My Uncle John and Aunty Veronica had managed to arrange a short visit to Beijing and of course were hopeful of trying to pack as much in to their few days as possible. Of course a trip to the Great Wall of China was top of the list, together with the Terracotta Warriors. The latter are in Xi’an, which aren’t even close to Beijing but with my help they managed to see and were suitably impressed by just about everything.
Mùtiányù (???) is around 70kms outside Beijing and as such is one of the closer parts of the Great Wall to the Northern Capital. It is for that reason that I wouldn’t normally advise travelling there, as, like my Aunt and Uncle, everyone else seems to be on a tight schedule and wants to fit in as much as possible. If you make the effort to travel just that little bit further away, you can be rewarded with fewer crowds and parts of the Wall which are in better (read worse) shape, relatively untouched and certainly with less hawkers, postcard vendors, cable cars, adverts for ‘One World, One Dream’, and the rest of the paraphernalia which goes with Chinese tour groups.
Having said that, I was hoping a wintry day in February wouldn’t attract quite so many people on a sightseeing mission to the Great Wall and I was right. It took around one hour to drive from their downtown hotel (Lusongyuan Hotel in Jiadaokou) to Mutianyu. We stopped in the souvenir stalls, were welcomed by the staff who were still waking up, drank some Chinese tea with them and then took the cable car up to the top. It was a bright, sunshiny day, but it was cooold and I was immediately glad I had bought my sheepskin coat, woollen gloves and hat. A lovely view. Although most of the surrounding hills were brown and dry, the wall and it’s shadow still had layers of snow brushed up against it’s side and along it’s turrets, while the bright sun reflected off the well worn steps.
We had the Wall practically to ourselves, save for a few brave and determined souvenir sellers and we wandered along far further than we may have done had we been following other tourists. We came back to the toboggan and ummed and arred, my Aunt trying to persuade us both to slide down – I think we all would have done it with a little more persuading. However, it was another, older cable car ride back down to the carpark.
Here is a Photo Gallery of the photos I took with my Minolta SLR.
