We didn’t have any local currency to get to the city centre, and Elizabeth, the Englishwoman on the train who’d bailed us out by covering the surprise “medical examination fee” sprung on us at the border, seemed convinced that we wouldn’t find an international ATM anywhere near Gia Lam. It seemed odd to me, but she lives in Hanoi and I took her word for it.. Besides, she offered us a ride in her taxi and took us right to the door of our hotel. A very nice lady, as I think I mentioned before. I try not to depend much upon the kindness of strangers (it’s a scarce and non-renewable resource) but it’s awfully nice when it comes my way. Thanks again, Elizabeth.

It was still early. Like most small hotels in this part of the world, this was a family-run affair. Like India, the staff here sleep in the lobby at night. We sat dozing ourselves, waited for them to get up and open the place officially, and watched the street waking up outside. It had been empty and quiet, but as the dawn wore on the street filled with women in round pointy hats wandering the neighbourhood with two baskets on a yoke over their shoulder, selling fruit, bread or eggs.

The hotel was on Ma May in the middle of Hanoi’s tourist ghetto north of Hoan Kiem Lake. And what a ghetto it is - quite as bad as Thamel in Kathmandu. All the vendor women want to pose for photographs and you can’t go ten steps without being pestered by cycle-rickshaw and motorbike-taxi drivers. I couldn’t have cared less. I was so happy to be out of China that Vietnam looked very good in comparison. The air was breathable and no one was spitting or smoking. And everyone was smiling! Vietnamese people smile all the time. It was such a contrast to China’s sea of scowls and dour inscrutability that it made me smile too, just to see it. It’s such a simple, small thing, but I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it. Smiles are good things. I was later to become gradually aware of two things: first, that Southeast Asians have a smile for every emotion, especially the negative ones, so smiles are social masks rather than genuine indicators of mood; and second, that everyone in Hanoi and along most of Vietnam’s tourist trail is a grinning crook or a con-artist. But I’m jumping ahead of my narrative. I didn’t know these things at that moment and was just amazed and grateful to see so many smiling, happy people.

Sheryl had taken an inadvisably large dose of her sleeping pills so that she’d sleep on the train (one whole tablet instead of her usual quarter) and trailed around after me most of the day in an uncomprehending daze. Afterwards she couldn’t remember anything we did that afternoon, but I found Hanoi an interesting place. The murky green waters of the lake give a turgid ripple once in a while to mark the passage of an especially big catfish, but are otherwise still. The lake itself is surrounded by a thin strip of park with paved footpaths. Ringing that is a big loop of very busy roads, and outside that a sprawling warren of crooked little streets and mouldering row-houses. The sidewalks have been colonized by entrepreneurs and converted into linear motorcycle parking lots, complete with informal parking attendants to sort out the tangle of handlebars and direct pedestrians back out into the road where they belong. Every night the streets fill with plastic tables from the streetside restaurants and noodle shops and the air fills with food-smoke and good smells. The food’s cheap and good (though not necessarily clean or healthy). It’s a peculiarity of Hanoi that you can get a cold drink from restaurants but never from any shop. Either electricity is too expensive, the shops are too small for refrigerators, or the Vietnamese believe cold drinks are unhealthy - possibly all of the above.

There’s a definite skill to crossing the street in Hanoi. There’s a torrent of traffic, but nearly all of it is on two wheels. There aren’t any lights or signals except at the most major intersections, and there don’t really seem to be any traffic laws either. So people can and do turn right or left from either lane and any direction at any time with no warning. Faced with this unceasingly rushing, solid wall of speeding metal and noise it seems that it would be impossible to cross the street. But the secret technique is this: you, the pedestrian, must take a deep breath, summon your faith and simply step off the curb and into the flow of traffic. The river of motorcycles will part magically in front of you and close up behind you as you cross. If you walk slowly, calmly and steadily across then your little bubble of semi-safety will move with you until you get to the far side. But if you speed up or slow down, try to second-guess the drivers or do anything else at all unpredictable, you’ll be flattened.

My most urgent priority, naturally, was to have my camera fixed. I had a few recommendations to go to a street south of the lake called Vọng Đúc. It was a small street lined with camera supply and repair shops. I asked around, took a deep breath and ducked into the consensus recommendation. The man there had no English but I demonstrated the problem and he knew what was wrong instantly. He produced a flat amber-coloured ribbon cable and pantomimed zooming the lens and folding the cable over and over until it broke. I noticed that he’d pulled it out of a jar of identical cables labelled “Canon 17-85 IS” and that made me feel confident that I was in good hands (though a little angry at Canon for what’s clearly a design flaw). He quoted me Đ300,000 (about C$18) and pointed to the next day on the calendar. What a huge relief. I’ll have a camera again tomorrow! I agreed to the quote with no hesitation at all. No doubt it was inflated, but it’s a personal rule of mine to keep repair people happy - especially camera-repair people. I might be a penny-pinching bastard but I’m not about to nickel and dime over something so important to me.

That night we saw one of Hanoi’s professed “must-see” attractions - a water-puppet show. Once a traditional folk art entertainment performed in rice paddies, now cheesy self-conscious exhibition for tour-bus groups. Sheryl was desperate to go and I was intrigued enough by the mysterious concept of water-puppets to go along. They’re just what the name suggests. The puppeteers stood behind a curtain, waist-deep in water on a flooded stage, working their simple brightly-coloured puppets by long sticks. There were something like twenty short skits telling wordless little stories about daily village life or Viet legends. My favourites were the unicorn-like water-dragons playing ball and the Spastic Fish Dance. It was all good light-hearted splashy entertainment and the puppeteers were surprisingly dexterous with their creatures. There wasn’t much in the way of marionette-style articulation involved - the resistance of the water served to swirl tails, swing arms and the like. It was accompanied by a dozen traditional instruments - odd assemblies of strings and gourds that kept up a whining, buzzing drone more than a little like a dentist’s drill.

In the end, though we saw a lot of Hanoi, we didn’t see many of its usual tourist attractions. There was too much to do and too little time to do it in. Our Japanese friend Sayaka had decided to travel with us for awhile and we were due to meet her in Nha Trang halfway across the country in five days, so there was no time to linger in Hanoi. The one thing I really wanted to do was to go and see the mummified body of Ho Chi Minh, but that was a washout: in an astonishingly coincidental stroke of bad luck, Uncle Ho was in Russia for his yearly cleaning just as Chairman Mao had been in Beijing.

We had two missions that took up all our remaining time in Hanoi. The first was to arrange train tickets out of town. Stupidly, we’d ignored the lessons that China had so painfully taught us and we hadn’t booked tickets as soon as we’d arrived. Bus is always an alternative - in fact the so-called “open-tour” buses are the main means of backpacker transport in Vietnam. But I wanted to avoid them for exactly that reason, and besides I’d heard uniformly horrible things about them. But luck was on our side and we got berths on the train in hard-sleeper class to Hue with no trouble, though it was a it more expensive than I had hoped it would be at Đ360,000 (C$21).

Arranging the cruise was much more trouble - an epic, exhausting endeavour in fact. In China, there’s not much in the way of two-tier pricing - no one had really cared enough about ut to bother overcharging us just because we were foreigners. It’s one of the nice things about the place. Not so in Vietnam. I’d been in Hanoi long enough for the initial infatuation to wear off. It was now clear to me that anyone we were likely to encounter would, with cheerful malice, mercilessly screw us over for every last penny in our pockets. With the sole exception of the train ticket office we had to work hard everywhere, even the humblest noodle shops, to get a price that was only three times too high (in this way, Hanoi was to be a good introduction to travel in Southeast Asia).

Despite being 150km from the city, Halong Bay is Hanoi’s main attraction - arguably more so than Hanoi itself - and everybody knows it. The streets of the tourist ghetto are lined with hundreds of agencies selling nothing but these cruises. Some are swanky air-conditioned showrooms and some are stalls with planks for counters. There’s a bewildering number and no way to tell the real hustlers from the merely overpriced and shifty. We had a list of a few operators said to be reliable, but it was useless - in the constantly seething upheaval of the Hanoi tourism business all of them had changed names, addresses, ownership or all three. A further complication was the host of brazen copycat offices. Success here means that every day another operation will be openly using your name. Looking around one intersection I could see no fewer than five Vinh Café offices, none of which were real (not that Vinh Café is one of the reputable companies - if anything it’s one of the dodgier ones). It’s a vicious, cut-throat business that’s probably even nastier for the businessmen than it is for the customers (and it’s plenty nasty for the customers, believe me. Nearly everywhere we’ve been, the default conversation opener between travellers is “Where are you from?” or “How long have you been travelling for?” but in Hanoi it’s “How much did you get Halong Bay for?”). I’ve never seen such an overwhelming concentration of scamminess in one place before.

And the agents are all selling variations on the same few things. In fact, they’re all selling exactly the same thing. This is by no means clear or easy to realize at first. Every one of them will swear blind that they own the boat that appears in the inkjet-printed pictures in the dime-store page-protector, each boat with their name badly Photoshopped onto its sails. And even the good reports we’d heard all had the common feature of a last-minute “upgrade”. So gradually we realized that they’re all just agents for a few big consolidators operating behind the scenes. The agent sells you to one of them, which blocks out groups and then sells them to whatever even more mysterious company actually operates the boat. So the agent you’re talking to doesn’t know what boat you’re really going on until the minute you leave, when you’ll be presented with the unexpected and joyous news of your “upgrade” to a different boat.

All this became clearer as we went, but the hustling, misdirection, fast-talking and outright lying make it very hard to see the pattern when you’re just trying to figure out how much this goddamned excursion might cost you. You know bone-deep that you’re being hustled but there’s no way around the bait-and-switch. We’d had some advice to avoid the cheapest operators - reports of rats and filth and such. Not counting those ones, we wound up with a shortlist on which the best price was a horrifying US$72 per person - something like C$76, which was about twice what I’d been hoping for. Our Africa compatriots Paul and Rebecca told us they’d paid $120 each for theirs and had a wonderful time, but their budget was a lot higher than ours is (in truth we don’t have a budget, we just try to spend as little as possible all the time). What are we doing? I thought to myself, feeling sick. We don’t have the money for this. I was close to exercising the veto right that Sheryl and I both reserve, and calling the whole thing off. Between the scamming, the constant hassles from vendors and the unrelenting catcalls of “motosikal! motosikal!”, Hanoi had lost a lot of its initial charm for me and we made a tactical withdrawal to our room to think it over.

The staff at the hotel had been continually badgering us since we arrived about their offerings. I’d been putting them off by saying we were waiting for the weather to improve, but after dealing with the circus outside, Sheryl decided to see what they had. At least we’d met actual flesh-and-blood people who had booked with them and said they’d had a good experience, which put the hotel one up on anyone on our shortlist since we’d read both bad and good reports of each of those online (Vietnamese tour agents aren’t stupid people, they know how to use a web browser, and they’ve polluted all the online forums and review sites with fake glowing recommendations of themselves and equally fake negative reviews of their competitors). The hotel’s agent started out pitching their $300 deluxe cruise, until our disgusted and hostile expressions prompted him to ask “Oh, you want the backpacker cruise?” Our ragged wardrobes and, yes, backpacks might have suggested this to him at the beginning of our stay, I thought. In the end they wouldn’t go lower than $80. It was ten percent higher than our next choice but I was sick of the whole question. Reasoning that at least we’d have someone to complain at if things went sour, I gave in out of sheer exhaustion. I regretted it instantly, though.

