We were heading to Beijing during a national holiday called Golden week and everything we'd read about this holiday said as a non Chinese tourist avoid China during this week if possible. Well not only were we in China we were heading to Beijing where the normal population is about 19 million so god only knows how many tourists would add to this figure.

We exited the train station and were immediately hit by a wall of people who were obviously waiting for people coming out but what they were actually doing was just blocking the exit for the rest of us. After fighting our way through we made it to the metro station to find the biggest rugby scrum we'd seen yet, the queue for the tickets and then the queue to actually get in the station …. this could be a long 4 days.

We decided to head to Tiananmen Square in the evening as they have a ceremony of the lowering of the flag at sunset every evening. It's pretty well attended as they shut the road off and troops march out across it as part of the event. The square is huge and absolutely packed, it doesn't really look like much at first but as it gets darker it comes alight with everything lit up so it's pretty impressive.

I'd read so much info on which section of the great wall to visit that we eventually decided to go to one of the furthest sections away from Beijing in the hope that it would be less busy called Jinshanling. We got chatting to a couple on the coach from South Wales called Hannah and Jason who were really nice so we ended up hiking the wall with them.

It was a good call choosing Jinshanling as in parts it felt like we had the wall to ourselves so we got some great pictures but my god in parts it was difficult. Some of it was so steep you felt like you could easily roll backwards if you lost your balance. The whole experience was amazing and was definitely one of our highlights of the trip, the four of us had a beer halfway along and whilst it was warm it still tasted good for the fact that we were on the Great Wall.

Originally we were going to camp on the wall but we'd changed our minds a few days before and thank God we did as there were these horrible big flying bugs everywhere, I would have been on high alert all night, as it was I had a minor flip out when one landed down my top in daylight!

The drive back from the wall took forever as traffic was so bad, in the end we all got dropped off at a metro station. We had 2 options of getting back to the hotel, one involved less stops but more changes and the other more stops and less changes. The four of us went with option 1 whilst 2 guys from our hotel went with option 2 then all of a sudden the race was on, who could get back the quickest?

We ended up running through the metro stations to different lines, up and down escalators, at one point we were legging it onto a train before the doors closed and Jason almost lost his footing and skidded onto the train. We made it back to the hotel, sweating and laughing, there was no sign of the other 2 guys, we were victorious. At least we think we were, what we haven't mentioned is that they didn't know we were racing them and technically they could a) have already got back and were in their room b) they didn't come back straight away or c) we'd actually beat them. We went with option c and went for a celebratory drink in the bar (although there was a small part of me that wanted to stake out reception just to know 100% that we won)

The following day we went to the Forbidden City, it is absolutely huge, you can't really get your head around the scale of it. We liked it but in all honesty the hordes of people pushing and shoving to get to a window to look in a room kind of took the edge of it a bit. We found ourselves in a clock exhibition and at the time there were very few people in there and the clocks were unreal so this was our favourite part of it.

That evening we met up with Jason and Hannah for something to eat and then we all went to see the bird's nest (Olympic stadium) and the water cube. They were both lit up and were really impressive, Hannah and I left the men to try and get their ultimate photos of the water cube.

On our last day we went to the summer palace which was lovely and nowhere near as busy as the Forbidden City so we enjoyed it more and in the afternoon we went walking round the Hutongs. The Hutongs are narrow alleys filled with shops, bars, restaurants and peoples houses so they were pretty cool. However we spotted several coffee shops that had pictures of cats in the windows, on closer inspection it was a cafe that you could have a brew and a piece of cake whilst stroking a cat. To all my Greek friends reading this, you would have loved it but can you imagine my horror? I couldn't think of anything worse!

Beijing is an amazing city and despite how unbelievably busy it was we loved it but we were definitely ready to leave the hustle and bustle of China behind for a more relaxed pace in Bali.

General points
1) China is a crazy country, it's weird and wonderful at the same time and we can't do it justice by writing about it, we really think it's one of those countries that has to be experienced to be believed. It's mental!

2) We've had some of the worst food of our trip in China, the Chinese we get back home does not exist here (or not when you're budget is £2 a meal)