My Gubeikou Travel Review 

Actually, it was in the year 2010, when I was an international student in Beijing. At that time, I really got tired of school life, so I asked several friends to go somewhere with me on a weekend. Since I really wanted to avoid the crowds and some of my friends had not been to the Great Wall, we made a deal to go to the Gubeikou, where there was a section of uncrowded Wall.

I got up early that morning and met my friends at the school gate, then we headed for the Beijing North Railway Station to take the train to Gubeikou. Truly it was the slowest train of Beijing and it took us four hours or so on the way. This made us stay overnight at Gubeikou, in order to fully tour the Wall, which was not in the plan. Actually, an episode happened then. After we arriving at the railway station and went to buy the tickets, the ticket seller told us that there was no train from Beijing to Gubeikou, which really caught us on the hop. As none of us wanted to travel to the bus station to catch a bus, we finally decided to buy tickets to the nearest railway station to Gubeikou---Huairou and then thought some other ways to reach the Gubeikou Great Wall after getting off the train. I thought the God must love us very much. We encountered a frequent passenger on the train and he told us the train would stop at Gubeikou Railway Station. The only thing we needed to do was to go to the train attendant to adjust the fare. At last, the kind-hearted train attendant helped us to get off at Gubeikou.

It seems that I have wasted my words too much. All right, let me come to the point. I will recommend some of my favorite sites of the Gubeikou Great Wall, which consists of Panlongshan Great Wall, Wohushan Great Wall and Simatai Great Wall.
1. General Tower, which was located on the Panlongshan Great Wall and where war was directed. Sat on a high location, the tower was easy to hold but hard to attack.

General Tower

Inside the General Tower

2. 24-hole Tower, the last tower of the east part of Panlongshan Great Wall. At first, it had three storeys and there were 12 holes on each of the 1st and 2nd storey. But we could only see one side of the wall when traveling there. Although heavily destroyed, the tower still looked magnificent, somewhat like the Colosseum in Roma.

24-hole Tower

3. There was also the best-preserved watchtower of the Northern Qi Dynasty located on this section of the Wall. I didn’t know what it was called, but we could overview the road, river and mountains in the distance when standing on it.

This is the watchtower

Inside the Watch Tower

4. Sister Towers, which were a pair of bacon towers. The Older Sister Tower was located on the higher north mountain while the Younger Sister Tower was located on the lower south. They were used to station troops, stock up food and weapons.