And no, the title of this post is not misspelled.
Anyway, Danwei had in its recommendations this China Daily article about tours to the Badaling section of the Great Wall. Trouble is, not only is the article incredibly superficial, it seems the journalist did no more research beyond talking to a friend of hers. Well, if the fact it was in the China Daily online edition wasn’t enough, the title should’ve told me everything I needed to know about this article:
  Why is it so hard to go to the Great Wall?
It’s not hard. It hasn’t been for a long time. Especially if you’re going to Badaling, which is what this article is about. Well, it seems the journalists friend finally found a satisfactory tour, a bus that went straight from Qianmen to Badaling with none of the endless sidetrips to various tourist scamming enterprises, but even so, it’s not even that difficult and there should not be any need to go hunting around town for a tour bus to the Wall. Not if you’re going to Badaling. And I still can’t shake the suspicion that this tourist friend of the journalist’s still paid too much.
So here are my instructions. If you want to go to Badaling, it’s very simple: Go to Deshengmen. Take the 919 bus direct to Badaling.
See? Easy. Best of all, that bus will cost you only 12 kuai if you pay in cash, or 9.4 if you have one of those public transport electronic swipe card things.
There is, I should mention, one potential complication: There are a million different variations on the 919 bus route, so at Deshengmen you will need to be careful. Those 919s departing from the side of the Second Ring Road only go to Changping. Not far enough. Ignore them. The 919s that go to Yanqing (and therefore, the Great Wall) leave from right beside Deshengmen itself, as in the very gate tower. Ignore everybody and everything, make a beeline for the tower, do not divert from that path. Once you’re there, it’s a bit easier: There’s a slow bus that stops in every crappy little village along the side of the expressway in Changping. That leaves from the eastern side of Deshengmen. Don’t take it; you’ll be stuck in an over-crowded bus for two or three hours. The bus you want leaves from the northern side of Deshengmen, from a small carpark (well, buspark, actually) sandwiched between the tower itself and a park. Now it gets even easier. If there are two separate buses running, one will go direct to Yanqing (you don’t want that- although you could ask them to let you off at Juyongguan, since they stop there for their regular safety check-in anyway, and Juyongguan will probably be less crowded) and the other goes direct to Badaling (this is the one you want if you really want to deal with all the crap that a trip to Badaling involves).
See? Easy.
Well, alright, my explanation of all the possible complications involved in getting the right 919 makes it seem hard, but it’s not. Here’s the summary: Go to Deshengmen. Go to the bus station on the north side of Deshengmen tower. Get on the bus. You may need to make sure you’re getting the bus to Badaling and not the bus to Yanqing. That’s easy: Just walk into the bus station saying “Badaling” to anybody in uniform, they’ll point you to the right bus.
I guess the other advantage of taking the 919 is that when you come back, you get off the bus at Deshengmen (funnily enough) and you’re then only a very short distance from Houhai, the Drum Tower, Nanluoguxiang, and all the entertainment options around there. If you take that bus from Qianmen that the China Daily article mentions, not only are you still taking a tour bus, but when you get back, you’ll be at Qianmen. I guess you could round your day off with another stroll around the Square. Still, that might be ok if your hotel is in that area and you just want to get dinner and retire for the night. Well, maybe the Qianmen area will get a lot more exciting again when they’ve finished the renovations. But then again, I was in that area at night with a friend a few years back, and yes, you could have called it exciting, but it was the kind of exciting that foreigners in general and tourists in particular should probably try to avoid, if at all possible. Let’s just say Dashalan’r seemed to have reverted to its pre-Liberation economy.
Wow, so much ranting, and all inspired by one China Daily article so crappy I couldn’t bring myself to categorise this post as ‘news’ like I normally do when I rant about something in the media.
I had the same idea of taking the 919 once, but found that coming back is not nearly as easy as getting there (really easy and cheap). First of all, they dropped us off at a place that was different from the bus stop, so to find the busses going back into town we had to search for a while. Maybe I went on a crowded day, but it was nearly impossible to get a seat on a 919 back into town without having to make a mad rush for the bus as it pulled into the bus stop. That, and both fast and slow 919s that are going on to Yanqing and back into the city stop at the same place, and its hard to figure out which is which – probably impossible if you don’t speak Chinese.
Fair point, I can see how getting back would be difficult, especially for those who don’t speak Chinese. But that’s all part of the adventure, isn’t it? And besides, a large part of the trouble with Badaling is the crowds. Actually, that’s the main reason I’ve never gotten off the bus there. Well, that and the fact that the in-laws live 20 or 30 km up the road…. Anyway, I hope anybody who comes across this looking for directions to the Great Wall sees two things: A cheap option for getting there; and the hint to get off at Juyongguan instead (hmmm… I wonder if you could persuade them to drop you at the turn off to Shuiguan…. But getting back would be even more of an adventure then)