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This has got to be the world's most terrifying school run

8 people have died falling from the mountain

This has got to be the world's most terrifying school run
27 May 2016

Well, we're definitely never complaining about our commute to work again. 

Instead of leaping into the back of a Vauxhall Zafira after a bowl of Ready Brek like lucky school children in the UK do, school kids in the isolated mountain village of Atuler in China's Sichuan province have to climb some hundred-year-old ladders up a huge and terrifying 800m cliff face to get to their lessons, before having to do it all over again in reverse when the last school bell of the day sounds.

To give just an idea of how utterly petrifying the journey is for these children, one villager recently told the Beijing News that "seven or eight" fellow villagers have fallen to their deaths while making the treacherous climb. 

Recent images of the village's plight taken by photographer Chen Lie, chief photojournalist for The Beijing News, shocked the population of China so much that the photos went viral on the Chinese web. He told The Guardian: "It is very dangerous. You have to be 100% careful. If you have any kind of accident, you will fall straight into the abyss."

All of a sudden, that 07:15 into Waterloo feels a whole lot more welcoming.