China Trip Day #3 - Beijing Sightseeing and the Great Wall

The guide we hired for our day of sightseeing in Beijing and a Great Wall excursion offered to pick us up at our hotel at 7:30 a.m. or 10:30 a.m.  Anytime in between we’d find ourselves stuck in Beijing rush-hour traffic.  Because our arrival was the night before, I assumed we’d be too jet-lagged to be down at the lobby bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 7:30 a.m., so I chose the later pick-up.  What I didn’t consider was that I could wake up waaaay before 7:30 a.m., like 2:41 a.m.  So much for best-laid plans!

Because we arrived a day earlier than our agency schedules arrivals into Beijing, we had a completely free day.  It would have been fun to explore on our own, but I’m happy with our decision to hire a guide (and driver) for the day. I’m sure they saved us so much time given that we would have spent half the day just getting our bearings.  I stumbled upon Mark’s Guide and Driver Service on Trip Advisor and signed up based on the rave reviews.  I’m happy to report we’ll give them five stars too.  We didn’t have Mark as our guide because he was already booked, so he sent one of his other guides, Rita.  She was spectacular, as was our trusted driver, Tony, the man who fetched us from the airport last night. I’ve read nightmarish accounts of drivers, (hired by adoption agencies, no less) but Tony was an excellent driver.   

At 10:30 a.m. sharp, Tony and Rita were at our hotel and whisked us off to our first stop, Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central square.  At 109 acres of cobblestone Tiananmen Square is huge!  Wikipedia lists it as the fourth largest city square in the world, whereas our Lonely Planet guide lists it as the largest “public” square.  I put the word “public” in quotes, because it’s ringed in fences and you have to pass through security to access the square and it closes at night.  I’m assuming this is all to quash any attempts at another “Tiananmen Square” protest. We skipped the opportunity to view Chairman Mao’s preserved body in the memorial hall built for him after his death and proceeded on to the Forbidden City. 

Get ready for more explanation points…the Forbidden City is huge!  The grounds cover 180 acres and stretches about a mile.  Built in the early 1400s, it was the Imperial Palace for the Ming and eventually the Qing (pronounced “Ching”) dynasties before their six-year-old Emperor was removed from his post in 1911.The Forbidden City housed the emperors and its households for five hundred centuries and was the political and ceremonial center of China during this time.  Rita provided an in-depth history of the dynasties and fun facts about all the buildings and life inside the Forbidden City as we made our way across the grounds and pointed out things I would never have known to ask about.  

The highlight of the day was our trek to the Great Wall.  If I could only see one thing in China, it had to be the Great Wall, and I would have left a happy person if I saw nothing else.  As I explained to Rita, even if Americans know nothing about China, the one thing they’ve heard of and probably have seen pictures of, is the Great Wall.   

We visited the Mutianyu section, which is about an hour-and-a-half drive from downtown Beijing.  Beijing is so big that even though we were that far out, we were technically still in Beijing.  What amazed me more was that only a few miles outside the central city limits the landscape went from urban to rural with a few company towns of high-rises dotting the highway.  Once we left the highway, we drove through some small towns, but otherwise, the area was agricultural.   To help protect the wall, a tourist center was built farther down the mountain in August.  We parked there and after a quick lunch of dumplings, boarded the shuttle bus for a five-minute drive to the “base” of the wall.  There are three options for getting up to the wall: walking, riding a chair lift or riding a gondola.  We chose the chair lift so we could spend more time climbing along the wall instead of just hiking to the wall.  

At the top, Rita pointed us in the direction with the most spectacular views.  She warned us it was steep.  Not a problem, I thought, it’s just stairs and I don’t mind climbing.  Well, the views were spectacular indeed.  But those stairs gave a new definition to steep.  The first set that gave me pause at least had a handrail.  The next set was even steeper, with a foot-high rise on some steps and no handrail.  I’m so afraid of heights that I never would have otherwise headed back, but I was at the Great Wall and was determined to get to the top of the peak our guide had raved so much about.  I started climbing on my hand’s and knees, got two-thirds the way up and made a mistake.  I looked down.  And I panicked. And after I stopped hyper-ventilating, I climbed back down.  

I wish I could have walked farther along the wall, but I was still so happy just to be there.  The advantage of going in the winter on a weekday is that we had the wall practically to ourselves.  We passed only a handful of people the whole time.  The whole experience was spectacular. And how many people can say they took a toboggan down the Great Wall?  After all the walking and climbing we did, we took the easy, but oh so fun, way down.