How to get to the Great Wall (video guide)

[long_way]

The Great Wall of China (Jīnshānlǐng chángchéng 金山岭长城)

Jinshanling section of the Great Wall is located around 100km northeast of Beijing. It is more than likely that you will be able to sign up for a tour to the Wall at your hostel. Most of the time the admission fee is included in the price of the ticket but it is a good idea to have a couple of hundreds of yuan in cash just in case. Bring some water with you (on the wall you will pay 5-6 time more) and supply of sugary food because you will need all the energy you can get. The stretch of the wall between Jinshanling and Simatai is only around 10km long but remember it's 10km up and down the mountain peaks.

Jinshanling and Simatai are probably the most unspoilt parts of the Great Wall. Even though Simatai has a cable car and a toboggan ride still Simatai is more demanding than Jinshanling. If you are in average shape I would suggest you hike Jinshanling, not Simatai. There is a hotel next to the entrance gate so you can spend a night there which will give you a chance to enjoy the wall for more than 4-5 hours which is the average time that you get if you come with an organize tour.


The Great Wall was one of the most spectacular scenes I have seen in China so far so I decided to make a different kind of slide show for it. I picked around 70 pictures and added some music and created a 9 minutes slide-show that you can play on your computer. The size of the file is around 19Mb.

http://www.yilongwei.com/download/GreatWall.zip

Youtube version of this same presentation can be see when you click here:

http://www.yilongwei.com/misc/video/wall.htm

(you can see this video in Full Screen mode).