Great Wall at Badaling

The Great Wall is of course the most internationally well know feature in China and with good reason - see here for Wikipedia article Great Wall

We took it in as part of a tour so it felt a bit rushed, it was very cold but as I've said before thats good for minimising the number of people to get in your way. I've seen a recent photo on the Chinese news which has a similar photo but none of the walking part of the wall is visable -

We saw the wall nearest to Beijing at Badaling and one thing I didn't realise before hand is how steep it is in places and you would have to really hand it to those early soldiers to ran up and down. Before the advent of gunpowder it would have been a formidable obstruction.

This is as steep as it looks and the step to riser ratio changes as you go up so that towards the top the step height is huge as witnessed by the need to install a hand rail in later times.

The view back down 

Inside what is left of one of the turrets

Really hard to do justice to the scale of the Wall and if we had more time we would have taken a longer wander along it.