The Mystery of the Great Wall

As Tanny and I discovered on our third day in Beijing, the greatest mystery of the great wall is how to get there on your own!

We got up around 6:00 (actually Tanny was up at 4:00 due to a very early bedtime) and went out to a local hotspot for breakfast. Tanny managed to order us some fried dough sticks and two bowls of hot soy milk via a combination of pointing hand gestures and broken Mandarin. I know what you're probably thinking and yeah, I wasn't too crazy about a whole bowl of soy milk but it was pretty tasty and made for a satisfying breakfast. The fried dough sticks were great!

We knew that the cheapest (and "easiest") way to get to the Great Wall was to take bus #919 from a spot located about 500 m from a specific subway station. Getting to the subway station was no problem and we even located the spot with a whole bunch of buses pretty easily. It was some sort of hub for many of the city buses. Pretty neat being there in the morning because there were a lot of stalls set up selling newspapers and breakfast on the go. There were also a lot of ladies with Strofoam coolers full of steaming corn on the cob. I had to pass on the corn since I was pretty full still. :-(

Anyway, we walked along the line of buses until we found the 919 bus stop. Our guide book told us there were two: an express with A/C and a regular 919. Tanny found a sign that said 919 Express in Chinese, but curiously it didn't list Badaling (where we were headed) as one of the stops. When the bus arrived Tanny asked the driver if he went to Badaling and he said no, pointed down the street behind him and said a lot of things we didn't understand. So, we walked in the direction he mentioned and found a non-express 919 stop. When we asked on of the people waiting he didn't think any buses here went to Badaling. Another express pulled up in the meantime so we asked them about Badaling. Same response .. go back. So we kept walking. We found five bus stops for the 919 and none went where we wanted. So we ketp looking. Eventually we ended up an ancient gate, to the north of which was a sign with a huge picture of the Great Wall and the words "Badaling" on it. Plus the ticket agent was shouting "Badaling, Badaling!". Bus number? 919!

Thankfully the bus was an express. The scenery en route was spectacular. Very moutainous. Along the way we saw many stretches of the Great Wall following the ridges along the moutains. I could see why it was a good defense and deterrant and alos why it took so long to build.

The bus eventually stopped a pretty non-descript parking lot and about half the bus got off. We were a little distracted by a kid who puked as soon as he got off and then got confused as to whether or not this was the right stop. No one said Badaling and there weren't any signs for the Great Wall. We started to follow a couple with a camera bag off the bus, but they turned around and sat down. So did we. The bus left the stop and was about 10 km away before we decided we should really have gotten off. I asked the ticket agent "Great Wall?" and she looked horrified! She waved frantically at me and managed to flag down a passing bus, ran after it and screamed at the other bus' confused ticket agent to wait and let us on. We got on the second bus and got off at the first stop. Yes, it was the right stop and no, Badaling is not the last stop of the Badaling #919 bus.

From the bus stop it was about 500 m to the entry of the Great Wall. Along the way we walked past wall to wall gift stalls and restaurants. The entrance was teeming with tourists (90% of whom were Chinese) but it only took us about 10 minutes to get tickets. There are two ways you can go, South and North. We took the South way since it was less crowded. It turns out that it's the steeper section, but having less of a crowd was well worth the steep climb. We walked along the wall for about an hour, taking pictures along the way. It's just as I imagined it. I think most of it has been restored to some degree and at one point the wall is blocked off and you can see crews working to rebuild the next section.

At every shaded portion of the wall there are people selling souvenirs. We relented at the very end of the walk when we met a very tenacious vendor who followed us for about 10 minutes and kept lowering his prices. We bought a picture book and postcards and thought we got a good deal (50 RMB instead of 150) but a Chinese tourist that he approached after us got the same stuff for 30 RMB! Oh well.

And apparently I look like the kind of guy who wants to buy a "Pee pee boy" -- a little statue into whose head you pour some water and well... you can imagine where that goes. Every vendor wanted me to buy one.

We ate lunch in a small restaurant in Badaling. This place definitely had tourists in mind since it prices were about 10 x what we paid in our hutong area in Beijing. Still, the food was good and we had beef chow mein and dumplings.

We got back to Biejing without incident and decided to go to the Summer Palace. It seemed easy to get to ... again take a bus from a specific subway stop ... but when we got to the spot where the bus should be, we saw no buses - anywhere. Since it was hot, sticky and very humid we decided to forego the Summer Palace and had a siesta instead.

Originally we had planned to see a Beijing opera that evening, but Tanny was still quite tired and wasn't sure she could stay awake until the end so we went back to the street of food stalls and had skewers of spicy mystery meat (chicken , I think), some pineapple on a stick and BBQ'd corn. The street was packed with people, locals and tourists alike and had a bit of a fair atmosphere. So far (two days later) there have been no ill effects of the street meat!

After the street market we went to our first Chinese mall which was very upscale and modern. We spent more money on some frozen fruit shakes and a big cream puff at the mall than we had spent on food the previous three days.