A four door hatchback, 4X4 sports car

Okay, so here we are after just 5 hours sleep and we are in a plush VW Passat heading out of Beijing, a city we have just spent 22 hours getting to, why?

The first thing that hit me about Beijing was the cars, yes there are ones you recognise such as Mercedes, Range Rovers, Audi and the one we are in, Volkswagen. But then there are a lot, whose names are as you would expect, difficult and the logos mean nothing to you. They are all Chinese made and from the comfort of our almost silent VW, clad in leather and trimmed in wood they all looked fine.

Most of them also look very familiar, the cars look as though you know what they are, but just can’t quite name them. Others though are much easier, because they are almost carbon copies of other cars, for example we saw a Range Rover Evoque that looked more Range Rover than the Range Rover, then there was a near perfect copy of a mini. The best by a long shot was their version of a Rolls Royce, which actually didn’t look that bad, it wasn’t an exact copy but, you could tell where they were going with the design. In fact, if Rolls Royce ever start making diesel tractors then this Chinese version will also sound just like it as well.

In general this copycat stuff seems to follow the general genre of the donor vehicle, so an SUV will still look like an SUV when copied and a sports car will still look like a sports car when copied. But its not always the case, because sometimes it seems the designers have taken the best bits from all their favourite cars and some how joined it all up to make one. Then they give that car and impossible long name, which I suspect is an amalgamation of all their favourite cars nick names and then plonk a crazy logo on the bonnet. A logo that has elements of Toyotas T, Mercedes’s three pointed start, the Lexus L and encircled by the BMW propeller logo. These strange hybrid vehicles could well have a four door saloon centre, the front end similar to a Porsche 911, a hatchback at the rear and the whole thing jacked up on off road suspension, don’t snigger I am being serious.

Weird cars apart, why are we driving out of Beijing and the answer is we are only here for a very short period of time and this is the only chance we have to see the Great Wall, which is about 2 hours drive from the city centre. The wall, I guess like any other visitor was high on our must see list.

My first impressions of the wall were disappointing maybe it was all the travelling, but it wasn’t as high as I was expecting or as wide or as grand. The builders were clearly semi skilled as who on earth ever builds a wall that isn’t straight, I mean if you have a wall built in your garden you don’t expect it to weave all over the place following the contours of your land, you will won’t it to be arrow straight. All walls need to be straight and this one isn’t, its all over the bloody place and from what I can tell on the top of every mountain they could find, which means walking on it is like trekking in Nepal.

Then there are the steps, they are simply a disgrace and there’s no excuse for it either. The wall is over 2,000 miles long and there must be millions of steps on it, due entirely to where they decided to build it so they had plenty of chances to get this right. I bet all of them are like the few thousand we encountered, with varying step heights from just a few centimetres to almost a meter and each step leans to one side and never the same side twice in a row. The brick work on the steps is uneven and treacherous, how they got through building regulations I have no idea.

No its clear, whoever signed this off as completed and safe must have had a heavy night on the rice wine.