The Great Wall of China!

Since, after all our travel ordeals, we only had one full day in Beijing, we woke up early to get started. Although it is difficult to organize trips, as you have seen from previous posts, the nice thing about China is you can get anything as long as you're willing to pay for it. We were able to hire a personal driver in nice VW Passat to take the four of us to the Great Wall for the day. After Chinese negotiations we settled on 700RMB ($100) for a driver for 8 hours.

We decided to travel to the Mutianyu part of the wall which is about a 2 hour drive from Beijing. Since we were up and ready to go at 7am we didn't hit any traffic and were able to get there in an hour and a half before all the tour groups which didn't depart until 8am. We got there as the local shops were opening and climbed these stairs up to The Wall, talk about a work out!

The stairs we climbed to the top.

The view on the way up.

The first glimpse of The Great Wall!

Before I show you the magnificent Great Wall, I must provide you with a brief history of the Great Wall based on a combination of guidebooks and wikipedia. The Great Wall 長城 or Chángchéng literally means Long City or fortress. It is a series of stone and earthen fortresses built, rebuilt and maintained between the 6th century BC and the 16th century to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire from Xiongnu or Mongol attacks. The wall is 4,160 miles long. At its peak, the Ming Wall was guarded by more than one million men. It has been estimated that somewhere in the range of 2 to 3 million Chinese died as part of the centuries-long project of building the wall. Some say they even stacked parts of the wall with dead bodies (clearly guidebook info). For more information feel free to wikipedia it.


When we got to the top, it was absolutely beautiful! It was a perfect fall morning with crisp air and bright sun. We were pleasantly surprised to be virtually the only people on The Wall. We were so enamored by the beautiful scenery and the magnitude of The Wall we took tons of awesome pictures.

We got there so early, that we were the only ones on The Wall.

Jeremy peeking out.

The four Beijing Travelers

The fortresses across the wall. Notice how small the entrances are.

From here, we descended down from The Great Wall of China. It was about 10:30am as we made our way down to find droves of tour groups climbing up. It was so incredible!

A small village on the way down.

Greg, this picture is for you. I found the slide that goes down the Great Wall! They also have ski lifts going up and down. Gotta love the tourist traps.

Jeremy and James posing with a big statue. We are often forced make up the meaning of many statues and museum exhibits due to Chinese and mistranslation. Your guess as to the significance of this enormous statue is as good as mine. It only looks about 5 years old, which is another weird Chinese phenomenon to build new monuments commemorating old things. The importance of this picture is really the Chinese/Japanese pose. Please notice the peace sign and the leg kick. These are done in almost every Chinese photograph, however people are generally pictured alone.

At the bottom of the hill we couldn't help but purchase 4 "I climbed the Great Wall of China" T-shirts. We then headed back to Beijing to move on to our next tourist adventure....