Great Wall and the Forbidden City

After two pretty much ruined weekends in a row, it was finally time to get out and be a good tourist. On Saturday the smog situation was luckily quite good as the Air Quality Index on the US Embassy page "only" said very unhealthy instead of hazardous like it did on Sunday.

I had heard that it can be a bit colder at the wall than in the city so I put on some extra clothes. When arriving at the parking lot, it seemed that this was not enough as I was freezing at first. Luckily it got warmer once we got to the wall itself and the sun started warming us up.

Since the wall is so, well, great, there are a lot of different sections to go to. Badaling is most popular one and swarming with tourists in the peak holiday times. We went to the Mutianyu section instead which is a bit further away but it's apparently easier to park there. We left so early that when we got there, the parking lot was almost empty. On the way to the entrance you are bombarded by dozens of people selling souveniers, warm clothes etc from their booths. There were not many tourists to choose from so we got the attention of them all.

We used the same cable car as Big Willy

We opted to use the cable car for going up and then walking back down. This was a good choice since this section of the wall is high up in the hills. Even coming back down seemed to take forever.

The wall was pretty much as seen from the TV. What suprised me though was that it was basically just climbing stairs either up or down all the way. Very rarely was it flat. Even this short section that we walked was a good workout. There were very few others there this early and I think the most number of people we ever saw at any one time was around 20 which is not what I was expecting.

My poor legs

After leaving Mutianiy, we went back to Beijing to see the Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. I knew that both were pretty large areas but after already walking quite a bit at the wall, seeing the actual scale of the Forbidden City was pretty daunting.

Thomas the Tank Engine?

At the Forbidden City we saw very few Westerners. This is not exactly the peak tourist season and the recent widely reported news of the bad air quality have probably made some people reconsider their travel plans.

There are three main halls in the outer court of the Forbidden Palace. They all have imperial thrones like this one in the Hall of Preserving Harmony