Beijing as a honeymoon destination had been my idea, a fact that returned to me in waves of guilt as I gazed at my wife of three days hooked up to a drip in a Chinese hospital. In three days we had endured a queue for train tickets that was more like a spaghetti western bar brawl and laughed off the 'friendly' staring and shouting.

Undeterred in our mission to see the 'real' China, we'd opted to take the local bus to one of the less visited stretches of the Great Wall. Miraculously, we caught the right one, despite the best efforts of a taxi driver who followed us for the entire trip, leaping on board at every stop to holler 'You wanna see Gre' Wa' 50 dollaaa?' at us. Why would I pay 100 times more than I'd already forked out to take me to a destination I was heading to?

A quaint market stall stood near the entrance to the site. 'How much for two bananas and a bag of nuts?' I asked the woman, employing my streetwise travellers' cool to shut down the chances of being ripped off. The food was already wrapped and in my hand before the wily old fox thrust a calculator under my nose. The price on the screen read 250 yuan - about £18. I didn't feel this represented value for money and returned the goods with a smile and a shake of the head. She responded with ear-shattering screeching and by clinging on to my sleeve for the next 100 metres.

The view from the Wall was spectacularly crap. A pea-souper smog filled the air, creating a hue like fag butts in a jar of water. My snot turned black. My wife began to feel sick on the bus journey back; within seconds of arriving, she was vomiting into the gutter. A crowd gathered, laughing. The licensed bandit we hired to get us back to the hotel kindly charged us four times the going rate to sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic for two hours while my newlywed drifted in and out of consciousness.

Next morning it took half an hour to convince the taxi-crooks outside the hotel that, being half-dead, my wife did not fancy spending 50 bucks to be taken back to the Great Wall, but would rather go to hospital. It was with disappointment that we learnt she would recover with antibiotics and a few days' rest; no need to abandon our honeymoon.

· Have you had a crap holiday? If so, write in and tell us about it. The writers of stories we publish will receive a copy of the Idler Book of Crap Holidays. Email crap.holidays@observer.co.uk