Gampei! Drinking with the Chinese

Rise at 9am to purchase the ferry tickets and find breakfast on the streets. This is successful and a tempting coffee at MaccyDee's rounds off an enjoyable morning. The rest of the day is spent trying in vain to find an English bookshop and checking out of our hotel which proves unexpectedly expensive. We are charged an extra 50% for staying in our room after 12pm (at least we had a rest...) and I have to pay another £2 for a peppermint mouthspray which was in our room and I thought was free. Ripped off and fingers burning I change my mind about the friendly Chinese and see their sweet helpful little smiles as they present our bill to us as antagonistic...

At the ferry port after some rushed shopping and a KFC, we meet a french girl, Clare, who gains our respect for having travelled on her own for 10 months around India and China. She is remarkably non-mad for a lone traveller and we enjoy our first conversation with a third party not involving the sentence "Hello, can I practise my English?" for a good four or five days. Unfortunately she is not on our boat so we can't continue the conversation, but we sit and chat to her while we wait, soaked in sweat after running to get here and sipping cool beers. She tells us that many travellers go downstream on the Yangtze since this means they spend less time on the boat. Perhaps this explains why we have seen so few Westerners on our upstream route.

The boat is basic but okay. We sit at the front, have our first glimpse of a clear night sky and enjoy some beers in the breeze and the moonlight. We end up having a particularly deep but enlightening conversation about home, and life until midnight comes around and beds beckon.

Saturday 12th July

Our overriding first impression of Yueyang as we berth is of a weary fishing port. The walkway pontoons are shrouded in a damp fog and it is drizzling. We console ourselves with a big breakfast of dumplings and noodles at a restaurant on the seafront. A young girl working there surprises us with remarkable English and comes over to tell us, without being asked, how to get to the station. This is the kind of helpful Chinese we like. Getting to the station is clearly documented in our guide book anyway but perhaps we look lost and bedraggled. Either that or our beards are a cry for help.

However, she is able to take us to a back-street ferry ticket office which seems a little dodgy but where we book our onward tickets to Chongquing. Writing out the Chinese request for these tickets draws our largest crowd yet, all fascinated as I laboriously copy symbols they recognise instantly. We consider passing a hat round for spare change and paying for our trip that way but don't think we could stick the attention. The paper is passed around confusingly by the ticket man and his card-playing mates and when we hand over £40 each for the four day journey I just hope that the whole thing is legitimate. I get the distinct feeling we've come in through the back door and that it might just slam shut in our faces.

Anyway, feeling confident now we have our passage out of Yueyang assured, we are free to escape its confines and head to our real destination, Changsha and finally, tomorrow, Shaoshan, the birthplace of Chairman Mao. Quite why we seek the insignificant birthplace of a man whose ideas, while revolutionary, probably did more harm than good for the people of China, I never quite understand. It was Mao who instigated the Cultural Revolution, a period of four years in Chinese history from 1966 to 1970 during which all physical reminders of China's 'feudal', 'exploitative' and 'capitalist' past including temples, monuments and works of art were ruthlessly destroyed at the hands of the so-called 'Red Guard'. Schools, universities and monasteries were shut down and academics and artists were dismissed, killed or sent to hard-labour in the countryside. Mao was, it has to be said, a very unpleasant dictator - although inexplicably even after his death he is still raised to near God-like status in the minds of many Chinese people. Nevertheless, Shaoshan is our destination and a bus takes us to the station where we are in for another close encounter with the Chinese.

We barge our way into the ticket office and identify the appropriate queue by a series of mumblings, pointings and stabbing at the book. We are interrupted by a girl who speaks English and says she can help us buy our tickets. Expecting this to be an innocent offer to help translate for us, we are slightly taken aback when the girl ushers us outside - away from the gaze of the PSB and the sure sign of a scam - where her boyfriend produces two appropriate tickets and some pieces of paper. All well and good except she demands we pay 120 Y for the tickets and even to a foreign eye, printed on each ticket it blatantly says 14 Y. After a few trialling minutes standing in the rain, struggling to overcome a strange embarrassment which seems to prevent us walking away from these people obviously ripping us off and buying pucker tickets for ourselves, we manage to get her to drop to 50 Y for both tickets. This is just slightly more tempting than going back to queue for ourselves, so we take the tickets, refuse her bizarre offer to eat with them - no doubt more ripping off was intended - and run for the waiting train.

