The Great Wall Battle II : Jinshanling vs Badaling
Trip Start
Dec 01, 2011
1
9
48
Trip End
Mar 02, 2012
Yanqing, Beijing, China
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Badaling was quite different from our first Wall experience. Loads of people, really built up with lots of shops, food vendors, souvenir stalls, starbucks, etc. From the bus stop, you actually have to walk through the shops to get to the ticket gate. The local bus cost about $1.5 AUS to get there, and the tickets for the Wall was 25RMB ($4) for me as a student and 45RMB ($8) for adults…so really cheap! The Badaling section of the wall was much wider and geared towards more tourist (i.e. it had toilets on the wall for one, it also had a slid on tracks/borderline rollercoaster for people not wanting to walk back down from a higher section…yikes!)…with that said, it had some really beautiful views. However, it was also possible to see telephone towers, a large town with factories and smoke stacks, and a very large highway. So a downside to being on this part of the wall, on top of the large amount of people trekking on a day where the temperature was probably -5, not including the windchill, and windy as hell, was the obvious indicators that you were not in the middle of nowhere.
Although still very pretty and worthwhile, we were really grateful that we had visited the other part of the wall, and felt spoiled by it. Since moving on from Beijing we've met other people who only visited Badaling, and felt let down. I can certainly understand that, I mean all the photos I recall seeing where of an empty wall laid across beautiful mountains and forests….not factories and highways. In the summer I’m sure its likely unavoidable, as I understand that the amount of tourists is insane, but I would suggest to anyone coming out to the wall to try different sections, and pay the extra to take a tour to a remote section… it really is quite a different experience when you can sit there and take in the views with not a soul insight.
We trekked for only about 2.5 hours, and then had to make sure we caught the last public bus. When we got back to the Beijing bus station, we could not find the local bus going back the way we came from the hostel, so we decided to walk the couple of kilometers. We went back through the Hutong, where we saw some, ah, interesting sights….we came across a couple of homes next to each other with the blinds over the front window drawn back, and girls in pjs, lingerie, fake saloons, etc….we’d later have it confirmed that this was a small red light district.
With that said, there were a few times that we walked through dark alleys, that we wouldn’t dare do in Melbourne…but we felt completely safe doing it here. China has felt much safer than Canada or Australia, and is not just us getting more and more comfortable in our surroundings… I’m sure you could go on and on about why that is that case, and there certainly is a lot of things not right in China, but on the other hand I have to give it to China on one thing in particular….ok, well two…I have not heard, nor seen anything relating to Lady Gaga nor Adele (nothing against her per se, her songs were just way overplayed back in Aus before we left) the whole time we’ve been here….sure the attack on my senses has know shifted to black snot coming out of my nose when I sneeze due to the pollution…but I think it’s a fair trade. My ears are much happier than they have been in quite sometime. I’m sure Laura will ask me to delete this or give me the classic 'really?!" look I’ve come to know and love…but that’s ok, she knew what she was getting into when we got married ;o)
