Entrance to Badaling Bear Park.

The we decided to skip the first walking leg of the trip from the Bear park to the first part of the Great Wall. We used these roller coaster chain driven carts to pull us up to the wall entrance.

Here is the view of what we are gonna be walking today from the coaster car.

So after a rather short up hill roller coaster ride, we are at the entrance.

The view is great up here.

The walking task is not an easy one head.

The Badaling Great Wall section is over 1000m above sea level. Another thing to help add to the problems of walking this stretch of wall.

I arrive at this first rampart, which is about 5.7m wide and over 8.4m high.

The steps are uneven, almost random heights for each step, random depth for each step, and a lot of them. This is quickly becomes a hard for even the experienced "Stair Master" user.

The ramparts were not made for tall people like me. Low ceilings and cramped spaces like this doesn't make this a very comfortable place to serve a soldier's duty.

The wall is about 5.7m wide, enough for 5 horses to gallop or about 10 people shoulder to shoulder.

The base of the wall is 6.5m wide. As you can see, an average Hun soldier on foot would certainly have his work cut out for him to get over this wall.

Yea! We arrive at the halfway point.

This is the famous Badaling wall entrance.

It is suppose to have the highest rampart in the area and serves as a watch tower.

A look back to how far we have come. A long way!

Almost at the end of our journey. Here is the highest rampart.

Yea! I made it!

Here is our tour group for this trip. We all made it.

Now to make our way back down. At least, walking down steps is physically easier, however much more dangerous.

Oh yea, you were probably wondering what was the deal with the Bear Park. Well, it is because they have like 3 pens of black bears.

The young bears were being particularily active today.

Hmm... Doesn't this golf ball, geodesic dome-like building remind you of something in Vancouver?

After our hard day, here is our lame but at least better dinner.