The bus ride back to Guilin from Yangshuo brought to mind that old parental admonishment: “You should have gone before we left!” I’ve travelled halfway around the world on buses. That kind of experience gives you superhuman bladder-control and teaches constant strategic planning around the timing of toilet visits. Alas, even the most experienced can be caught off-guard. Every minute of that hour-long trip was pure torture. Each little bump in the road made me seriously think my bladder was about to rupture. Half an hour of that and I was in pain - an hour and I was in agony. I could really, really have done without the traffic-jam getting into Guilin. Just as I thought I was going to pass out, the bus finally ground to a halt. But there’s no public toilet in Guilin’s bus terminal, I discovered.

Increasingly panicked, I tried to rationalize peeing against the nearest wall despite the throngs of people. How bad could it be, I thought? To say the least, bodily functions are not accorded the same level of privacy here in China that Westerners are used to - sometimes none at all. Babies and toddlers here wear pants with a split down the crotch so that they can squat anywhere, anytime, I found early in our visit. Nowhere is safe; they’re allowed - encouraged - to pee or defecate wherever they happen to be standing (in Shanghai I saw a toddler hunker down and empty his bowels on the floor of a supermarket. I wish with all my heart that I was joking. Afterward his father picked him up and strolled blithely away leaving the mess on the tiles).

I couldn’t do it though. Partly it was due to the fear that releasing what now felt like fifty or sixty litres of urine had a very real chance of actually drowning some innocent bystander, but mostly I just couldn’t be that rude. Call me inhibited, tell me I have body-consciousness issues, I don’t care - I just think of it as having a little goddamn class. But standing by your principles costs, as we all know, and this time it was killing me.

The only thing that saved me was remembering in a flash that there was supposed to be a hostel somewhere near the bus terminal. Hobbling painfully I crossed the busy road and, finding a sign for the place, around the corner and down an alley or two. There wasn’t anybody minding the desk but luckily for me the door was unlocked. That toilet was a blessed sight, I can tell you. (And I can report with no exaggeration that I peed for 120 seconds straight. I know this because I timed it, like the character in that Graham Greene novel Travels With My Aunt). The girl now sitting back at the reception desk looked warily surprised to see me as I slipped out with a weak smile. Thank you and apologies, Guilin Flowers Hostel. I hope that never happens to me again. I hurt for hours afterward.

In the end the rumours were false; it’s not possible to book the Nanning-to-Hanoi International Express from Guilin. It can only be reserved from Nanning itself. We’d just have to show up in Nanning and hope there was space left on that night’s train. At least we got tickets to Nanning, though at ¥65 they were the country’s most expensive hard-seat tickets (a similar distance in Hunan cost us ¥8, by way of comparison).

That train didn’t leave until early morning. We had reservations at a hostel fifteen minutes’ walk from the station. This is definitely the part of town that people actually live in, and not a sanitised tourist district; everything was run-down or crumbling behind walls of scaffolding. The hostel was nice, though, with friendly staff and a relaxed, sociable group of guests. All except me, that is - I was in a foul mood and hid in the dorm sulking like a teenager. Sometimes I make myself tired.

Typhoon Koppu blew in overnight, lashing the city with high winds and heavy rain, and the roads were littered with leaves and fallen branches as we made our way to the train station at dawn. One possible reason for the high price of the ticket became apparent quickly. I thought I’d seen more or less everything Chinese trains could throw at me, but this train was different from every other I’d seen so far - a double-decker commuter train like a grimy version of Toronto’s GO trains.

For once we managed to board early before the crush, take our seats and get our packs stowed, and were seated happily congratulating ourselves when up walked the man in whose seat I was sitting. Our seats were upstairs. God damn it. I can’t win at this. Whose bright idea was it to number the seats the same upstairs as downstairs? If I could read Chinese I’d have known which mysterious little ideogram meant “upper” or “lower” - being an illiterate, stupid laowai I’d just followed the conductor’s finger and it had definitely been pointing downwards. To add more embarrassment, I’ve been on enough sleeper trains that I really should have noticed the upper/lower characters because they’re probably the same ones that distinguish lower berths from upper ones.

The train had filled up in the meantime - more than filled up - and so an infuriating circus followed. The train was so packed I had to crowd-surf over a huge clot of people and wheeled suitcases with our heavy packs to get to the stairs, (making no friends at all among the downtrodden masses) and then rearrange the already jammed luggage racks on the upper level to try and wedge our packs in - incurring more hostile stares of loathing from their owners (after five weeks in China I’m not really bothered by hostile stares of loathing, however). Naturally our real seats weren’t as nice as the ones we’d had to relinquish. I was stuck between Sheryl and a fat man with a terrible gas problem who’d stolen the window seat because he’d gotten there first. Between the crowding, the heat, the choking acrid clouds of cigarette smoke and the fecal stench arising periodically from my left, I was feeling very ill by the time we finally made it to Nanning six long hours later. I consoled myself during the trip with the thought that it was my second-last train in China.

Fortunately for my fraying sanity there was no trouble getting berths on the train to Hanoi leaving that night. The price difference between hard-sleeper class and soft-sleeper was small enough and I was cranky enough that we decided wordlessly to treat ourselves. Spend enough time with someone and you often know what they’re thinking without talking about it - and we’ve spent nearly every waking and sleeping moment of the last sixteen months together.

There didn’t seem to be much in Nanning that we could really get into in the space of a few hours. We killed the time in the usual ways - finding lunch, stocking up on train food, and managing to spend all of our remaining Chinese yuan. It’s not technically legal to take yuan out of China, but the real reason was that I prefer not to deal with monychangers whenever possible. The exchange rate from the ATM is always better and I don’t need to worry about being ripped off. So every time I leave a country it involves a tricky process of trying to guess how much of the local currency I’ll need so that I don’t have too much or too little. In this case it worked out nicely and we’d be leaving China with less than ¥2 (about C$0.30) left over. It was a bit of a gamble, though, because since it’s also illegal to take Vietnamese đồng out of Vietnam it meant we’d be entering the country with no currency of any sort (barring a few US dollars I’d had stashed away since Africa against emergencies). This becomes important later.

Normally we’d have wasted the remaining hours until the train at the internet place we’d found, but there were too many heavy chain-smokers in one room (which is to say, everyone except us) and with no ventilation there wasn’t any breathable air at all. I couldn’t stop coughing and my eyes were bright red. China has destroyed my breathing. I have a horrible, persistent smoker’s cough and I’ve never touched a cigarette in my life. (Deafness I can blame on India. Likewise, when I’m diagnosed with lung cancer I know exactly where to lay the accusation). We fled after an hour and spent the rest of the time in the station’s waiting room watching Rude Frog And Hippo public service cartoons on the wall screens.

The train was comfortable, but wasn’t much of a sleeper train - not in the sense of how much sleep we actually got, at any rate. That wasn’t a surprise; we knew we’d be crossing the border in the middle of the night. We reached the Chinese side of the border at Pingxiang around 10:30 and were stopped for about an hour and a half. Customs was a bit of a joke - we all schlepped our baggage off the train and into the border post, stood around aimlessly for ten or fifteen minutes and then got back on the train. They didn’t even bother making us run our bags through a scanner - surprising, given that you’re required to do so roughly every half an hour while travelling inside China. Like a lot of border guards, these ones seemed to be of the opinion that anyone leaving the country is ipso facto Not Their Problem. I’ve never had a breath of trouble getting out of a country - it’s getting in that’s sometimes tricky.

To that end, we stopped another hour at the Vietnamese border. None of the Vietnamese or Chinese passengers on the train had to disembark, so there were only half a dozen foreigners squinting in the stuttering fluorescent light of the border post. There were the usual forms and passport inspection, but again nobody seemed at all interested in what we might have had in our bags. They were only interested in our “medical examination” (i.e. taking our temperature to see if we had Swine Flu) and then shaking us down for a so-called “Medical Examination Fee” of 2,000 Vietnamese đồng each. It’s a pathetically small amount of money - about a dime - so I’d have just rolled my eyes and paid up, if not for the small matter that I mentioned above: We had no money of any sort. I’m not sure how they realistically expect everyone crossing the border to pay, if it’s not allowed to take either currency out of its respective country. I think they’d probably have let it slide, since it was undoubtedly just the official’s little scam on the side. But there was a friendly Englishwoman named Elizabeth who was returning to Hanoi from her short trip into China and who had defied the forces of government oppression by smuggling some đồng out, and she paid for us and for two Germans who had the same problem. Nice lady.

With the Medical Examination successfully completed, I listened intently and with held breath for the sound that’s become one of the sweetest and most satisfying I can hear - the kthunk of a stamp hitting my passport. As it was handed back to me I nearly wept with joy. I was really, truly leaving China. It didn’t matter what trials might lie ahead, what annoyances or horrors or unpleasantness. I’d greet them all with a smile because they wouldn’t be happening in China, and that’s the only thing I gave a damn about right at that moment.

Today the place is a zoo. The town of Yangshuo is only an hour away from Guilin by bus. Swarms of women in pointy hats lurk at the bus station waiting to push hotels on disembarking passengers. The town is bursting at the seams with Chinese tourists and Westerners - sightseers, backpackers and pretty-boy rock-climbers strutting around with their helmets and chalk-bags dangling pretentiously from their little knapsacks. There are touts and hustlers everywhere - you can’t take ten steps without being hit up for something. Every restaurant has a woman standing outside shrilly importuning passersby. Crappy souvenir shops outnumber everything except the hotels. Most of the restaurants serve Western food at enormous prices. I wouldn’t eat at any of them, but it’s obscurely comforting to know that I could get pizza or “Chicken Gordon Blue” if I wanted to. Yangshuo’s signature dish is Beer Fish. I never bothered to try it, suspecting that the name said it all and that it would be beery-tasting fish, which I can imagine well enough without needing to taste it.

Prices for everything in Yangshuo are at least half again what they are even in already-expensive Guilin, and often even higher. I wasn’t happy about that. I was even less happy that we hadn’t booked accommodations ahead, since it was Saturday and rooms were very scarce. Yangshuo is probably the only place in China where that matters. I left Sheryl sitting on the packs and went out to try and find somewhere to stay. Full. Full. Full. Expensive. Full. Et cetera. Yangshuo is an easy place to get lost in - none of the streets are straight - but at least you’ll always come back to one of the same half-dozen places even if you’re not sure how. After an hour of fruitless searching I gave in when I somehow found myself standing in front of Sheryl again. Naturally she’d gotten us a room at the place right in front of her, without needing to take a single step. Why I go through the motions, I’m sometimes not sure.

Our first night in Yangshuo was no fun at all. Our hotel shared a wall with a loud bar (I think all buildings in Yangshuo share a wall with a loud bar) and the room shook until the wee hours, so not much sleep for us. The noise and the need for food drove us out into the crammed streets. The town was unbelievably loud and crowded. The main road is pedestrianised - nice during the day but superfluous that night since there were so many people it wasn’t possible to walk, only to shuffle along at the pace of the crowd. A pickpocket’s dream.

In the afternoon and the early evening the river is genuinely lovely, though. The water is shallow and fast. People swim or wade, looking for crabs and crayfish. On the far bank the limestone peaks rise all crazily twisted and pointy and swathed in greenery. Huge furry stands of bamboo bend under their own weight and sway in the breeze. From a distance in the hazy air, they look like giant cycads or tree ferns and the misty peaks like gently smoking volcanoes. I daydreamed that I’d been transported back in time to the late Cretaceous Period or that I was Professor Challenger gazing at Conan Doyle’s Lost World. The illusion was so convincing that the sudden noise of a boat engine made me jump, thinking it was the roar of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

At night the river is a different story. Big dinner-cruise boats covered in furiously blinking and flashing lights and blinding, multi-coloured searchlight beams drifted downstream blaring thunderous karaoke. The peaks were all lit with a hideously tacky light show. It was a kilometre away around the bend of the river, but we could hear it and see the illumination on the hills. It’s supposedly choreographed by the man who did the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics. I never saw them but it must have been scary. Tickets for this show were laughably expensive - something like ¥600 per person (C$92). I couldn’t really see how they could prevent us from taking a boat or hiking up into the hills to see it for free, if we’d really wanted to inflict that on ourselves. Indeed, later we saw a sign ominously warning that it was illegal to follow “local guides” to see the show outside the Designated Area (which I didn’t believe for a second) and also that all “local guides” are evil criminals who will knock you on the head and steal your money if you’re lucky (which was only slightly more credible). At any rate the notice was clearly just fear-mongering meant to scare tourists and only served to confirm my suspicion that there must be a thriving local business in sneaking people into the show.

Our second day in town was a write-off; Sheryl was feeling poorly and we were both short of sleep - but at least the downtime gave me a chance to finish post-processing my terrible photos from Wulingyuan. On the third day we’d recovered enough to rent bikes and ride out into the countryside. Our goal was the so-called Dragon Bridge. Neither of us expected much from the bridge itself but it was a good excuse to get out of town.

The paved road out of Yangshuo soon turned to gravel, then to dirt and rocks. Our hands, arms and bums were soon aching from the pounding as we rattled and jolted over the rocky road. The trail wound between the limestone peaks through villages, fields and violently green rice-paddies. The bright white light filtered down through the hazy air, casting no shadows. The path occasionally followed the riverbank - not the River Li but its tributary the Yulong - and cries of “Bamboo! Bamboo!” would go up whenever we were spotted. There’s a local industry involved in ferrying tourists and their bikes upriver to a waterfall and back down again on bamboo rafts. The rafts are neat - made of bamboo poles lashed together and curved up at both ends - but we just weren’t interested and the constant pestering calls got annoying after a while.

Another low-grade annoyance was the local guy dawdling along the trail on his rickety bike who attached himself to us. He pestered us with “Bamboo!” and “Go! My home! Eat!” and tried on the guide routine, pointing out the turnings of the path to the bridge (already clearly marked with red spray-painted arrows). We tried the usual slower-faster tricks to get rid of him but he stuck like glue until we reached a straightaway where we could power past him. He showed up at the bridge five minutes after we did and pointed triumphantly at it announcing “Dragon Bridge!” as if he’d guided us for weeks through perilous adventures. But he’d missed his chance to demand money for his dubious “services” and all three of us knew it.

We sat by the stone arch of the bridge for an hour or so, dozing, soaking our feet in the cool water and watching the little fish and the rafts. It’s claimed that the river is 7m deep under the bridge, but I watched as the raftmen dipped their poles to the end and leaned on them to push off the bottom, and those poles are about 3m long. So just more hyperbole in a country rife with it. It doesn’t pay to take anything much literally here in China, I’ve found.

We were nicely sunburned and overheated by the time we got back to town and had to flake out in the air-conditioning for a couple of hours (we normally never pay for rooms with air-conditioning but it was all that had been available and we were grateful for it at that moment). We went out again in the late afternoon with the aim of seeing the Great Banyan Tree and Moon Hill (a natural stone arch) but had no luck - just as we got to the site of the tree a few kilometres from town a gigantic rainstorm began. We waited out the storm under an awning (more or less pointless, we were already soaked to the skin). My cheap shoes from Beijing are really going to start falling apart in earnest now - they don’t do well with water.

But shoes are the least of my worries. I found out when we were nearly back to Yangshuo that my camera’s lens is broken again. I bought it used in Cape Town for more than I’d wanted to spend, and had to have it repaired four months later in Kathmandu (again, for more than I was comfortable with). This time it won’t autofocus when zoomed under 30mm, and it locks up the camera if I take a photo using manual focus. I have, effectively, a 30-85mm zoom lens that makes my camera freeze up sometimes. It makes me feel sick whenever something goes wrong with my camera. I’m afraid of how much this is going to cost me.

But it was a nice ride back to town after the rain stopped. There was a rainbow and we got to watch the rich people taking their hot-air-balloon rides over the peaks. And that night on the river we saw a cormorant fisherman on his boat, his funny-looking black birds all beady-eyed and bobbing their heads in unison with the ripples of the water. They took turns diving into the river and sometimes they’d come back with a fish in their neck-pouches that they’d retch up on to the deck. It was a quirky and strangely charming thing to watch.

Getting to Guilin from our last stop at Zhangjiajie had been interesting. We’d booked a sleeper train to Guilin from Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, but hadn’t been able to book from Zhangjiajie to Changsha ahead of time. That meant we were stuck with third-class “standing” tickets for a six-hour trip. Not a lot of fun, but I figured we could manage if we got onto the train at the head of the stampede and succeeded in claiming some space for the packs on the overhead luggage racks. Needless to say we aren’t yet skilled enough (or vicious enough) with our elbows ever to hold a place at the front of the mob, and it was with a sinking feeling that I arrived to find our carriage already packed to the roof with a seething three-dimensional jigsaw-puzzle of human flesh and wheeled suitcases. But the conductor pointed us to the next car, which was nearly empty. We had seats for the whole trip and I had the luxury of not needing to kill myself lifting the heavy packs over my head. I don’t know why the extra carriage was there, or why they didn’t take half the people from the crowded carriage next door. I’m not complaining by any means, but I’ll never understand Chinese trains.

In Changsha we had a four-hour wait until our midnight sleeper to Guilin. We spent it sitting in the big public square outside the train station. It was very boring until all the crazies came out to play. I’d been wondering where they all were, to be honest - we’d been in the country for more than a month by this time and these were the first seriously mentally ill street-people we’d seen. Given the government’s dodgy human-rights stance, I admit I’d been unable to resist certain dark suspicions of secret roundups, purges and disappearances. But the reality was less sinister - they’re all in Jintai Square in Changsha. There was the demented armless woman with a plastic-wrapped photo hung around her neck on a string showing her pre-amputation with two black leprous arms; the man with no legs pushing himself along on his stomach on a little wheeled plank, face gone the grey-brown of road dirt; the vacuous maniacally grinning man with only two fang teeth; the annoying guy who just wouldn’t quit trying to sell us a stolen mobile phone; and the nice deaf kid who came around a few times to try and sell bracelets. We liked him - it was nice to escape for a moment the burden of guilt that comes with using sign-language and hand-waving instead of speaking the local language.

We’d been spoiled on our last sleeper train. We knew it at the time and appreciated it deeply, because we knew we’d pay for it on the next trip. This was that trip, and it was no fun. The train stopped for an hour and a half before even leaving Changsha, and later for another hour. Nobody was ever sure why, either time. The neighbours were loud and never really settled down; there were too many stops during the night and an Indian-style dispute over berths at every one. Between that and the pig-man one compartment over who snored, yelled and sang in his sleep, I was in a very foul mood by morning.

We’d arrived in Guilin an hour and a half late and it was incredibly hot even at ten o’clock. It’s easy to tell that we’re getting farther south. We’ve lost 15 degrees of latitude since Beijing and it was hot there. Following the directions from the hostel we’d booked, we rode the local bus nine stops from the train station, only to find no trace of the central square we were looking for.. It took us ages to figure out where we were even with a map and the help of some friendly residents. Somehow we’d ended up 3km short of the square. I’m not sure how we managed that - should have looked for landmarks instead of counting stops, I guess.

We were on the west bank of the Lijiang River, roughly at the edge of town. It’s calm and green, lined with trees and studded with islands. Houseboats and people swimming made the water sparkle with glittering splashes. A nice place, we thought; a nice day. Maybe we’ll walk to the hostel. Mistake. Too far, packs too heavy, and way too hot. We made it about three-quarters of a kilometre along the dusty riverside paths before we gave up. We thought briefly about getting back on the same bus but it was an easy rationalization to talk ourselves into a taxi (mistake number two, as it happens - we thought it would cost only one or two yuan more than the bus but taxis are a lot more expensive in Guilin).

After all the effort to reach it, Guilin wasn’t spectacular. It’s nice, clean and quiet, but it’s on the tour-bus circuit, and the flood of older package tourists has caused a plague of overpricing that makes it hard for budget travellers to survive. Prices are high here, especially in restaurants, and the streets are constantly patrolled by boat-tour hustlers with their laminated posters. Guilin is famous for the verdant limestone peaks that poke up through the city here and there. It’s pretty and it’s fine for those same elderly bus tourists, but compared to Wulingyuan, Guilin’s little hills are worth no more than a passing glance. But it’s a clean, nice place with plenty of shops for me to replace my worn-out clothes.

There’s a central park along the shores of four small interconnected lakes, lined with footpaths, trees and statues, and at the park’s eastern end at Shan Lake stand the Sun and Moon Pagodas. These were certainly worth seeing. Tall and elegant, they’re mirror-images save that one is bright gold and the other shining silver. The golden Sun Pagoda rises from the lake and the Moon Pagoda sits on the shore. Lit at night and reflecting in the rippling water, they make a striking sight.

We spent three days in Guilin without doing very much. There hadn’t been a chance to take a rest day since leaving Beijing two weeks earlier and we were both a bit worn out. It was good to have an opportunity to catch up on my notes and writing, and to have a decent internet connection for email and uploading photos. We slept in our rickety dorm beds, two of six in a stuffy mildewy third-floor room, and spent our days sweltering in front of the fans in the café downstairs. Only toward dusk when the temperature dropped a little did we really venture out.

In such a tourist town it was harder to find cheap food, but we’ve become experts by this time and managed to find good places for steamed buns - still the best dòushābāo (sweet red-bean-paste buns) I’ve ever had - and our beloved stick-food (deep-fried here in Guangxi and not as spicy as in Hunan). The Mid-Autumn Festival is coming up soon and so moon cakes are ubiquitous in the shops - dense, heavy pastries with different fillings. They’re the perfect food for travellers. Easy, recognizable, unsurprising and very filling - you could live on a few of them a day if necessary.

Another temptation was the string of shops selling imported booze. China has made me need a drink very badly almost every day, but we hadn’t been here in the country long before I realized that I’d better start thinking of my time here as a sort of detox exercise - there’s only weak, watery beer and the vile Chinese báijiǔ or “white liquor”. Báijiǔ, although cheap, is basically kerosene and even I can’t drink it. And anyway it’s all made from rice (yes, even the beer) and so Sheryl with her rice allergy can’t partake, which is no fun. I’d like to report that I was able to refrain from drinking myself into blessed numbness due to sheer moral fortitude, but in fact I refrained out of sheer tight-fistedness. There was no way I’d pay the inflated prices the shopkeepers were demanding, no matter how much I wanted a drink. Anyway the end result was the same so I’m still claiming it as a moral victory.

As travel days go, it hadn’t been that bad getting to Zhiangjiajie. One bus and one train. Finding a place to stay wasn’t especially easy, though. A Malaysian woman we’d met in Dehang had given us the name of a hostel that she said was near the train station. Neither of us could see any hostels nearby. Asking around got us different responses. Nobody spoke any English, and our Mandarin is incomprehensible to the Chinese ear, but various hand-waving and sign-language responses told us that either that street didn’t exist or it was really far. The direction into the centre of town was fairly obvious, and so we walked for twenty minutes until Sheryl couldn’t carry her pack any longer and there was no choice but to take a taxi the rest of the way.

Neither we nor the taxi driver could find the hostel, although we were on the right street, but we hardly had any emotional attachment to the idea and stopped at another random hostel we came across. Choosing a hostel based on the fact that you happen to be in front of it isn’t always the wisest course of action, but this time we were lucky. The hostel was a multi-storey addition built onto the rooftop of another, larger apartment block. There was a garden up there with a pond and a waterwheel. One of the strangest arrangements I’ve come across, but entertaining. From the garden we could look across the city’s buildings and their spastic neon frenzy to a golden-lit pagoda on a hill.

Sheryl was having trouble with her neck and had to lie down with an ice-pack, so I ventured out into town to find food. Zhiangjiajie is a hole, but a glitzy and cheerful one. It’s full of rowdy Chinese tourists there for the many casinos and (possibly) to visit Wulingyuan. I found a sturdy, jolly woman selling stick-food and picked out our dinner, first having to convince her that I wanted it spicy. Sign-language was the order of the day - her with much eye-rolling, puffing and flapping of her hands as if her mouth was burning, and me with the thumbs-up. Everyone was delighted with the laowai wanting spicy food.

In the morning we took a short minibus ride to the Wulingyuan Scenic Area and paid the painful ¥500 admission (nearly C$80, China’s not as cheap as you’d think) and got fingerprinted. The entrance gate is at the south end of an immense, ancient river canyon. Millennia of rushing water have eaten away the sandstone bedrock to a depth of hundreds of meters, and what remains is an alien weird-scape of thousands of sculpted rock pillars, all crumbling and overgrown with vegetation. Precariously balanced layers stacked up into the sky form stalks and pinnacles, some so slender that it’s hard to imagine how they’ve survived earthquakes and storms. It looked like a bizarre otherworld - a city of stone spires or the cover of a pulp sci-fi magazine. It felt like I was looking out on another planet - or would have, if not for the familiar twisted cypress trees clinging to the flat tops and flaking sides of the rocks. They leaned out into space, warped into strange shapes by the malice of gravity.

But I got a sinking feeling when we set foot in the park and a horde of annoyingly persistent self-styled “guides” descended on us. Our Indian experience served us well in that moment - we’re wise to their tricks and we know how to shut them down quickly. But the park was swarming with people. I hadn’t realized until then that it was the weekend. There must have been a hundred giant tour groups, each led by an overbearing guide braying through a megaphone. Every one of their charges was hysterically over-excited and every single one of them was spitting, shoving, and screaming at the top of their lungs.

And that was just at the entrance. Stupidly, we decided to go up to the Huangshi (Yellow Stone) viewpoint on the closest big peak. The sign said that there were 4000 steps up, and Sheryl didn’t think she could make it so we took the cable car for ten bucks each instead. That was a mistake. Trapped in a small car with six screeching people. I couldn’t even take a picture, with my fingers in my ears. The cable-car was disconcertingly fast - only a couple of minutes to go a kilometre up to the top (And so unnecessary! I should have recognized the 4000-stair figure for typical Chinese tourism hyperbole. I counted them on the way down and there were something like 1200).

The path and the viewpoint at the top were… hell. Bedlam. Insane crushing mobs of shoving, elbowing, pushing people. We had to fight to get close to one of the railings to see the view, and when we’d reached it we had to hold on to it against the people trying to push us out of the way. I was in an increasingly murderous mood with every second that passed and was seriously beginning to regret coming. I’ve noticed from the newspapers that the Chinese government seems to take a very relaxed attitude toward natural disasters, industrial accidents, and the like that kill hundreds or thousands of citizens. After one weekend visit to a tourist attraction here, you begin to understand why - there are just so goddamn many Chinese people.

We managed to fight our way clear of the riot of black hair and elbows just in time to forestall my killing spree. Happily for the sake of my sanity, the tour-group crowds vanished just two or three terraces along the circular route around the top of the peak. Typical of organized tours, that sort of surgical-strike sightseeing, but I certainly wasn’t going to complain that they weren’t mobbing the whole path. My state of mind began - slowly - to recover under the influence of the stunning views to the north and the west. Still disappointing was the quality of light - bright, diffuse and hazy. Terrible for photography. The air was so thick that the line of peaks in the distance that we could see with our eyes registered on the camera’s sensor only as featureless white nothingness.

With rain threatening, we picked our way down the 1,200 slippery steps to the canyon floor and back to the thronged paths and worked our way up the stream of people to where a less-frequented trail branched off, until we were at last able to walk among the eerie stone pillars in peace. Under the trees the atmosphere was sweaty and tropical and the mosquitoes soon began to hover. Not having any repellent, we tried to walk briskly and leave them behind, which worked as well as you’d expect. With our heads down and barrelling forward, we must have looked like the nuclei of two insect-comets, mosquito-tails stretching out behind us.

It was getting late by that time, and we needed to find the hostel where we’d made reservations. It’s the only place to stay inside the geo-park, and we’d already paid for it, the money having been demanded when we booked through the hostel in town. We only had to find the place. I knew it was somewhere on the top of the canyon’s north wall. About a million sweaty steps later we hauled ourselves over the edge. I looked around and held up the map, but couldn’t find the hostel. I knew it had to be close, but couldn’t see it anywhere. And then I lowered the map, which I’d been holding up in front of the hostel, blocking my view. Not one of my shining moments, it must be admitted.

As much as I’ve come to loathe the Hostelling International logo as a symbol of dirty, noisy, overpriced and substandard accommodations, sometimes it’s a welcome sight. There was a problem, though: food. Not really wanting to carry a heavy pack full of food around all day, we’d decided - uncharacteristically - to bite the bullet and buy an overpriced meal or two inside the park. But there was nothing around the hostel but trees and rocks. No shops or restaurants. The hostel had a kitchen, ironically, but we had no food. Finally the manager found a couple of dusty packages of instant noodles and sold them to us at a rapacious mark-up. There wasn’t even any drinking water available, and I was very glad I’d impulsively tossed some water-purification tablets into my bag.

We spent the evening and the early hours of the night sitting at the edge of the canyon, listening to the wind and watching the little bats flickering into the nuanced indigo depths of the valley. The stone landscape looked even more bewitchingly alien at night, and when the moon rose the sandstone spires cast massive black shadows. We were awake again early in the morning to watch the sunrise light the thick haze through purple to warm ochre. The view from the northern canyon wall is spectacular at dawn. The cooler night air had filled the rift with mist and the tops of the stone fingers looked like immense floating islands.

Working our way along the top of the canyon, we came to Tian Xia Di Yi Qiao, the so-called First Bridge of the World. It’s a natural rock arch 350 meters above the ground that links the canyon wall with one of the stone pillars, over which has been laid a concrete bridge with guardrails. The rails have been encrusted with an overflowing profusion of padlocks, similar to (although much exceeding) some of the bridges we saw in Rome. Nearly all of the many thousands of locks were identical - none of them had been engraved or personalized, and all of them had been bought at a nearby stall. There was an imposing black marble sign with a message directing readers to become one with nature by putting a lock on the railing themselves. I quote the English section of the sign:

“…the lock note is the essence of humane wishes. The harmonious unity of the nature and the humanity form the highlight of the landscape of deep meaning. It is the last form of expressing our wishes. Noble and everlasting, natural and harmonious, let’s become part of the landscape.”

By hanging a bloody great obtrusive lump of metal off an even more obtrusive concrete bridge? Well, I’ve had enough demonstrations by now to prove to me that the Chinese have a very different outlook on nature than I do. It was certainly visually interesting.

The tour-groups began to show up on the path around 8:30 or 9, making life unbearable. We rode the free park bus to the Bailong elevator, hoping that there would be stairs down to the lower, eastern section. There were no stairs and we couldn’t manage to scam a free ride on the $10 elevator, so we rode back on the bus in a big circle around to the northeast section where our map had a few “natural trails” marked that headed down to the lower, eastern section of the park. We worked our way down the canyon wall and set out to find the route through to the main trail along the south part of the park. But the map must have been old, because although the rock formations were in the right places, most of the trails were nowhere to be found. We had to backtrack three or four times, but we did find a giant cave system of three low caverns filled with big bats. They weren’t at all happy to see us and fluttered manically around squeaking and dive-bombing our heads. I like bats, but the thought of rabies crossed my mind and I decided the last thing we needed was to get bitten. On the retreat from the cave we came across a pure white, eyeless millipede.

Not fancying the idea of forging a path through the tangled brush and over the steep hills, there was no other choice but to climb back up to the top of the canyon wall and ride the bus further to the east and back to the more established paths. Out of the remote areas of the park and back into tour-group territory again it was even more crowded, but we were happy to see that there were cheap food stalls - we were very hungry by that time. The crowds were really unbelievable, though - both their density and their rudeness.

Prominently displayed at the intersection of three paved paths was another big black marble sign with a list of “Tourism Etiquette Rules for Chinese Citizens” exhorting readers to exhibit “refined manners” and to refrain from, among many other things: Spitting, littering, yelling or shouting, not queuing, taking pictures of “foreign friends” without permission, sneezing into other peoples’ faces, going bare-backed in public and engaging in “feudal superstitious activities”. It was either laugh or cry at that moment, because even a cursory glance around revealed least twenty people doing each of those things with all their might.

The organized tours were all there to see the postcard view of the Emperor’s Paintbrushes, the slenderest and most tightly-clustered of the stone spires. The path continued past the formations and down out of the canyon all the way to the road that leads to the southern park gate. Bus tour groups don’t do stairs and so we had the path to ourselves once we’d left the park’s showpiece behind. There were many downward steps indeed. Our knees were aching after a couple of hours of them and we were very tired by the time we reached the bottom at mid-afternoon.

