Today we drove out to the Mutianyu section of the wall, which is a little further outside of the city than other sections, and is thus less crowded. This section has been mostly restored to show what it originally had looked like, so we weren’t climbing on the original stones, but it was still pretty impressive. We were extremely lucky to get there on a clear day with great weather and we could actually see the city from the top of the wall (our guide Sam said he’d never seen that in 8 trips)… likely due to the holiday and reduced production and air pollution.

The hike up the wall was really challenging and as we huffed and puffed we started to worry about how we’d fare in Tibet if just getting up the wall was proving this difficult. We prevailed and made it to the end of the towers that were open, to a final one which rises up to an old unrestored part of the wall, and we couldn’t believe how well even that had lasted over the centuries.

At the end there was a chute down to the bottom (the quick way down)… not very authentic but a lot of fun and easier on our legs. I have a video of it which for some reason I can’t quite get to work like the other videos on the site seem to be working, but will keep working on it.