We spent spring break in Asia, which means it’s time for a trip report! Join us on part 7 of this adventure, which covers our time at the Great Wall of China and in Beijing!
About This Post
A version of post originally appeared in the newsletter. Subscribe to see the latest ASAP. This is part 7 in our report on this trip:
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 1 - Planning and Booking
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 2 - Heading to Hong Kong
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 3 - Afternoon at Hong Kong Disneyland
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 4 - Day at Hong Kong Disneyland
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 5 - Wrapping Up Hong Kong Disneyland
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 6 - Hong Kong
Spring Break in Hong Kong, Beijing, and China Part 7 - Great Wall and Beijing (you are here)
Outside the trip report format, we also have:
Over the next…many weeks, I'll be sharing my trip report for our recent trip to Hong Kong (w/ Disneyland), Beijing, and Shanghai (w/ Disneyland). These won't be just two entries, one about each of the parks we visited. Rather, they'll be extensive and cover from booking the trip to getting home, including plenty of non-Disney content (for more recent non-Disney stuff, visit Emjoyable Explores). This post covers our time at the Great Wall of China and in Beijing.
Visiting Beijing and the Great Wall of China
Our schedule for the Beijing portion of our stay had gotten jumbled around a bit. The Monday we arrived was during Qingming Festival. We'd hoped to avoid visiting the Great Wall on the holiday, but our other big Beijing attraction (the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests) is closed every Monday. Emily and I had missed the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests years ago, so we settled on visiting it Tuesday and enduring the crowded wall Monday.
Arriving into Beijing South Station just before 7AM, we were quickly found by the driver / tour guide we’d booked.
The journey to the Great Wall was one of Zoe’s favorite parts of the trip. The driver had a Mandarin to English translator app on his phone, and a handheld English to Mandarin audio translator that Emily and Zoe used from the back seat. Zoe got a real kick out of it.
The drive took about 2 hours with minimal traffic. The tour guide was thrilled to hear that Emily and I had visited before and had decided to come back, excited at our "great appreciation for Chinese culture."
I wouldn’t quite say I have “imposter syndrome” as a traveler, but I also don’t know that my level of engagement rises to the level of “appreciation.” I really like being in a lot of Asian cities I’ve visited, including Beijing. I generally take pleasure in being in busy places that I can’t fully comprehend. Part of me feels like when I comprehend (is this the same as appreciate?) places, they lose a little bit of wonder.
When it comes to tours / drivers / guides, we’re typically the type to set our own plan and strictly stay to it. Depending on where you’re traveling and what kind of guide you book, you can expect to be nudged toward various “cultural” experiences that your guide is often collecting a kickback on. This driver made some pitches for extra activities that we politely declined, but we did concede to one of his arguments.
We were heading to the Mutianyu portion of the wall and had planned to hike up to the wall and then walk along the wall. With Zoe, we know to expect third parties to discourage any form of walking (the kid did a 17-mile length of Manhattan walk a few weeks back, by the way). The driver was rather insistent, however, that crowding and time management weighed in favor of taking the cable car up the wall.
This turned out to be completely correct, and from the Mouse Hacking perspective it’s a good reminder that nothing beats touring strategy built on experience. He knew we’d want to be ahead of the crowds, and he knew the hike up would put us behind them.
Over about two hours, we hiked to and up the "Hero Slope" and back. The weather was perfect, and the difficulty was perfect for us. Around the turnaround point, Emily and I split a beer, Zoe had some juice, and we all had some Snickers. We also bought Zoe a fun medal. I “haggled” a bit for it, but I’m sure I still totally overpaid.
I like to try and calibrate my level of haggling to the context. There’s no perfect rule, but I generally don’t like to be too aggressive in situations where I suspect someone’s livelihood depends, in part, on getting a few big wins from foreign tourists who can afford it.
As we headed back to the start, we noticed the crowds had picked up immensely. Some of the more narrow passages had queues dozens of people deep. Our driver was completely right that by skipping the hike up we’d managed to beat serious holiday crowds. Emily wrote more about our Mutianyiu visit here.