We took another of the park’s ubiquitous green free buses to the gate, hoping to find a minibus to take us to Zhiangjiajie. But asking about transport when we arrived got us nowhere fast. A long series of very confusing conversations with one person after another finally established that the gate was an entrance-gate only, not an exit. Not an exit for us, at least. Even though there were plenty of cars heading out of the park, we were told (I think) that there was no public transport on the other side. Sometimes it’s just not worth fighting about, and so we got back on the bus we’d just gotten off and took it all the way to the eastern gate by the town of Suoxi and from there eventually back to Zhangjiajiie.

I wish we’d been able to visit Wulingyuan in a different season, or even on a weekday. The brutal crowds ruined much of it for me, but I don’t for a second regret going - its fascinating geology stands out in my mind even among two years of the world’s wonders. At times, when we were alone above the crowds on the canyon wall at dawn or moonrise, or on the forest paths with the stone spires towering precariously above us, its strange, warped splendour captivated me. I would have loved to be able to hold that feeling the whole time we were there, but what beauty I was able to seize for myself was enough for me, in the end.

Huaihua, I discovered, is a nasty hole in the ground - more or less literally. The square in front of the dilapidated train station is a huge excavation surrounded by hoardings, and the noise and the dust made the place intolerable. I wanted to leave as soon as possible, but we were stuck there for three hours until our next train left.

As we stepped down onto the platform and headed for the exit, we saw a thing that will be forever branded into my consciousness as the defining moment of my experiences in China. I’ve mentioned before that China is loud. Everyone shouts here, no matter how close they’re standing to the other person. The noise level rises exponentially with the number of people involved, and I soon came to understand that the loudest person wins the conversation. So it wasn’t with surprise, but with a horrified satisfaction at the aptness of the moment, that I witnessed two people standing on the empty platform. One was a rumpled train passenger with his wheeled suitcase beside him and an apprehensive expression on his face. The other was a stocky middle-aged train official in her uniform. She stood no more than half a meter from him, and I swear to you that she had a megaphone in her hand, her amplified voice blasting through it directly into his face. He gave no sign at all that he was bothered by this, or even that he really noticed it. That’s China.

The plan had been that we’d visit two of the geo-parks in Hunan and then make our way to the provincial capital of Changsha to board a train for Guilin in Guangxi. The lack of integrated ticketing in the Chinese train system caused us problems again, in that we could only book the first of those five trains from Chengdu. The next three trains were only short hops to Jishou, Zhiangziajie and Changsha and having to take hard-seat class didn’t bother us, but from Changsha to Guilin was very long and we couldn’t face the thought of hard-seat. We needed sleeper berths. Luckily we were able to get them from Huaihua. It was for a day later than we wanted, but I wasn’t going to argue. I can’t imagine how long we’d have been stuck in Changsha if we hadn’t been able to get tickets out beforehand.

We’re definitely getting further out into the sticks now. While Sheryl stood in the ticket queue I watched with gleeful fascination as a woman with a duck in a bag pushed forward to her own counter. The burlap sack had a hole in it and the duck had poked its head and neck out, quacking away with a furious lack of dignity. It tried to make a break for it a few times, but with its feet trapped inside the bag all it could do was flop around and try to roll away, raising a huge din the whole time. He’d never get very far before the woman would push forward again and the string in her hand slid the loudly protesting duck across the tiles.

The hard-seat train to Jishou was as crowded and pushy as expected. It was hellish getting the packs up on the luggage racks, but someone almost always helps out - it’s in everyone’s best interests to get the stupid laowai out of the aisle. At least we had seats and didn’t have to stand. There’s definitely a difference between soft-seat class and hard-seat. Lots of smoking in the seats, throwing trash on the floor, and that sort of thing. We arrived in Jishou around four in the afternoon and found the bus to Dehang village easily. Everyone else on the bus were, well, peasants. It seems so rude to use that word, but it’s not meant as a slur, that’s what they were. Agricultural types. Subsistence farmers. Peasants. They were all friendly, chatty and laughing at us (which was a nice change from angry, sullen and laughing at us). The trip to Dehang was less than an hour, along the river past rice paddies in gorgeous yellow light and slowly turning waterwheels used for irrigation.

Dehang is impossibly charming. The people are very relaxed, very friendly, and very quiet. There were a couple of token efforts at souvenir stalls but nobody really seemed to care if you bought anything. Dehang is a village of the Miao minority people. The women were very pretty and the houses were all wood with traditional pointed roofs. There were maybe a hundred houses in the village. A big stone-paved square was on one side with little alleys leading away toward the forked stream that ran through the middle of the settlement. A few short stone bridges arched over the water. Nearly everyone seemed to be engaged in making baskets or weaving on old wooden looms.

There were bushels of rice and little red peppers spread out to dry on every flat surface - every stone of the village square was covered with bamboo mats spread with rice, so roofs, balconies and bridge railings had all been pressed into service too. There were kids everywhere. So many of them! The Miao people, being a minority, are exempt from China’s infamous one-child policy and huge swarms of cute kids ran through the village. It’s funny, but I hadn’t really noticed the general absence of children in China until they suddenly appeared in numbers here.

I went off to find somewhere to stay, but I was completely useless that day. I couldn’t even find the river or a bridge to use as a landmark. Bemused, I turned matters over to Sheryl. She found us a place in a three-room wooden guesthouse overlooking the river beside an arched stone bridge. It was clean, dusty and atmospheric. I loved the smell of the wooden walls and didn’t mind at all when the building swayed whenever anyone climbed the creaky wooden stairs. The guesthouses here are all Nepali-style - you generally take your meals where you sleep. Food for Sheryl with her rice allergy might be a problem, we soon discovered. We’d kept her more or less alive in China so far but here everything was rice. All the noodles were made of rice, even. I finally wrote out the phrase “I am allergic to rice” and started showing it to people. That turned up enough yellow (wheat) noodles to get her by for the first day, but after that we’d found a little stall by the square selling our beloved Stick Food. Salty, spicy and good. Rolled up noodles, quail eggs and tofu strips. The food in Hunan and Sichuan makes me so much happier than in northern China.

Paths led out from the village along little streams through the rice paddies. Dehang rests at the bottom of a narrow valley surrounded by fantastically weird sculpted limestone crags and pillars. The streams all swarm with glittering dragonflies, damselflies and butterflies. And lots of ducks in quacking mobs of twenty or thirty at a time. Little blue-tailed kingfishers swoop down into the water and tiny crabs lurk under the rocks - the villagers catch them and cook them, lined up on bamboo skewers. It’s a nice balance between tourism infrastructure and village life - the concrete paths benefit everybody. There didn’t seem to be very many tourists, though. We kept stumbling over a whole class of Chinese art students furiously sketching the wooden houses, but there were only three or four foreigners besides us (I remember in particular Ivan, a Spaniard who had somehow managed to convince his employer to sponsor his year-long world tour).

Dehang is not a late-night sort of place. Its residents go to bed with the sun, and so there were no lights burning at all when we went for a walk late that first night. We watched the full moon rise over the limestone peaks in a violet and indigo sky. Venus peeked between two spires and followed the moon as the sky darkened to charcoal. It was unbearably beautiful. The moonlight was bright enough to read by and threw our sharp-edged shadows ahead of us as we followed the paths out away from the village, between the river and the rice fields. There wasn’t a single artificial light to be seen, and we could have been in any century at all. The village was fast asleep and we had the valley to ourselves, except for one toad who accidentally attacked my ankle.

We spent the next two days in walks among the limestone peaks and spires around the village. The walk out to Liusha Waterfall was pretty and we found derelict pedal-boats hidden in the hills nearby. Nearby, the Nine Dragon Scenic Route climbed up and through rock pools and fairy grottoes beside a roaring stream all overgrown with hanging greenery. Huge spiders with vivid stripes had strung their webs across the path and I was soon draped with sticky strands and irritated arachnids. The route ended in a cave behind a waterfall and a curtain of moss and falling water. Following my lead over some slippery rocks on the way down, Sheryl caused me a few seconds of panic when she slipped and fell into a pool. Our first thought was for her camera, naturally - flesh and bone heal but cameras don’t. It was fine, but she was soggy and unhappy. We laugh about it now. Well, I laugh about it at least.

We took a couple of walks up and out into the hills overlooking the village. The bamboo groves and the trees had grown too high for there to be much of a view but there were lots of toads and lizards. On the last day we took a big hike out of the valley away from the rice fields and up 1500 steps to the top of the peaks. Sweaty and dripping at the top, we looked down to see nothing but a hazy bank of mist. Not sure it was worth the workout but it was good to get some exercise.

The country around the village is a sweet place. The women working in the village all wear brightly-coloured pantsuits with embroidered cuffs, and ragged cotton versions of the same to work in the fields (the men all dress like slobs, the same as men everywhere you go). And the huge, emblematic conical hats are uniformly present to keep people shaded from the sun.

It was so fascinating to see the rice paddies at all stages of cultivation. The harvesting especially is interesting. Each farmer has his own techniques, but the steps are roughly the same. The standing stalks are bundled, cut and laid flat. Some farmers haul huge wooden bins out to the fields and smash the cut stalks against the inner walls to shake loose the grain. Others use pedal-powered wooden threshing machines with rotary paddles, feeding the bundles of stalks into a hopper and catching the grain as it pours out. The bundles are stood up to dry for hay and the grain is spread to dry on mats, then threshed again to remove the husks. The drying and threshing process is repeated until all the grain is husked, and the fields are flooded to make the roots of the cut stalks rot and make it easier to pull them up and replant.

Tourism has hardly affected these people. Modernity has hardly affected these people. Except for their shoes they could have been pulled from any time in the last thousand years. They don’t seem to care much about technology or have any real personal use for motor vehicles. They use steel tools, but their bins are made of wood and their baskets are woven from bamboo. It’s humbling to think that the only technological development of the last hundred years to have a real, measurable impact on their way of life has been the simple plastic hose - which saved them from the eternal, back-breaking chore of carrying water in buckets for drinking, washing and irrigation.

I loved Dehang. It would have been so easy to lose track of time and spend a week or two immersing myself in its sweet, slow pastoral life. But it wasn’t to be - we’re due in Changsha in a few short days, and our visa expires in two weeks. I was kicking myself for wasting so much time in the seething, ugly northern cities. It’s distressing, that I fell in love with China only when it was too late.

Walking around the path brought his face into view. It was more abstract than lifelike - more as if someone had carved a gigantic stone doll. Eyes, nose and mouth were in shallow relief, but loving attention had been paid to his ears, with their long, dangling earlobes. His pupils, eyebrows and lips were painted on, staggering in their sheer enormity. I could have crawled inside his ear-hole, or stood on his lower lip without being able to reach his nose. And yet, even on such a scale, it was still recognizably the Buddha, serene and smiling enigmatically, gazing out over the river. And his face was just the beginning. I looked down from the dizzying height past his shoulders to his seated lap, hands resting on his knees, and further down to his vast feet, each toenail as long as a grown man lying down. Mosses and lichens had found purchase in the crumbling stone of his twenty-storey-tall body.

We’d chosen the right day to come and visit. At the top of the cliff was a set of railings arranged to channel a queue of people toward the statue, but it was completely empty. There were no tour groups, and only a few scattered families and sightseers. That made me happy - by all reports the crowds can be appalling there, sometimes. But we hardly had any company as we made our way down the nearly vertical stone stairs beside the Buddha. It took us twenty minutes to clamber down, and, once past the shrine at his feet, just as long to climb up the other side again.

