Hiking the Great Wall of China

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Thanks to the strong recommendation from Agathe’s sister we decided to head to a small village on the outskirts of Beijing to stay with a local family, what a recommendation it was! Not only were the family incredible cooks, cooking some of the most scrumptious food we’ve had in China yet, we got to hike the great wall completely free of other people! At the family we met two Canadians and set off together for the afternoon. Because of its more remote location the wall was quite rugged at times and quite physically challenging, but oh my god we have never seen anything like it! Every few meters we had to stop for a new picture, the weather being misty also added a very cool feel to it.

Having spoken to the family we were told to expect the walk to take around 4 hours – so at 6 when watching the sunset and having walked for said 4 hours we were getting slightly nervous of not seeing any paths heading down: had we really gone overboard with the pictures and taken way too much time? Who would have thought getting lost on the great wall of China possible? After an hour and a half of searching ways off the wall in pitch black with the lights of our slowly dying phones we finally found it, a small path heading downwards! Although we could have probably spent an unexpected night on the wall, we were pretty happy getting back to much anticipated fresh beers! The next morning, we set off again to discover another part of the wall, and get in as much as possible before heading back to Beijing and catching a 14-hour night train to Changsha, capital city of the Hunnan region.