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The best-known section of the wall, and the one most people see, is at BADALING (daily 8am-4pm; Y30, students Y15), 70km northwest of Beijing. It was the first section to be restored, in 1957, and opened up to tourists. Here the wall is 6m wide with regular watchtowers dating from the Ming dynasty. It follows the highest contours of a steep range of hills, forming a formidable defence, and this section was never attacked directly but taken by sweeping around from the side. It's the easiest part of the wall to get to but it's also the most packaged, and to get the best out of it you need to escape the paths along which visitors are herded. A giant tourist circus greets you at the entrance, including a plethora of restaurants, rank after rank of souvenir stalls, a bank and post office. On the wall, flanked with guardrails and metal bins and accompanied by hordes of other tourists, it's hard to feel that there's anything genuine about the experience. Indeed, the wall itself is hardly original here, being a modern reconstruction on the ancient foundations. From the entrance you can walk along the wall to the north (left) or south (right). Few people get very far, which gives you a chance to lose the crowds and, generally, things get better the farther you go. Unfortunately, the authorities have recently wised up to the attempts of tourists to enjoy themselves here, and it's possible that guards will turn you back from unreconstructed sections. If you head south, which most people do, you'll come to a cable car (Y60), after about 2km, which will take you down to a car park, and a zoo full of sad, mad bears. Keep going past the cable car and you'll reach an unreconstructed section that in parts is quite hard to climb around. Eventually the wall peters out, and from here a complex route - basically just keep heading southeast - will take you through the scrub to Qinglongqiao West station, from where there are infrequent trains back to Beijing. If you're going to try this, bring a sleeping bag and be prepared to spend the night sleeping rough as you may well get stranded. Head north from the main entrance and you'll shake off the crowds fairly quickly. After about a kilometre you come to the end of the reconstructed section, and from here you can climb down onto the old wall and keep going. It's on this ruined section that you get a much better impression of the wall's real, more frightening character - a lonely road plodding on and on through a silent landscape. If you've come here with sleeping bags intending to stay the night - only really feasible in the summer months - this is the section to head for, but look out for the guards as dusk falls, as they'll order you off
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