The Wall is full, please go away

[pm215]

My trip to the Great Wall was actually over a month ago, but I've only just got round to pulling the photos off the camera. I went with a tour company, and the obvious problem with this is that you wind up going to the most touristy part of the wall, and on a Saturday in summer it's heaving with other tourists...

This part of the wall is a bit of a tourist trap: you ride up and down to it on little amusement-park style cars, and the road from the carpark is full of stalls hawking tourist tat. (There are also some rather sad and mangy looking bears in concrete pens, for some reason. They stand on little platforms and catch food thrown to them.) However, if you turn your back on all the other tourists and look out over the parapet at the next loop of the Wall as it runs along the ridge of the mountain you get a better sense of why it might be worth coming to see.

I think that probably the best thing to do would be to find out which sections of the wall are less set up for tourists, and go early and on a weekday, and be prepared to walk for a bit to get away from the parts at the top of the cable car and chair lifts.