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Badaling, China
And I've got a wall around me that you can't even see
About an hour and a half out of Beijing, up in the mountains but not far enough away to escape the smog, is the Badaling section of the Great Wall of China, one of the seven wonders of the world and a place deserving of such an otherwise arbitrary honor.
There were a few ways to get to the wall from Beijing. The most popular option is to take an all day bus trip. They're not all that expensive (Beijing is pretty damn cheap all things considered) and everyone seems to take them. Another option is to hire a taxi all day to wait and wade through the traffic in the city and push on out to the mountains. The last option is to take a train with all of the Chinese tourists. When I reached my hotel in Beijing (a very nice Raffles Hotel), I asked the people there what they recommended. I was told that the bus tours were too regimented and allowed little time at the wall to explore, while the taxis get so bogged down in city traffic that they are not worth the trouble. The train is the way to go and (all things considered) it was. It also was the only time in China that I wish I had understood Mandarin. I held great plans that before I left for China that I would learn some Mandarin but (as always) my schedule seemed to fight me and get in the way. My lack of Mandarin really wasn't a problem, it was certainly easy enough to navigate streets and subways and tourist attractions with only English, but the North Railway Station (where trains to Badaling left from) was a different story altogether.
Everyone has seen the pictures of the Great Wall, where it gently drapes over hills in all of its picturesque glory. What those pictures do not show you are that those hills are really mountains and that a walk along the wall involves steep ramps and even steeper stairs. The loop that I completed near Badaling had an elevation gain of about 2,000 feet and some really rough sections. And (like everywhere in China) it was really busy. The only good thing was that the farther out and up I got, the more the crowds started to fall away. By the time I got to the farthest sections, I almost had a few stretches of the Great Wall all to myself. What more could anyone ever ask for?
While the wall originally may have stretched 5,000 miles, it doesn't mean that it was 100 percent continuous. I sure hope that the Mongols never find out about this part.
As the train rises into the wilderness, you start to see sections of the Great Wall draping across the mountainside. There are sections that are in ruins and sections that are missing (as well as a lot of local houses built from very nice former wall stones). The section at Badaling was restored to make it both physically passable and scenically pretty, much like this section where a steep drop is followed by a steep ascent and then a steep descent. Same as it ever was.
