So far, so good.  We had started to get our heads around eating noodles and peanuts for breakfast.

We survived the warm-up walk and acquired a borderline obsessed taste for jasmine tea. Now, we were facing the longest day’s walking of our trek.

We started very early.

Blinking at the dawn, we knew we should be appreciating the glorious colours. Instead, we wondered how much money could be raised for charity with a lying-in-bed-athon.

However, the sight of the wall winding itself inexorably into the lush green landscape inspired even the sleepiest of us and we set off on our walk with growing enthusiasm.

At first, we passed stalls selling postcards, guidebooks, bracelets and, worryingly, replica copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. After the stalls came ‘Heaven’s Ladder’. The hardest part of the trek; it involved a long, slow climb up an almost sheer cliff carved out into 303 steep steps.

When the last three members of our group completed it, it appeared that they had received help from an ancient Chinese man, whose lack of teeth was made up for by his phenomenal strength, tugging each of them effortlessly up the steps. After Heaven’s Ladder, the path became easier as we walked along the mountain ridge.

This section of the walk was the quietest and one of the most beautiful, with flowers, butterflies and lizards a-plenty. We didn’t see a single person outside our group all day.  The Wall felt like it was ours for the taking.

After lunch we followed a narrow path through scratchy thickets, which fell away to reveal a largely eroded section of Wall, with steep drops and loose stones underfoot.We walked for a couple of hours, treading cautiously and wondering how our Chinese guides could have got so far ahead. Only then did we look down further to see a wide footpath running parallel to the Wall about ten metres or so away…

Transferred to this new route, we trekked with ease, making good headway until suddenly the path came to a dead end and we were forced to climb back up onto the Wall. This was as rough and tricky as before, but with the newly added challenge of a sharp downhill incline.

The height and uneven surface brought out many people’s fears and strengths and the group bonded strongly as we coaxed each other past the scarier bits. At the bottom of the slope was a track leading into ‘Sweet Water’ – the village where we would be staying that night.

At our farmhouse we were greeted with ice-cold beer and lemonade, then shown our rooms: little more than sheds with a row of hard beds.

Dinner was cooked by a smilingly shy daughter of the farm.  It included none of the concessions to the European palette that had been present in Beijing. Instead, we enjoyed beef, nuts and rice in deliciously complicated sauces, washed down with jasmine tea and beer. While we ate, the farmer lit a campfire and set firecrackers off for us.  We chatted and sang songs well into the night, blowing across empty beer bottles to accompany our voices.

When we eventually went to bed, we slept soundly, despite the hard beds and a wailing cat that broke the peace at regular intervals throughout the night.

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