Great whirl of China

Explore Beijing on an overnight stay instead of hanging about the airport on a layover

Like most people, I hate airport layovers. I’m impatient, which makes any loitering difficult, but I also despise being in a new country and not being able to explore it.

So, with the prospect of going via Beijing to save £200 each on flights to Japan for a holiday with my husband James, I did a bit of digging and discovered a great tourism initiative.

The Chinese government waives its visa fee (around £100) for tourists arriving from one country and departing to another if they are staying in Beijing (and some other cities) for less than 144 hours.

On top of that, Air China offers a FREE hotel room and transfers for anyone with an overnight layover of between six and 24 hours. So we bookended our trip to Japan with two 22-hour layovers in Beijing and called Air China to arrange our hotels. airchina.co.uk

Fortunately we had no delays, and landed at Beijing airport on time.

There are plenty of signs for the 72/144 visa-free entry, as it’s called, but we still managed to miss the correct desk for rubber stamping our passports. But, after filling out a short form and a queue at passport control, we were in the country.

Baggage goes straight through to the your final destination, so with just our overnight hand luggage we headed straight to the airline desk, who promptly arranged our minibus (allow 1.5 hours for the airport).

Our hotel – the Yinyang, close to the airport – wasn’t exactly five-star, but I was pleased to see toothbrushes in the bathroom, as I’d forgotten ours.

James has friends in Beijing so, after a quick freshen-up, we got a cab into town (£11) via the Drum Tower and Houhai lake, and enjoyed a delicious South Chinese hotpot dinner at a restaurant called House of Shuhe.

After a decent night’s kip it was on with our holiday. On the way back from Japan, now dab hands at the system, we breezed through and were at our second – cheerier – hotel within an hour of landing.

With a later landing time, we dashed straight out to find a Peking duck restaurant, aware that in Beijing places tend to close fairly early. Fortunately, we found the Siji Minfu, which is open until 10.30pm, and enjoyed the delicious local delicacy – once staff taught us how to fold a pancake with chopsticks. Had we been earlier, we could have checked out the nearby Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, but we opted for an early night back at the Aulympic Hotel ahead of a morning trip to the Great Wall we had booked before. beijinglayovertour.com

We were picked up by the team at Beijing Layover Tour at 9am, whisked (with white knuckles) to Mutianyu where we took a spectacular cable car ride up to

the wall, strolled along taking photos of the magnificent views and gawping at the feat of engineering winding over the hills into the distance, before tobogganing down. Yes, you read that right – we slid back down the side of the wall in a metal tube on a plastic sled!

The operators dropped us back off at the airport, shattered, at 1pm in time for our 4pm flight. It was well worth the £65pp (cable car and toboggan extra).

We packed plenty into our brief stays in Beijing and I highly recommend anyone adventurous to give it a go – as long as you’re prepared to plan it carefully, with a Plan B and a Plan C in case of flight delays. The Beijing Layover Tour company offers refunds as long as you let them know asap.

Also check your transit eligibility – British citizens with a British passport are permitted, but restrictions can apply to others.

It’s also difficult to predict the traffic. It took us 30 minutes to get back to our hotel one night in a cab after taking well over an hour to do the same journey into town.

Ensure you travel with the addresses of every location you plan to visit written in Chinese, pack a pen to save time filling out your boarding cards. Also download the DiDi app for cabs.

Finally, don’t expect luxury accommodation, but it’s a bed for the night, a private toilet and decent shower – and it’s free.