Great Wall in Gubeiko

It was a pleasure hiking the great wall.
I got a very good recommendation from Luke to go on the great wall in Gubeiko. A small village, around 130km away from Beijing.
We found this nice little hostel named: great wall box hotel, which is actually also part of the the great wall… so you can straight away hike from there.
We went there by taxi ride – this is probably the most money I chinese person received from us 750 RMB and the driver was smiling. this is probably what he gets for 3 months…. 100 CHF -> 1,5 hours ride from the airport directly to the hostel.

As you see on the 1st picture, it was very cozy. The owner took care about us and we had a lovely family dinner in the evening with all the hostel guests. Actually there was not much another possibility, as the village is almost dead. There is really nothing else which you can do there….

The next day we went on this 5 hours hike called “curling dragon”. we were confident that swiss people have less than 5 hours…. so we were able to do it by 4,5h. Of course we took it slowly as we had to take a lot of pictures. so the good think about it was, that we were almost the only one on this track. there was a tour with a bunch of chinese tourists coming from the closest parking place at the wall. So they basically walked up from the parking went few meters on the wall and went down again where the car picked them up. HAHA – that’s China.

Marcel, Sonja and me on the other hand were hiking. up and down and going through the little watchtower. A few were really breaking down soon… otherwise the wall was still in a good shape and we were so happy to went there at this time on this spot. I can highly recommend it to go on a hike beside the tourist-area. So there were also no people selling you stuff… luckily we got some disgusting bred (not toasted of course) with jam with us from the hostel. So we didn’t get starved.

The way back from the hostel to Beijing was a little adventurous as we went by a a old and very small car (it was surely not a taxi) to the busstation and from there we took the (chicken)bus to Beijing downtown for 15 RMB (2 CHF) . it was fun 😀

here some pictures: