For the children of the Atule'er village in China, the journey to and from school is usually a matter of life and death, with a whole lot of vertigo in between. I'm not just saying that because walking to school in the wee hours can feel like a literal death grip, I'm saying that because their village is located at an altitude of 4600 feet, and the isolated nature of the village makes it staggeringly hard to get anywhere without risk.

While the villagers would welcome a road connecting them to different areas, the high cost of building and low number of people living there is a major deterrent towards government efforts. "The main problems is that we can easily move the villagers to a nearby city but without their farm land they have no job. They have good land resources and have a high yield of crops. Building a road to the village would cost 60 million yuan (£6.2 million) which is not cost effective because the number of people is so low." office secretary Ji Ke Jin Song said. A sad state of affairs. No child should have to risk their life for a basic education.