Camping on the Great Wall

Outside of Beijing, there are a number of easily-accessible sections of the Great Wall that are un-restored. Technically, you're not supposed to go on them, I guess, but plenty of people are interested in climbing around up there seeing what it's like. On the weekend we went, it was downright crowded--mostly with Chinese hikers, decked out in brand-new "gear," although a fair number of foreigners too.

The section we went to was near a town called Jiankou, and it's apparently one of the more dilapidated sections. Large portions of it--especially steep stairways or sections built on narrow ridges--were crumbling away entirely, making for some dangerous scrambling and imminent risk of rock-slides.

We took a bus to the village of Jiankou in the evening and hiked up to the wall (about an hour's hike uphill) to find a place to sleep before the sun went down. We knew it would be cold, and we only had one sleeping bag and two fleece "blankets" between the two of us, but we figured we'd be ok. We wanted to find an old guard house or watch tower to sleep in to get out of the wind. When we got up there, it was a little creepy--the wall is falling apart, especially the guard towers, and there were great black ravens wheeling about in the sky, flocking around the old, ruined towers and crying out ominously. We hiked for 45 mins away from some other groups of campers then settled in to a small tower to have dinner and spend the night. As soon as it got dark, two things happened: it got COLD, and it got SCARY.

More details on the adventure in the pictures.

The next day we hiked for 8 hours or so then scrambled down the hillside to a village mid-afternoon and found a bus back to BJ.