No trip to Beijing is complete without an excursion to the Great Wall of China just beyond the city’s fringes. But the sections of the wall in the immediate vicinity of the city are overrun with hawkers and kitsch, so it’s far better to take a organised bus trip (offered in most city hotels, guesthouses and hostels) to Simatai where the wall snakes over rolling hills through the desolate scrubland as shown on all the postcards.

From Simatai you can do a five-hour hike along one of the best preserved/reconstructed sections of the wall to Jinshanling another major point along the wall. Neither place is more than a handful of buildings so the main attraction is the wall itself, where hawkers thin out over the first half-hour’s walk leaving you to appreciate the scenery and the satisfaction of plodding on stones that have heard the patter of footsteps since time immemorial. Some sections of the wall are really steep, with oversize step following oversized step, so you need to be in reasonable shape for the trip.

It’s a long day with five hours on the Wall and six in the bus to and from back to Beijing; and sure enough on the way back all the other travelers were snoozing away, making it feel of the end of a school trip. The cost of the whole affair is about US$30 per person; well worth it for memories that’ll last a lifetime – oh, and at Jinshanling you can buy a ride on a flying-fox for another $10 that onto which you can be harnessed for the few hundred meters (at some height) over a reservoir back to a bus; a great little adrenaline burst.. – I’ve linked to a video of it (though it’s not mine).