Still with some time left before the park closed, Sheryl decided we should walk a hundred kilometres across a traditional red-lacquered bridge and up a million stone steps to find a monastery temple. What with the heat and the steep stairs we were both gasping and dripping sweat when we reached the top of the hill and had to take a break and watch the monks mixing cement. Sheryl had wanted to visit the monastery because its shrine hall held a thousand terracotta statues of Buddhist sages and enlightened souls. She thought it might be a nicer version of Xi’an’s Terracotta Warriors. Not so. It was all I could do to keep from laughing when I saw them. They were lifelike statues posed in various meditating or teaching poses, all painted in the most hideously garish, lurid hues, like a colourized version of a black and white film. And they had all been captured with the most comical grimaces, and with all their flaws intact - giant drooping eyebrows, furry moles, wall-eyes and buck teeth. I couldn’t believe we’d climbed all those stairs to see something so weird, but yet so funny. Of course we couldn’t laugh or even smile - it would have been horribly disrespectful. So we walked up and down the aisles not daring to look at each other, desperately trying to hold in the laughter, with constipated expressions (not unlike those on some of the statues).

We caught the bus into Leshan proper to try and find a place to stay the night. There were only two hotels in town, as far as we could see. Two places that we could identify as hotels, that is - there might have been others. The problem in China is that a lot of buildings have lobbies that look like they could be hotels, and there are a lot of indecipherable variations on the characters that mean hotel so when wandering around looking for lodging you waste a lot of time. We took the cheaper place, which was still twice the price of a hostel. It was nice to have our own room for a change, though.

In Leshan, like most Chinese towns, life is lived in the streets and mostly after dark. The place was deserted while we were looking for a hotel and bustling when night fell. A thousand street stalls and restaurants had set up in the alleys, and we walked around awhile to try and find something that wasn’t wobbly animal bits or chicken feet. We settled on a hole in the wall serving Leshan’s version of stick-food: cook-it-yourself hot-pot. A cauldron of boiling soup is set on a gas burner on the table, and you choose from the sticks available. The ends of the bamboo skewers were stained in different colours to show the prices. A coalition of staff and locals assembled to show us how it was done. Nobody had any English and our attempts at Mandarin met with blank looks, but everyone was friendly and bossy and with lots of hand gestures we managed to figure out what is, in essence, a pretty simple operation (put the sticks in the pot, take them out when the food is cooked, and dip them in the sauce). We avoided the organs and weird things (which are the most expensive anyway) and stuck with tofu, eggs and vegetables. It was quite good - spicy, but not murderously so. After India nothing really seems spicy any more, but the further we penetrate in to Sichuan Province the less that statement holds.

We had an invitation via couchsurfing.org to stay with a nice Argentine named Nico while we were in Chengdu. It took us awhile to get to his place, though. The train had been late, and then we had to find food. Our first stop at a fast-food restaurant by the train station was a bust - no English menu and no pictures to point at. The menu in Chinese was behind the counter so there was no possibility of poring over it trying to match characters and figure out what we could order. It’s times like that when I really feel the helplessness (and humiliation) of not speaking the language - not to mention being illiterate. Our second stop was an Ajisen, a Japanese noodle-house chain that sells ramen, originally a Chinese dish, back to the Chinese. Ajisen made our life in China easier more than once.

Bus 55 took us downtown from the train station, and then I had to run around frantically looking for a toilet. I’m sure my faithful readers could live without knowing it, but stomach troubles are a huge part of travelling - especially cheap travelling, and I’ve lost count of the number of times one of us has had to find a toilet in a hurry. In this case, one of the drawbacks of a nice clean, modern downtown became immediately obvious - no streetside public toilets. I thought I’d never find one in time.

We had Nico’s street address in Chinese characters and I’d managed to find the right street on the map. The bus had gotten us close and we walked a kilometre or so from there. Of course it would have been faster and easier to take a taxi, as Nico had assumed we would, but we like this sort of challenge, and it was ¥20 saved. After coming more than a thousand kilometres by train, bus and foot, we screwed up on the last ten meters and instead of going to #3, we went to #1, unit 3. Very embarrassing.

Nico was a nice guy, based on the ten minutes we saw him. He worked late and slept late and we hardly had a chance to speak during our time in Chengdu. He had a nice apartment arranged by his company, and we used it to relax, sleep and recover from the train, and then went out at dusk for a night walk along the river. The water ran deep and quiet between its cut-stone banks, lined with narrow green parks and footpaths. People were jogging, playing Chinese chess, or sitting and drinking tea. It was calm, relaxed and charming. Small gymnasium parks were set off to one side with exercise machines painted in bright blues and yellows. People were using them too. It’s a great idea that would never work back home. People would be far too embarrassed and self-conscious to work out in public. Here in China, though, body functions are far less private.

As we walked we saw bright red sparks rising from the river and floating over the city. When we got closer we saw that they were paper lanterns - little hot-air balloons made from a paper-covered wire frame and a disk of paraffin. People would light the paraffin and the lanterns would float up slowly into the misty, sultry, still air until they caught a cross-wind high above and were swept away to the southwest. It was enchanting. The airborne fires were mirrored on both banks of the river by small piles of incense and paper set alight by small chanting groups of people. I never did discover the reason - another unfinished story among many.

On the way back to Nico’s, on the opposite side of the river, we skirted a deserted neighbourhood. Ancient single-storey houses of thin, dark wood all slumped together, their shared walls and sagging roofs rotting down into the wet ground. Tiny alleys threaded through the shambles like wormholes. It reminded me of a wasp-nest or a coral colony - some semi-random organic accretion that was nevertheless a single artefact, a single… creature. There’s no telling how old it might have been, but I’d guess that it dated from the early years of the last century. The neighbourhood was abandoned at first glance, and the outside, street-facing walls were plastered with demolition notices, but dark moving shapes and rustlings from inside made me think it would be furtively occupied until the wrecking balls began to swing. I’d have loved to explore it with camera in hand, but we never had time during daylight hours.

It was long past sunset by the time we arrived outside Nico’s building again, and a dozen food stalls had set up on the sidewalks. The air was full of the smoke from their grills and everything smelled good. We hadn’t had pleasant experiences with food in China until then, and we were wary. But we were in Sichuan Province, home of good spicy food, and that night was to mark the beginning of our love affair with southern Chinese stick-food. From then until the moment we left China we ate stick-food whenever possible. Stick-food, you ask? Well, food… on sticks. Grilled or fried, from little restaurants or food stalls or sidewalk carts. All the food is laid out pre-skewered and you point at it or assemble it yourself, depending on the place. Naturally we still had to be a little careful, because there can still be strange animal parts involved in stick food, but you can always see what you’re getting. Chengdu was our first experience, and it was salty, spicy and good. Chicken, tofu, little boiled quail eggs and potatoes. Even honeycomb-shaped slices of lotus root, starchy and stringy. The sticks were rolled in spices and barbecued over charcoal and brought over to us still smoking. We sat on plastic chairs at a folding table on the sidewalk, eating our stick-food and drinking beer from the convenience store, grinning foolishly, relaxed and - in a very welcome change - happy.

Chengdu’s star attractions, and the reason we’d come, are the giant pandas. Our first morning in the city we were up early to make it to the breeding centre outside of town - via taxi, since the buses don’t run early enough. We’d been warned to get there as quickly as possible, because the pandas fall asleep more or less immediately after their morning feeding. We arrived before 9am and still felt like we were late, but rushed through to find them as awake as pandas ever really are. They’re treated very well at the centre. The place is clean and well-maintained, and they’re given everything they need.

Pandas are darn cute, in their fuzzy, sluggish way. We saw four of them right away, chowing down on huge piles of bamboo, a big fat old one that never bothered to wake up (or even move, as far as I could see) and two young adults wrestling and doing headstands in slow motion. Of course the seven cubs were the most fun, adorably lethargic in the morning and playing with their basketballs. Playing, for baby pandas, seems to consist mostly of lying on your back with all four feet up in the air, holding a ball. If it falls off, you roll on your side and half-heartedly try to grab the ball back. If you succeed, you repeat step one. If not, you lie there until a human comes and gives it back to you. Pandas are the laziest animals in the world. The kids woke up only later, when it was time for them to go inside their house - though one, possibly in passive protest at his captivity, refused to move and made a keeper carry him like a sack of potatoes.

There were two four-week old babies at the breeding centre. They were fuzzy, but their eyes weren’t open and they couldn’t walk yet. Strange-looking creatures, but apparently two weeks earlier they’d been hideous hairless grubs - at least according to the educational film we watched. I now know far more than I ever wanted to about panda mating, reproduction and artificial insemination.

Pandas, on sober reflection, are really not a very successful species. They’re very badly suited to their environment, and many factors conspire against them in nature. Really, a vegetarian bear? They can eat 27 out of the 60 species of bamboo, but they only like six or seven of them. Their diet leaves them with a very low energy surplus. They hardly move, and apparently most of the time they’re actually too lazy for sex. The females are only in heat for one or two days each year. As well, they’re cursed with a physical reproductive issue: short penises and deep vaginas (you can thank the educational film for that knowledge). So even if they can stir themselves to mate, it’s rarely a success. Even if the mating succeeds, they can only raise one cub at a time - twins are common, but one nearly always dies. And the few that survive are plagued with nearly a 100% incidence of parasitic intestinal worms. Really, pandas are a tragic failure as a species. They’re a perfect argument against the brainless pseudoscience of the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement, and conversely, an excellent supporting example of natural selection at work blindly eliminating an unfit species. Giant pandas would have gone extinct without any help at all from humankind. It’s amazing that so much effort and money and so many tears are spent preserving them instead of more deserving species. If they weren’t cute and fuzzy nobody would give a damn about them.

There’s not a lot else to do in Chengdu, besides seeing the pandas. Nico had recommended a “traditional shopping street”, saying it was beautiful, but it turned out to be kitschy and touristy so his advice became suspect. He was right about the Green Ram temple in the west of the city. The Taoist temple was lovely and quiet, with lots of huge buildings ornately decorated with golden figures. Monks practised Tai Chi in the courtyards, and although I know that Tai Chi is ostensibly a martial art, this was the first time I’ve ever seen it used for sparring. The mock combat was still very slow and controlled. The Green Ram temple is so named for two great bronze goats flanking the entrance gate. Their verdigrised green surfaces were worn shiny in spots - visitors are meant to rub the rams’ bodies to cure any ailments in their corresponding parts. You can bet we rubbed them all over. Hey, you never know. After a year and a half of hard travel our bodies are barely functioning, and I’ll take any advantage I can get.

A lot of travel is finding ways to take care of boring, necessary, utilitarian tasks. In places where you don’t speak or read the language, this is often an adventure. Near the temple was a whole street of pharmacies. We were running low on nearly all Sheryl’s medicines, antibiotics, painkillers and whatnot. I’d have thought that, excluding traditional Eastern medicine, the language of the pharmacy would be more or less universal. So it eventually proved, although in the pharmacy we chose, all the staff fled immediately when confronted with the Latin alphabet. That was fine by me, since it let us go up and down the aisles of glass cases looking for the right names ourselves, with reasonable success.

