Nixon was definatley dosed when he went to the Wall -- what was it he kept muttering? "it is indeed a Great Wall... it is indeed a Great Wall... it is indeed a Great Wall..."
(shameless paraphrase from Doonesbury circa 1975)
The Great Wall is accessable from Beijing in 3 or 4 typical tourist drop off spots, but Badaling is the most common - where Nixon went. It was re-built in many places for tourists since during the Mao era a lot of local folks just kind of picked up the stones and carted them off to build their own 'little walls'
The thing to do, is take a really cheap Chinese tour bus up to the Wall, OK, you will NOT have a tour guide who speaks English, and you will not have any idea of where you are at any given moment or where you are going, but you will have an experience, and you will get to Badaling after a while and after stops at plenty of schlocky tourist sites on the way. We got into the habbit of having the driver of the bus write down what time we would leave so as not to get left behind. (key advice - please take note!)
OK, the real advice, Go early! Even going eraly, there will be literally thousands and thousands of people there.
And now the ULTIMATE advice; Wherever you arrive at the wall, if the crowd turns left to go to the Wall, please turn right.
You will eventually get to some guarded gates or stairs leading up to the wall. The gorgon at the gate is not evil, and being westerners you will usually be allowed to access the Wall at these less than well-known spots. This means, (we went up to the wall 3 or 4 times back around 1990, and again around 2000) you will be on a semi-private area of the Wall overlooking the valley accross which you will see the throngs of tourists. On one occassion, the soldier stood up, kind of gestured with his rifle that we should go back; we smiled, I took out my camera (a big rig in those days) and he immediately got into a pose. I went to shake his hand, slipped him a US $ or 2, and he let us up.
Other times, we simply found some broken down stairs and made our way up onto secluded areas. We packed a picnic lunch and essentially had miles of the wall to ourselves to enjoy. Hiking about 20 or 30 minutes in reverse of the crowd, in the opposite direction away from the parking lots, we found our way. From pictures or videos, you can not fathom how long that fucker is. Like a snake winding through the mountains, it stretches farther than the eye can see. And NO, it is not visible from "space" like the urban legends of NASA might suggest, but it is a really, really cool place.
Who else here can say that they got laid on the Grate Wall of China?!
peace.
Posted: October 2, 2007 - 7:41am
By suggestion of TigerLilly, who's been doing some traveling of her own lately: a place to talk about one's travel adventures (in the physical world!). Great road trips, the time you got a gig crewing on a yacht, your years in the Peace Corps, the time you walked the Great Wall... You get the idea!