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With only two days in Beijing we knew that there was a lot to pack in. We were staying in a guest house with an amazing inner courtyard that could have been the set of a kung fu film. The staff were very enthusiastic and helpful, and we signed ourselves up for a trip the Great Wall which was to leave very early the next morning.

We had been very excited about being in the home of Peking Duck and pancakes which are definitely on our list of favourite things to eat. So we wasted no time in finding one of the many restaurants specialising in this delicacy. Our taste buds were tingling in anticipation as the table was filled up with plates of pancakes, plum sauce, cucumbers and spring onions before three plates of duck arrived. One was pure meat, one was meat with strips of fat and skin, and the final plate was piled with thick strips of roasted duck fat and skin. We eagerly set about making our first rolls. The duck was not quite what we'd expected as the skin was more fatty than crispy. The flavour of the duck was lovely, but after a couple of rolls neither of us could face much more of the fatty skin. We're not sure whether we're just used to the Anglicised version of this dish, or whether Peking Roast Duck is quite different to crispy aromatic duck that we'd order in a restaurant at home - either way we were the only ones not totally convinced by the food, as we were surrounded by locals enthusiastically tucking in.

We woke at 5.30 the next morning (with the taste of duck fat still lingering!) to start our trip to the Great Wall. It was a bit chilly when we got outside, and we quickly rushed back in to collect our jackets (which have barely been used since Nepal) - a move we'd be very glad of later. We were headed to a relatively quiet section of the wall at Jinshanling, about 110km North East of Beijing. This meant a bumpy 4 hour ride in a minibus with a driver who seemed to be in a major hurry. It was the fastest we'd travelled on the road for a while, and we found it mildly terrifying as we weaved and swerved through the traffic. Thankfully we dozed a lot of the way there and were blissfully ignorant.

It was a steep ascent to get up to the wall which warmed our legs up after the long journey. As we got closer it was clear that the wall really is quite great, and we had a fantastic 10k walk along it to Simatai. The wall clings to the ridge at the top of the hills and includes some very steep sections between the regular watch towers. Some parts have been neatly restored with flat paving and even steps whereas others are more rustic and crumbling and require a bit of scrambling. The mid-point of the walk was marked by the highest watch tower which provided fabulous panoramic views of the surrounding countryside and it was amazing to trace the wall in both directions as far as the eye could see.

We were in a group of about 10 people and although we were not hurrying to reach the end, we kept finding ourselves quite a long way ahead of the others. We were very lucky it was a beautiful clear sunny day and as long as we kept out of the biting wind sitting waiting in the sunshine and admiring the view was not at all unpleasant. Despite stopping a number of times en route we still arrived at the end of the walk over an hour before the last stragglers - a couple of South American sisters who seemed to stop every few paces for a lengthy chat and a photo shoot. Our guide was exasperated as the walk that usually takes around four hours had taken them about 5 and a half hours. This meant a very late lunch, which had a few people complaining - mainly the ones who had walked very slowly! We were all off the wall just in time as a big thunderstorm rolled in and we narrowly avoided a soaking.

Our lunch was a delicious spread of Chinese dishes (with very little meat, and no seafood!) hungrily devoured and washed down with lashings of jasmine tea. It was then back into the minibus with the frustrated racing driver at the wheel, and we arrived back tired but happy after a long day at about 7pm.

After a couple of pre-6am early starts in a row, we allowed ourselves a lie in and didn't make it to breakfast until about 9am the next day. The main thing on our agenda was to pick up our train tickets for the next day and visit the Forbidden City. Our tour books warned that Beijing was a fairly difficult place to find your way around and finding the office that we were to collect our tickets from certainly confirmed this for us. Armed with a tourist map and Heather's renowned navigational prowess, we still found ourselves standing on street corners looking at the names of two streets crossing one another and not being able to pinpoint our location on the map. A lot of the central part of Beijing that we were walking around is based on a neat grid layout, but we got a bit of a shock when we realised walking one block of the grid could easily take 15 minutes. The scale of everything was pretty mind-blowing after many of the cities we have visited. To cut a long story short, we had been walking for around 2 hours when we found the right office in the right building and finally had our tickets in hand. We were feeling tired and starting to notice the effects of Beijing's infamous pollution and had to remind ourselves of how little time we had left to convince ourselves to go on to the Forbidden City.

Having said that Beijing was doing a good job of tiring us out, we have to say that we were generally pleasantly surprised by how user friendly it was for foreign tourists. Perhaps it's the Olympic legacy but there are a lot of helpful English signs, ticket machines on the Underground have an obvious English mode and many of the Underground trains have a route map with flashing LED's which make it very easy to see where you are and what the next station is going to be. We were also lucky to be blessed with another beautiful clear, sunny day so it was not too hard to convince ourselves to persevere with our site-seeing despite aching feet.

The Forbidden City is immense and we were among thousands of other visitors, but queues moved fast and there was no waiting around. We took the audio guide which told us a few interesting stories and facts as we wandered around, including one about the Emperor's courtiers bribing eunuchs to help them disguise the fact that they hadn't eaten all the distasteful ceremonial food that it was their duty to consume (we could feel a little sympathy, having had to eat things out of politeness more than once this year). The architecture was beautiful, and it was interesting to note the enthusiasm of the Chinese visitors to the attraction, who were in a majority.

We had a bit of shopping still to do to stock up for the train journey. We managed to fruitlessly plod around one of the main shopping areas for quite some time before giving up, and subsequently found everything we were after on the doorstep of our hostel.

After what felt like a long day on our feet, we rewarded ourselves with a delicious, spicy Chinese hot pot (fondue style dinner) and a few nice Chinese beers. It was with little joy that we set the alarm that night once again for a pre-6am start, but we were excited to be getting on a train the next morning heading homewards.

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