We were in Beijing in Early Oct. Here are some highlight and some mistakes that we learned from. I will discuss the Wall last but bear in mind that we had 6 days. We scored a huge advantage by booking a little known hotel within walking distance of the Forbidden City. I would not call it a 4 star but it was very clean and the breakfast buffet was enough to start your day. It is the Shatan Hotel about $60/night. you will also get a good idea of the local flavor of the area because it is on a narrow street that not all taxi's are aware of. Be sure to have the Chinese Script of your locations for the cabs. Taxi's are very reasonable and will get you through traffic flow that you will find adventurous. From this hotel you can walk to the Forbiidden City Tienanmen square, Jinshan and Beihai park. Our tip here is utilize a guide at the Forbidden City. It is huge and there is so much history that renting a Guide saves you time. (About $6.00 Canadian, recommend Charlie older, knowledgable and very entertaining, good English). Ask the hotel staff to write the Chinese script for locations you are traveling to, they are more than helpful. Check to see if the Olympic sites are open. This apparently is hit and miss now. (Closed when we went) The Summer Palace is another time consuming trip. It is worth the trip and no guide is necessary. It is a large tract of land and water and takes time to see. You will be doing a lot of walking on your trip. We walked at night and never felt uncomfortable. The other places on your trip we did not cover but the Houhai and Bell and Drum Towers area a short cab ride from this hotel as well. (Frankly we got templed out) WE did not get to Badaling for the following reasons. We researched that it really is not representative of the original Wall. It has been refurbished to accommodate tourists and at any one time you may encounter 15,000 people. We were fortunate to take a day for the Wall and booked with the following Guide: http://www.greatwall-alternative.com Take some tome to visit his site. We were a group of 9 and this was the highlight of everyone's vacation. WE would also recommend a rickshaw ride through the ancient Hutong districts (this again is all around the Hotel and the Forbidden City). Very eye opening but a word of warning NEGOTIATE YOUR FEE prior the trip. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. We were also in Xi'an and Shanghai.

loved this section of the wall. it's not nearly as crowded and you can get some great shots with no one in the background in places....it looks like your on the way all by yourself. when you arrive make sure you only buy a trip up on the gondola and a trip down on the toboggan. its lots of fun. i also bought some coffee table books there that i could not find anywhere else in china.

The best side to visit The Great Wall is without question the Mutianyu section, by far better than Badaling, less crowded, older, more difficult to go up to (which is good for me) and just prettier. You can have it just for yourself! At the end, ask for this new place called The Schoolhouse, really nice, great western (and chinese) food and relaxing environment, english speaking staff and probably the best bathrooms in China!!

Definitely go to the Great Wall at Mu Tian Yu. It's the other section of the Great Wall near Beijing. The main or more frequented section is Ba Da Ling. When I was there ... November, 2005 ... hardly anyone was around. I felt as if I had the Great Wall to myself ... quite a feeling. As a documentary photographer, I took numerous stills and video. Many of the stills can be found on Yahoo Travel. I teach in China, and many of my students have told me, "You're not a man until you've walked the Great Wall." Well, I've walked part of it, so I guess I'm "part man."

I visited the Mu Tian Yu Gate in March, 2003. You first run a gauntlet of stalls with vendors selling everything from the usual tacky souvenirs to better quality items and food. If the dried fruit vendor is there, load up. It's wonderful! You do take a cable car up to the western end of the restored section. While you can walk to the west on the unrestored section, it looked like the walkway was not necessarily even. Walking east, you are walking down a lot of very low rise-wide tread stairs. It takes a little getting used to and can get hard on your knees. However, you can stop wherever you want. The scenery is great from there. Your options to get back to the stalls/parking lot are to walk back up those stairs and take the cable car down or continue east somewhere between a half kilometer and a kilometer where there are two other options. One is a western style open seat chair lift like at a ski lodge. I took that and the wind did bounce it around a lot. The other is a one person toboggan, which reminds me of a one man luge except you sit up and brake with a joystick between your legs as you descend a curving metal chute that even crosses a bridge near the bottom. A friend took that and thoroughly enjoyed it. Restrooms are in a building between the parking lot and vendor stalls. No facilities up on the wall. Attendants charge you a fee, which the first time was 50 jiao but the second time they tried to charge 2 yuan. They fold the money into triangles so be careful you get the right change back.