Hard seat is everything we have expected : scabby, smelly, full of smoke, noise and spittle. However, we do actually find seats and the journey passes reasonably quickly once we begin. In Changsha we find the "Railway Hotel" to be the most convenient, having as it does a main entrance leading onto the platform. We take a large triple room because it is oddly cheaper than a smaller double room - the logic escapes us too - and after dumping the bags head into town. We have some errands to run like changing money, buying train tickets for tomorrow and finding some English books to help maintain our sanity on the four day ferry trip. Walking towards the centre along a long straight road, we choose a reasonable looking restaurant and go in for lunch. As usual our timing is impeccable, we have missed the Chinese lunch time (whenever that is) and disturb at least eight waitresses from their own lunches. However, all eight are determined to play some role in the preparation of our table so we are instantly the focus of a whirl of activity.

The service here could be described as either sharp or tremendously inefficient, depending on your viewpoint. We make fools of ourselves ordering in Chinese and then discover the only other customer in the place speaks good English and could have helped us. He is eating a meal with his mother-in-law and her mother and, incredibly, he has not yet been eaten alive or even had his eyebrows singed by their dragon breath. It is clear that under such extreme conditions he has achieved such a calm state only thanks to the three bottles of beer which decorate his table.

The food is plentiful, if a little bonier and less hot than our usual choices. As we proceed, our friend, obviously keen to escape from his terrible company, comes over to speak to us and offer us beers. We are at first difficult to persuade. 'Beers at lunchtime are never a good idea,' we claim, filled with a kind of idealistic sobriety uncharacteristic of us. But this man is persistent and claims he, and the rest of the Chinese population, will all be mortally offended if we do not accept his willing hospitality.

Not wishing to anger a whole nation, particularly one full of 1.2 billion hot-tempered Chinese, we give in and accept a beer each. We understand about one word in three of the ensuing English ramblings but the gist is that he is filled with an enormous happiness because his mother-in-law is coming to his home city of Canton to stay with him and his wife. We can't quite understand his emotions - he must surely be the only exception in a world full of men programmed to hate their mother-in-laws. Anyway, he claims it is the greatest honour for him to share his happiness and buying our drinks is a matter of pride because, he says, we probably have more money than him. Since his business is exporting leather-goods in Canton, this qualification is somewhat dubious but nevertheless we accept his hospitality. What follows is a slow and necessarily painful spiral into chaos.

After an hour we make our excuses to leave but he is having none of it and returns from the bar with a large bottle of Cognac. His various motherly relations tootle off to have a sleep somewhere and he invites us to 'drink brandy and talk politics'. Questioning our ability to do the former and definitely knowing we can't do the latter, Llew and I formulate a failsafe plan to get us out of this man's fatal grip. It is quite simply to humour him, drink him methodically under the table and then make a hasty retreat once he can no longer walk. There is no plan B. We learn the Chinese for Bottoms Up! - Gampei! - and call the shots on knocking back half tumblers of this actually quite pleasant brandy.

We listen to his tortured English, nodding when it seems appropriate, as he proceeds to say very worthy things about the political-economic differences between China and Britain. I fail to understand the finer points of his argument, lost as they are in the slurred, cotton wool of his brain before even reaching my ears. Basically he seems to be very friendly but bitterly jealous of us and our freedom. Fair enough.

Our plan goes remarkably well, although it does call for us to consume a foolish quantity of brandy. When the bottle is finally empty, after many, many Gampei's and our friend begins pulling other customers off their chairs and talking of karaoke, we decide it is time to leave. We bid him a testy goodbye and make a run for it. If he is not arrested by the PSB tonight he will surely be eaten alive by his mother-in-law when she wakes up.

The plan may have worked but it is now 5pm and we are no longer in any fit state to be running errands. We eventually find solace in a restaurant called "John's Cafeo which has a string quartet playing and serves sobering coffee. We stay forever, laughing in disgust at our wasted afternoon, and whenever we finish our cups one of a huge number of hovering waitresses comes to fill up our cups. When we final stagger out at 9pm with ten or twelve cups inside us, our bodies' are spoilt for choice on intoxicant - alcohol or caffiene. The trouble is with so much caffiene inside us sleep proves to be tormented and we both live to regret the afternoon's behaviour.

I have vivid and tortuous dreams in which our "friend" turns out to be a Triad boss who hunts us down for forcing him to lose face in public in such an ugly fashion. I wake frequently to stare at the bright circle of light coming from the railway clock outside the window but always when I fall back to sleep I am in the same dream: running from the Triads. The night seems to last forever.