In an effort to cram as much in as possible before our busy Olympics schedule was to begin, we booked to head out on a tour of the Great Wall the day after getting back from Xi’an. Two major attractions in two days… looks like my lazy travel days are a thing of the past.
I stayed at Leo Hostel when I first arrived in Beijing and had heard good things about their ‘Secret Wall’ tour. People were raving about it, actually, so I figured it must be a pretty good day out. I had heard loads of times about people’s disappointment with the restored, super-touristy areas of the wall so was after something a wee bit different. I’m not sure my friends were convinced but eventually they decided to give it a go.
Another early morning saw us in a minivan with a nice group of travellers. We drove for about three hours, chatted a bit, slept a bit and eventually made it to a road with a police blockade on it. We passed through that without much delay and then a few minutes later we were detained by a bunch of villagers apparently hoping to swindle some money out of us. We waited them out for about 20 minutes and they gave up and waved us through towards our destination.
We were met by a little old man who spoke no English who led us up a hill. We couldn’t see the wall due to some serious fog/smog so we climbed up the hill blindly waiting for it to appear from the mist. When we first got to it I could tell everyone was a bit under whelmed, myself included. All that was left of it was a short, crumbling brick wall with weeds and grass growing out of every nook and cranny. But after following along for a little while we finally saw what all the fuss was about. The towers were huge and seeing the wall spread across the peaks of the hills was amazing. Unfortunately we couldn’t see too far ahead because of the fog but it sort of added a bit of mystery to the whole experience not knowing what was coming next.
We were pretty surprised to see a guy waving to us from one of the towers about two hours into our walk and even more surprised to find that he was operating a makeshift corner store inside the tower complete with snacks, souvenir books and beer. We figured a beer on the Great Wall was too good a chance to pass up and cracked one open on top of the tower and toasted our trek. Apparently the shop guy has to walk two hours to work and back carting a whole load of stuff with him and sometimes he doesn’t even have any groups passing through. Nice place to work but it’s a bit of a crap commute.
After about three hours of hiking along the wall we meandered down into a small village, had a tasty meal and were soon on our way back to Beijing. The ‘Secret Wall’ tour turned out to be a pretty good day out but I think I’d also like to see other parts to see for myself if it really is a disappointing tourist trap.
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