The North Korean Great Wall| 2 min read

We started our trip at Shenyang North train station at 7.30 AM. We thought it would only take us 2 hours to get there….typically it was 4 hours later and we arrived in Dandong.

We were welcomed by a big statue of Chairman Mao. After booking the train tickets back we took a cab to the Great Wall section, Hu Shan (虎山长城), which marks the eastern end of the start of the Ming Dynasty’s extension to the Great Wall.

The entrance fee is 40 RMB. It’s a short part of the Great Wall, only 1.2 kilometers in length. It was really nice as there was no one else except us climbing up the massive and wicked steps that have formed all the way up to the top. This section is really different to the part we visited in Beijing, Badaling.

It was very very exhausting to climb the Great Wall, but when you are on the top of the beacon tower in the middle you have an amazing view of the Yalu river and strangest of all…North Korea(!). Even if you can hardly make out any differences between the landscapes of North Korea and China the pure sight of North Korea is exciting as such if you think of the impossibility of going there, foreigners, particularly westerners cannot get any closer!

At the end of the Great Wall there is a small museum, the entrance fee is only 10 kuai, when you have been out in the cold for that amount of time, and it’s worth it just for the heating! I recommend it as a great experience, certainly an odd story to tell your friends at home, how often to you get that close to an out of bounds country?