go to.  I had read about different areas of the wall within about 3 hours of Beijing, that were in various conditions, reconstructed or not.  I thought it might be interesting to see part of the wall that was not reconstructed, but in the end, convenience was the deciding factor.  The closest to Beijing is Badaling.  It is completely reconstructed, the easiest to get to and the most visited.  You can get there by train or bus, I had heard that the views from the train were very beautiful, so we decided to take the train.  It wasn't clear to me how many trains went each day, so we tried to get there early.  However, getting across Beijing at morning rush hour does not happen fast.  By the time we got to the train station, the next train available was the 10:57am.  So we waited.  First outside the train station in an area designated for The Great Wall trains.  Then shortly after, they moved us into the waiting room. When it was about 45 minutes before departure, people started lining up and then the doors opened at about 30 minutes before departure.  The train was partway down the platform and when the doors opened, everyone just started running down the platform to get a seat on the train.  The people at the end of the line did not get a seat and had to stand, so running was worth it.

The train stopped a couple times leaving the city, and then headed into the mountain.  The mountains are relatively close and quite impressive.  We got one nice view of The Great Wall and then started going through tunnels.  At one point, when we were close, the train stopped for a minute and then started going backwards and then we were at the train station.  From the train station, there were free shuttle buses to the cableway.  You can't see The Great Wall from this side, so it's hard to get a perspective.  There didn't seem to be any other way to go, so we got a one-way cableway ticket and rode up to the top.  Exiting the cableway, we were at nearly the highest part of the wall and it was very crowded.  We had two choices, up or down, so we headed up to what seemed to be the highest spot and then continued on.  As we went, the crowds got thinner and the railings disappeared.  The wall is very steep, part stairs and part smooth stones, there was not a lot of level walking surface.  Built along the highest contours of the hills, it is not easy walking, there was a lot of up and down.  We kept going until we got to a spot that was closed off.  Fortunately we were near the exit and were able to walk the rest of the way down.  We found the buses back to Beijing first, so we hopped on a bus instead of trying to find the train station, especially since the buses go much more often.