After our cable car ride down from the wall, Zoe got a Great Wall popsicle.
Tired from minimal sleep on the train and all the steps, we enjoyed a quiet but slow ride back to Beijing, where our driver dropped us off at the Kerry Hotel.
Emily reviewed Kerry Hotel already, I’ll just share that I’d sprung for a kid-themed room, and it included access to an indoor play center in the adjacent mall. A kid who spent the morning walking along the Great Wall deserves some old fashioned play time, I think.
The next day was our day for walking around Beijing. Years ago online I declared myself as not really caring about food, and a fellow traveler was astounded and asked what I travel for. I thought on it for a long time, and the best I've arrived at is "I travel to walk [and ride trains] around places." So this was going to be my kind of day.
After hotel breakfast, it was time for our first trip on the Beijing subway. I noted the line we were at actually went to Universal Resort—a good destination for a future trip, but not this one.
Temple of Heaven is a beautiful complex. It's a lot like walking around any large city park, but with some cool 15th(ish) century Chinese architecture to check out along the way.
The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, which is reproduced at half-scale in EPCOT's China Pavilion, is itself a stunning piece of architecture. (If you're in this for the EPCOT of it all, this is Zoe's 8th EPCOT country and 4th of 8-ish pavilion "icons".)
We really enjoyed walking around and taking photos from all angles.
Absolutely beautiful.
There was a small exhibit on the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, and it was entirely in Chinese. Personally, I loved this. I don't read Chinese, and my Google Translate app was only so helpful. But I enjoyed being reminded that not everywhere has to be "for" English-speaking tourists. This was an important enough place for the Chinese travelers visiting from all over their country (and the world) that it was sufficient to just have the descriptions in Chinese.
There's a lot of hype for visiting places "off the beaten track." While some people like to just do things other people haven't done, a lot of "off the beaten track" appeal comes from the fact that you wind up in places where the experience isn't designed around you.
Whether it's a Disney park, a National Park trail system, a wing of The Met, or a well-worn backpacking route in Southeast Asia, "tourist tracks" are built to direct tourists physically, emotionally, and intellectually in specific ways. Getting "off the beaten track" is appealing, in part, because it liberates you from these structures.
But you don't always have to leave the beaten track to experience this. It's one of the things that I've felt a lot in my (limited) time in China—that no one really cares that I'm there, and that much of it wasn't at all built with my perspective or experience in mind.
From Temple of Heaven we started the walk to Qianmen Street. It was looking to be only about a 30-minute walk, but after just a short bit we realized most of it would just be along a business-tower-lined highway, so we opted for a quick subway ride instead.
Qianmen Street is a long pedestrian street (with some adjacent streets) that ends at Qianmen, a famous gate on the south of Tiananmen Square.
I don't always wave my American flag when I travel, but when I do it's by walking around with a coffee.
There are plenty of opportunities along the street for shopping and snacking. It's a fantastic pedestrian experience.
Our plan had been to go to Tiananmen Square...but travel in China just can't ever work out perfectly (that's part of the fun!). As it happened, advance reservations were required for Tiananmen Square, and we didn't have any.
Now, it's possible we're just that bad at travel planning. But the reality is that there just isn't as much in-depth English-language travel planning content written about China, and Google has made it harder to reach good content in recent years (in our extensive travel planning experience).
It's probable that something like Claude or ChatGPT would have flagged this, but those tools have their own shortcomings when it comes to travel assistance (like the time Claude just completely made up a restaurant for me to visit at EPCOT).
We made our way instead to Wangfujing, another pedestrian street, this one more modern and upscale. It happened to be home to an Arabica, which we of course had to stop at. (If you're in this for the Arabica of it all, this is visit number 2 of this trip.)
While the day was winding down there was still time for one more #touristFAIL, as it turned out the Wangfujing Snack Street was permanently closed. At least our vegetarianism had dampened our excitement for that one.
There's still so much of Beijing we haven't seen, but I was glad to see this visit confirm what I remembered—I really like this place. Even with two tourist fails, we were able to fill a nice day of walking and sightseeing.