We’d finally learned our lesson about getting around in China, and had booked train tickets leaving Chengdu as soon as we arrived, before leaving the station. It was a gamble, of course - we had to guess how much time we’d want in the city, and wouldn’t be able to extend our stay if we wanted to, but it was clearly the only way to go about it. We guessed right, and had enough time to take an overnight trip to Leshan to see the world’s biggest seated Buddha statue as we’d planned, and then had an afternoon to kill before our train. We relaxed by the river, took a long walk and a long lunch and went to a pet market - happily one without so many crickets as the one in Shanghai. There were huge buckets of turtles, and goldfish scooped up into bags and sold by weight. Sheryl was happy to see a cage of demented ferrets, but my favourite was a rabbit in mid-jailbreak. He’d jumped out of his glass box into the one below, which was filled with hundreds of hamsters, madly trampling the carpet of fuzzy little balls in his bid for escape.

On the way to the train station we stopped by Nico’s to collect our bags and met his next guest - a Japanese man who’d travelled around the world by bicycle three times in eleven years. I couldn’t control my jealousy. He’s living my dream the way other people say I’m living theirs. It was an interesting moment for me, actually. I know people are jealous of my travels and confused at how it’s possible to travel for a year and a half without working, but in our case the answer is simple - we worked hard and saved hard for years, we’re spending our life savings, and we travel as cheaply as possible to make the money stretch. This man’s travels, though, clearly bespoke a different order of things. I had him pegged as an aging son of wealthy parents. When Sheryl asked him if he’d had to work at all during those eleven years, he turned up his nose in affront and said that he’d never had to work. So no fear, friends and readers. Not being independently wealthy, I’ll be back home sooner than any of us would like.

The main attraction in Xi’an is the legendary Terracotta Warriors - thousands of flowerpot soldiers lined up in ranks underground. Sounded dead boring to me. Normally I’m fascinated by archaeological apocrypha, but we’d heard a lot of disappointed reports from fellow travellers. They told us that there was only one excavation open, and though there might be thousands of the figures it wasn’t possible to see very many from the single viewing platform. Looking at all their photos, there did indeed seem to be a depressing similarity of angle and subject. Between the ¥100 admission charge and the likelihood of disappointment we both decided that it just wasn’t worth it to us - and the same went for the other sites billed as “archaeological digs” around town.

I know this will sound strange to a lot of people - why did we come all the way to China if we aren’t going to visit the important tourist sites? But that’s one big difference between a two-week vacation and long-term travel. When you’re on the road for so long you learn to be ruthless in distinguishing the things that are going to be worth the effort and the money from the things that aren’t. You can’t do everything in any place you visit, just like you can’t visit every place in every country. There’s a constantly shifting line beyond which the return of experiences on the investment of your time, energy and money just isn’t high enough.

Too, glamour surrounds everything you hear about - particularly in China, where hyperbole abounds. Everything is the biggest or the highest or the most famous example of its kind wherever you go, and objective truth finishes a spavined last in the race. Anything and everything is the Celestial Jade Dragon Emperor’s Whatever. A hundred stairs up a hill becomes 4,000. A little waterfall becomes the Golden Double Prosperity Pool. And anything more than a meter off the ground is Heavenly, I soon understood. Absolutely everything is Celestial Jade Dragons. The Chinese use the word dragon like we use the word the. So even after only a couple of weeks in the country we’d learned to be sceptical about the reputation surrounding tourist attractions - particularly the famous ones. I’ve been let down too often. Twenty times bitten, twenty-first time shy… as they say. Or maybe I’ve just seen so many of the world’s wonders that I’ve begun to rank them one against the other.

In any case, we decided against the Terracotta Warriors, opting instead to hire bicycles for cheap from the hostel and make our own DIY budget tour, as we almost always do. Traffic was very heavy and the air was grey and caustic, but we’re beginning to get the hang of Chinese roads. The Drum and Bell Towers looked interesting, even stranded in the eye of a churning traffic whirlpool, but their admission prices were out of reach too. Looking for something free, we parked the bikes at the edge of the historic Muslim Quarter and explored the thronged maze of twisting alleys on foot. The crowds were crushingly thick and the narrow streets were choked with markets, vendors and food stalls. I use the term food in an emphatically loose sense. The stalls were overflowing with strange things on sticks or dripping from pots - grey, nasty, weird stuff I wouldn’t touch even after months in India and Japan.

I’ve been wondering for some time now what happens to meat in China. The Chinese gleefully consume fat, cartilage, eyeballs, bones, organs, skin, beaks, exoskeletons and heads, not to mention anything else unidentifiably slimy, wobbly, crunchy or oozing. What happens to the actual muscle tissue? It never showed up on my plate, I can tell you that. Chicken feet are beginning to seem comfortingly familiar.

The Quarter’s Great Mosque was an interesting architectural hybrid of traditional mosque and pagoda - supposedly camouflaged to try and spare it during one of the country’s many purges of minorities. We didn’t go in - yet again, the price was too high. Besides, mosques tend to be big empty spaces and we could see most of it from the gate. The Muslim Quarter was beginning was beginning to make me uncomfortable by that point anyway. The combination of the natural Chinese fractiousness with the subordinate role of women in Islam does not seem to be a positive one. We saw a man beating a woman, off down a side-street. People stepped around them to either side, unconcerned as he worked her over backhand and forehand. Later we saw another man go after another woman with a brick in his hand. At least people stopped him. This took away what little charm the Muslim Quarter possessed.

We rode down to the main tourist attraction of Xi’an proper, the Big Goose Pagoda. I’m still not sure why it’s called the Big Goose Pagoda. It’s certainly a pagoda - roof piled upon roof, narrowing as it went up. And it’s unquestionably big - a scowling pile of concrete that despite its narrow shape somehow gave the impression of lumpish squatness. But… goose? No idea. Maybe because the ugly thing was the same dirty grey as the thick air. Squinting at it would make it vanish, perfectly invisible against the exhaust of a million engines free of oppressive catalytic converters. We’d really come to see the dancing-fountain show, but the pools and jets were dry and empty. Come back at eight o’clock, we were told. Water show tonight. There was no way in hell I was going to pay money to go inside that glooming miscreation, so we took a turn around the souvenir shops bordering its wide square before beginning the laborious and dangerous ten-minute process of crossing the road back to the bikes.

After dusk that night we rode back down to the Pagoda, accompanied by an amiable Spaniard named Julian who’d worn himself out on his own rented bike that day, fighting traffic just like we had. No one was happier than I was to find that the wide roads of Xi’an were a different place at night. The grimy humid air had cooled to a misty dampness that haloed the streetlights. The traffic had lightened and we could ride as fast as we wanted - which, as always for me, was as fast as I could. I miss my bikes more than almost anything. It felt so good to ride again, even on a rented junk bike with stripped gears. Jiefang-lu is lined with huge arching trees and separated bus lanes. It might be the only good cycling road in the city, but it is a good one and I pedalled my heart out, passing all the other bikes and scooters. Lots of electric scooters in Xi’an, I noticed as I rode - a very good development that unfortunately hasn’t yet reached Beijing and Shanghai.

There were huge crowds at the Pagoda. The building itself wasn’t any prettier by night - just yellow and ugly instead of grey and ugly - but the fountain show was good tacky fun. Hundreds of water-jets cycling through primary colours were choreographed to clichéd and pompous Western marches. I nearly died laughing when the water began to spring up to the notes of the Liberty Bell by John Philip Sousa - too many years of Monty Python have left me completely unable to take that piece seriously. People of all ages were running through the fountains, getting soaked and shrieking happily.

The crowd was surprisingly well-behaved at first, sitting on a waist-high wall with people standing behind. A nice group of kids made sure the three of us could see. Then a pushy old woman stood up on the wall. Chinese people seem never to be more than a few seconds from turning into a mob, so that set off a wave of standing and shoving. At home, there’s a marked difference between generations in terms of courtesy and consideration for others. But whereas in the West we’re used to polite old people and loutish teenagers, here the older the person the ruder they are - especially the old women. We hadn’t been able to see a thing after the first ten minutes, so I was feeling angry all over again by the time the music died down. But we hung around after the shoving horde had elbowed and bickered its way off across the square, and then the music and the water started up again. The impatient crowd had been tricked into leaving at the intermission and the second half of the show was just for us and a couple of dozen other mellow people, all of us grinning at each other in triumph.

The last of Xi’an’s sights was the old city wall. Xi’an’s old city was huge in its day, and there are 14 kilometres of wall. We didn’t have the inclination to walk all fourteen - or the time, either, we had a train to Chengdu that evening. We had time for a couple of hours, though, and so we climbed a rickety, swaying steel ladder-staircase to the top. Xi’an’s walls are as wide as a Beijing road. You can rent bicycles or golf-carts to ride along the top of the wall, or be driven in a little electric train. We walked. There’s so much space on top of the wall and so few people bother with it that we were completely alone most of the time - the first time, in fact, that we haven’t been crowded and pushed since that other Wall north of Beijing. This wall was far less interesting, though. It had been completely, immaculately restored and had no character at all. And it was so wide that unless we hung out over the edge we couldn’t tell we were walking atop a wall at all. It was blessedly quiet, though, and we stayed up there until we were forced down by rain.

The last hour or two were taken up by Sheryl’s fevered and ultimately fruitless search for Magnum ice-cream bars. We don’t have them at home, and when she discovered them in Europe for the first time it was as if she’d found her calling. Allergic to rice and finicky about food at the best of times, she’s had great difficulty eating in Asia. In China especially, home of Weird Gross Food, her beloved Magnum bars have formed the main part of her diet. She’d been overjoyed to find them in Shanghai and then in Beijing, seizing on them as a means to avoid starvation. But as I can now testify, having looking in every freezer in the city, there are none in Xi’an. Sheryl now looks forward to hunger pangs and withdrawal symptoms.

Having had to run for the train out of Beijing, we made sure to be at the station in plenty of time. In fact we were in the first fifty people waiting at the gate. And waiting. And waiting. The delay was no fun. Whenever the clock on the display screen approached the train’s latest projected arrival time the numbers flashed forward another fifteen minutes. The train was an hour and a half late - a first for us in China. It was infuriating because we were perfectly sure that the controllers knew exactly where the train was and exactly when it would arrive, but strung it along in tiny increments so the crowd wouldn’t get too impatient. It didn’t work. At every false alarm the line crushed forward, and it was snatch up our packs again and crush forward with them or else be trampled.

I say it was a line, but that’s only courtesy. It was a line because it was constrained by a row of seats on one side and a wall on the other. Enterprising people had formed a second “line” starting at the gate and angling into the adjacent row, ready to shove in with elbows and wheeled suitcases flying as soon as the gate was unlocked.

