On our fourth day we took advantage of a tour organized by our hostel to “do” the Great Wall in a more hard-core way than most tourists. There are several sites where one can go to see the wall near Beijing, all about 2 hours away. Badaling and Mitanyu are supposed to be the most restored site, both packed with tourists. Simatai and Jinshanling are two relatively unrestored segments, with connected by about 10 km of nearly uninterrupted wall. So, the deal was that a bus would take us to Jinshanling and then pick up from Simatai five hours later. The hike between the two took us a little over four hours and was quite exhausting since you end up going up and down all the time. Thanks god it was early June – I wouldn’t recommend this hike in July.

The Great Wall doesn’t change all that much from one kilometer to another, so we probably would have seen enough after an hour. Walking on it for four hours, however, is a good way to start appreciating the scale of the thing. For this reason, I present the reader with a somewhat repetitive collection of photos: as we saw it.