The best slumber party ever...

The best thing I did in Beijing was an overnight camping trip on the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall. I found the tour with the China Culture Center of Beijing and booked it before I even left Wisconsin. I'd already seen the Wall's Badaling section - that's the part closest to Beijing, so it's what most tourists see. It's also horrendously crowded and full of hawkers, so I was excited for the chance to get out of Beijing and see another piece of the Wall.

On the day of the tour, we left Beijing at 3pm and were at the Jinshanling section by 5:30pm. We had a little snack in the local village, and then headed up to the Wall. After a short hike (maybe 30 minutes) along the Wall, we situated ourselves in a watchtower to watch the sun go down. It was really gorgeous, of course - a little cloudy, so not the most impressive sunset I've ever seen, but the setting made up for it! We were surrounded by mountains and could see the Great Wall for miles up and down in either direction. It was also blissfully uncrowded - our group was ten people plus two guides, and the only other people we could see were some Chinese photographers who had set up their tripods a few watchtowers beyond us to catch the sunset.








This is Faye, one of the employees at the China Culture Center.


Afterwards we walked back for dinner at a "village home" (and souvenir shop, obviously). It was a great meal with dumplings and beer, plus tons of side dishes, and our host was really fun. By the time we had finished eating, it was dark. We said goodbye to our host, electricity, and running water, and hiked up to yet another watchtower, in the opposite direction from where we had watched the sunset. We just had our flashlights to climb the steep, irregular steps of the Wall. Once we arrived on the watchtower, our local guide opened up an inner storage room and we arranged our mats, sleeping bags, and pillows (after checking the corners for bugs!) right under the stars.

As I said, there was no electricity or running water; off on one side and behind a tower wall was a bucket, and we each had several bottles of water. I washed my face with a wet wipe and chewed gum rather than get up and stumble around brushing my teeth with a water bottle and spitting into the same bucket that everyone peed in! The air was really and cool and refreshing, compared to the nastiness that is Beijing in August. I laid out on top of my sleeping bag for awhile, star-gazing and chatting, but we were all asleep before 10pm because there wasn't much else to do and we had to be up at the crack of dawn anyway.

I slept surprisingly well - the ground was hard, obviously, but no big deal (more obnoxiously, the pillows were completely flat so I ended up stuffing my shoes, a sweater, and a pair of sweatpants under mine....I was glad I did in the morning, because then everything was covered with dew but my shoes were dry!). It did get pretty cold between 2-5am, but those sleeping bags were really warm! I woke up a few times in the middle of the night, and was amazed by how blindingly bright the moon was, right above me. By 4:30am I couldn't go back to sleep anymore - I felt strangely rested, the sun was just barely starting to rise, and the Chinese photographers were already on their way back up from the village to hit the highest watchtower and catch the sunrise.

Waking up on the wrong side of 6am.

After everyone was up and moving around (about 5:30am), those of us who wanted to set off on a short walk along the Wall to find a good place to watch the sunrise. It was light out, but the sun hadn't really risen yet. I walked along the Wall and through the watchtowers for about 20 minutes, and found a good place to see both the sun and the Wall. Another amazing view of course - my pictures don't do it justice (when I faced the sun, it blinded my view of everything else, and when I faced away from the sun, everything was in shadows and mist) but it was enough just to be on the Great Wall, by myself, at 5:30 in the morning. I'll always remember how it looked, even if I can't show you :)






After I'd had my fill of sunrise, I returned to our little camp on our private watchtower, and we had breakfast - lots of bread and blueberry jam, moon cakes, instant coffee and tea (some boys from the village brought up a huge jug of very hot water) and bananas. The nice thing about no bathrooms or electricity is that there's no pressure to get ready or make yourself presentable - I woke up and was ready for the day in the same clothes I'd both slept in and worn the day before, washed with another wet wipe, and applied sunscreen! We picked up our little camp and started our hike by 7:30am.

Mr. Wong, our fearless leader and local guide.

The hike was great fun, moderately difficult (some steepness, both up and down, and lots of stairs), and took about three or three and a half hours. Our guides said Jinshanling is sometimes called the "Wild Wall' because it is one of the least-restored, most natural sections that are left. We started off on the Wall itself, and the first part was in pretty good shape. Then we came to a section that had some sort of military significance, so we couldn't walk on the Wall itself and the middle of our hike was actually down on the ground. We could usually see the Wall, sometimes close enough to touch, but it was pretty rough - a lot of loose rocks and dirt, and since it was hardly ever flat there was a lot of slipping and stumbling around and grabbing for tree roots and leaves. Also, some parts were just through fields or woods. It was lucky that we had a local guide, because there wasn't an established path that I could see!



Finally we crawled back up onto the Wall, and the last part was the most rugged and ruined - we were on the Wall, but in parts there was no rail or barely any stone work left at all, so we were just walking on this raised stony path with a fall on either side!





After 3.5 hours my muscles were sore, my legs were all scratched up from the branches and grass, and I was hungry and sweating buckets. But we made it to the village of Gubeikou for another local meal. I was starving for lunch and beer, even though it was only 10:30 in the morning! This meal was really good too, at the home of an old retired couple that somehow was NOT attached to a souvenir shop...I didn't know such places existed in China.

The views on the hike were incredible, but the best part was how quiet it was. There's no comparing it to the Badaling section near Beijing, or any other tourist attraction in China, where there are always hordes of people and and hawkers. 95% of the time it was just our group, and we only met one hawker. (I can't even complain about her, because she hiked with us for awhile and pulled me up some steep parts!) That was really special, to have something so huge and magnificent to ourselves for a whole night and all of the next morning.

I highly recommend the China Culture Center if you're ever in Beijing - they have all sorts of tours, of different lengths and to different places in and out of Beijing, as well as classes. The guides were great and everything on our tour ran smoothly - I didn't know I could sleep or eat so well on an outdoor camping trip!