It was so boring, sitting there on our packs with our chins in our hands, not daring to open the bags and take out books or journals for fear that the crowd would surge forward again without warning. Country people watched us vacant-eyed and with food falling from their open mouths, like we were television. We were desperate enough to try out on a pair of old ladies some conversational openers from a phrasebook I’d found (I only resort to playing the buffoon for the locals in the throes of the most utter boredom). It surely entertained them endlessly, chortling at our pronunciation, then leafing through the book and snickering at the translations. Lucky thing for them that we did talk to them, since our phrasebook-pointing exchange led them to ask (by pointing at the phrasebook) where we were going. We said Chengdu, they snatched our tickets, compared them with the screen above our gate, and said something in Mandarin that I suspect translated to oh shit. They’d been waiting all that time in the wrong line. The last we saw of them, they were climbing over rows of seats and pushing through the crowd, hauling a huge wheeled suitcase in each hand, trying to get to the right gate before their train left.

We felt good - if somewhat bemused - about our random act of accidental kindness, but our only source of entertainment had now vanished. The only thing that kept us sane were the overhead screens with their animated shorts of a rude frog and his purple hippo sidekick. These moralistic sixty-second pieces invariably show the Frog and the Hippo committing some act of littering, theft, public rowdiness, vandalism, spitting, drunk driving or leaving the toilet stall in a mess. Each one ends with the Frog receiving his well-deserved comeuppance through the unavoidable consequences of his rude and antisocial behaviour. Their unsubtle message is meant to inspire the public with the spirit of politeness and civility, but apparently they think that just watching the Frog absolves them from any need to actually be polite and civil. The only effect of the ads seems to be that the Chinese eat more frogs to punish them for their rudeness.

The train finally did arrive, and we fought our way onto it in the way that was becoming distressingly normal to us. The conductor at the door to our carriage took our tickets (last, although we got there first - this too is becoming normal) and gave us plastic tokens with compartment and berth numbers painted in flaking gold. We weren’t vigorous enough with our elbows and all the luggage space was gone by the time we found our berths. I had to haul the packs up the ladders to the roof of the car, breaking my neck three or four times, and wedge them by our feet.

Sweating, bruised and in foul temper, I was nevertheless happy to have our first sleeper berths in China - at least, until I saw the state of mine. Some previous occupant - who clearly hadn’t learned anything from Rude Frog and Hippo - had been eating a big bag of McDonald’s slop. Not content to leave the trash scattered all over the bed, he’d apparently rubbed the disgusting shit all over his body and then rolled around in the bedding, leaving it coated in reeking grease and the pillow felted with slimy black hair.

I hate McDonald’s at the best of times. I haven’t set foot in one for many years. But no matter where we go they’re impossible to escape - insultingly omnipresent in every major city in the world. But despite the temptation of their familiarity and the consistently vile, alien things that wind up on our plates on a daily basis, the number of times we’ve fallen so low as to eat at a McDonald’s on this trip (or any other American fast-food chain, for that matter) is exactly zero. It’s amazing what you’ll eat when the alternative is McDonald’s.

I couldn’t deal with the nauseous reek. I just rolled the whole stinking mess into a ball and stuffed it into a crack in the luggage rack across the corridor. I slept (or tried to sleep) on the bare mattress under my own sheet with a sweater for a pillow, missing Indian trains and wondering for the ten-thousandth time why I was in China.

In another instance of the inversion of expectations China’s been tossing my way, the bus terminal ran like clockwork - as opposed to the utter chaos of boarding any train here. Tickets in hand, we approached the turnstiles in the waiting room. Each turnstile was numbered and I saw quickly that the one mysterious number on our tickets must correspond to a turnstile, just like an airport departure gate. The woman at the turnstile checked our tickets and then called someone to escort us to the right bus. We were on the bus in a blur of efficient, polite service. It was such a contrast to the trains that it made my head spin - especially given all the horror stories we’d heard about Chinese buses from other travellers.

The bus was old but comfortable and nearly empty. It took ages to get out of the city. Traffic was very heavy and we crawled past one of Beijing’s massive ring roads after another. For some reason the bus got stopped by the police for half an hour. They were arguing over the presence, absence or content of various papers, as far as I could tell. At one point both the driver and the conductor were locked in the back of the police car. No one seemed especially concerned about any of it, though, and eventually they got back on board and we were moving again. We never did find out what it was all about - just one more little unfinished story among many on our travels.

What with all the police delays and a road-construction traffic jam the trip took closer to four and a half hours instead of the three we were expecting, but we had a very welcome surprise when the conductor, who knew we were going to Jinshanling, motioned us to stay in our seats until after Gubeiko. They dropped us off right at the highway exit for the road to Jinshanling! Sure, there was a friend of the conductor’s waiting with his van and suddenly that last-second phone call of his made more sense, but it was only four kilometres to the entrance and we didn’t have to take the ¥20 ride. We did though, since time was getting tight and we didn’t have an extra hour to spend walking.

That same logic made us decide to take the cable car from the entrance up to the wall itself rather than follow the winding path up the hills for another hour. We probably would have taken it anyway - we like cable cars. It was a dodgy, rickety contraption but the view as it lifted us above the crest of the hill was magnificent. The Wall stretched away into the hazy distance, draped sinuously over the old green broken-backed hills like the spine of a world-sized snake, with collapsing square watchtowers studding its length at each crest.

It was an exhilaratingly tough hike along the top of the wall for ten kilometres from Jinshanling to Simatai. The old yellow bricks underfoot were crumbling and ruined and overgrown with weeds, and the footing was precarious - even dangerous in places. Huge, steep climbs up and down had us clinging with fingers and toes to the broken stone and hoping it wouldn’t collapse entirely. Every time I reached the top of a stair or turned a corner I stopped, overcome again by the air of desolate and windswept antiquity.

As we hiked we pretended we were Mongol warriors invading China. In truth, though, the invasion was already a success. A veritable horde of eight or ten weatherbeaten Mongolian women were waiting at the top of the cable car to attach themselves like leeches to the tourists and follow them for hours along the Wall as unctuous and overfriendly “tour guides”. I’d read reports about them from unwary previous hikers and so I knew that somewhere around the two-hour mark, now best friends with their unwilling charges, they’d unleash the sob-story, reveal the laminated photos of their thirty starving children and refuse to go away until they were paid off for their “guide services”. Not wanting any part of that, Sheryl and I had decided beforehand that we spoke only Icelandic and replied to any overtures with “nó yngleske”, so they left us alone in favour of easier prey.

We’d somehow gotten stuck among a group of a dozen other tourists who’d come up at the same time. We tried everything to get away from them - slowing down or speeding up strategically - but the Wall was too narrow and we couldn’t lose them. It was a mixed blessing, though - they were occupying the Mongolian women, who were being real pests, by the sound of things. Their nasal, wheedling voices scratched away at our ears no matter how much distance we put between us and them. I speculated that since the Wall had been built precisely to keep out their distant ancestors, they were now answering some need from deep in their tribal memory by spending all their time on top of it.

It was difficult walking. The sun was very hot and my backpack full of food and water was heavy. I suppose we could have done without carrying all that water - every watchtower for the first few kilometres had someone with a Styrofoam cooler selling coldcokewaterbeer! The farther along we got, the lower the price fell and the more desperate were the sales pitches. Hell of a way to make a living. You can call me a bastard for not supporting the grassroots economy, but since I was carrying all that heavy water I was damned if I’d buy any - cold or not.

Halfway along the Wall to Simatai the hawkers disappeared and the Mongolian women made their extortion attempts and then peeled off on various side trails back to Jinshanling. We discovered the reason shortly afterward when we came on a work crew restoring the Wall. They were working from the direction of Simatai to Jinshanling and so all of the Wall for the rest of our trek had been completely rebuilt. Replaced, it would be more accurate to say. The whole top third of the Wall had been stripped and rebuilt with completely different bricks - sharp-edged pale grey with black mortar. All the crenellations had been sheared off and replaced with low ledges that did no more than hint at the Wall’s former shape. The visual contrast with the warm, yellow, crumbling old section was shocking. It looked like it had been built yesterday - another tragic restoration job of the sort that was becoming all too familiar to us. The Chinese just can’t stand for their ancient historical sites to look so disgracefully old and disreputable.

The rest of the walk to Simatai was much less interesting than the first half. I admit to some cynical amusement when we turned the first corner after passing the restoration crew and realized that they were laying the new courses of stone directly on top of the older layers without making any attempt to brace up the fragile, crumbling old bricks. The lower, unrestored two-thirds was already beginning to buckle and bulge out to the sides under the heavy weight of the new stonework. I give it ten years before these sections of the Wall collapse into rubble. By the time anyone reads this, the restoration will probably be completed all the way to Jinshanling and all that wonderful atmosphere will have been erased by a shoddy contemporary imitation. I feel very lucky to have seen it when I did.

We arrived on the stretch of the Wall above Simatai village around five o’clock, but weren’t quite ready to quit. We knew there was another cable-car station a few kilometres ahead that ran down to Simatai, so we headed there along the scrubby side trails beside the Wall. We saw the cars stop running for the day as we walked. On a hunch we continued to the top station, thinking that there might be a trail down to the village, but no such luck - the ancient, off-duty attendant we found (who we inadvertently rousted out of his cottage and whose dinner we interrupted, actually) told us in gestures that there was no walking trail and that we had to go back along the Wall. It was getting quite late at that point and we had to hurry - but that only meant that we got to see the sun go down from the Great Wall of China.

There was a hostel in Simatai and we’d made a reservation by phone from Beijing. We shouldn’t have bothered. The hostel was grotty, overpriced and nearly empty, and judging from the number of women hanging around asking “hotel? sleeping?” we could have found a homestay for half the cost. It was nice not to have to think about it after a long and tiring day, though.

We knew ahead of time that it was going to be a hassle getting back to Beijing. A trio of French girls had told us that there was a village-wide conspiracy to deny the existence of any buses, and so it proved. Everyone we spoke to - including the hostel staff - swore blind that there was no bus, or that there was a bus but it only left once a day and had already gone, or that it didn’t leave until late at night. Coincidentally, they all knew someone with a very good minibus taxi who could take us to a place where there would be lots of other minibus taxis that could take us to Miyun, from which we could catch a bus back to Beijing. Honestly.

The other two Westerners staying at the hostel fell for it and paid something like ¥70 each to be taken to this mystery location, where I’m sure they were gouged into a three-figure price tag by the only taxi there, all just to get to Miyun. We told them to wait, that they were being taken, but they wouldn’t listen. I wonder if they ever made it back to Beijing? If they did, the probably didn’t get there any sooner than we did, and they probably had to pay upwards of ¥200 each in the end - more than CAD$30. That probably doesn’t sound like much but it’s sixteen or seventeen times what it should have cost. There’s no helping some people.

There was only one road out of town and we walked along it, thinking we’d flag down a Beijing-bound bus when we reached the highway. It was a nice walk through friendly little hamlets and fields of lavender and marigolds under a rare, deep blue sky. After three kilometres we saw a sign telling us that it would be eight more to the highway, so we turned back and reached Simatai just in time to hop on a green bus directly to Miyun. That cost us the horrifying sum of ¥4 each, and when we caught the 980 back to Beijing that was another ¥8 each. Score one victory. There are these precious moments, sometimes, when I really do feel like a savvy world traveller.