July 1997 Archives

An early start sees us conveyed to the airport at 7.30am after another Western breakfast Eastern style. And despite initial jokes about the reputation of Chinese airlines - holding the worlds worst safety record - we are surprised by the manner we are dealt with, which is efficient if a little surly. We seem to be sharing the plane with a host of middle-aged to elderly Hong Kongers. The food is reasonable and Chinese. I am given a final shocking insight into the Chinese mentality when an old lady sat near me spits her bones out onto the carpeted floor. It is a sad fact that despite their civilised facade, the Chinese are total animals. They really are.

We drop, literally, into Hong Kong around 12.30 with the worst landing I have ever experienced. Perhaps the horror stories about CAAC do have a grain of truth after all. Hong Kong is bright, clear, unbelievably hot and somehow looks much more inviting in the sun. Of course that could just be relative to where you've come from. Coming from China, Hong Kong seems like one big country-club for fun-loving ex-pats, an oasis of organisation on the edge of chaos. To live here you need only tolerance for the mismatch of lives and interests thriving here. Suddenly, I admire Hong Kong for what it has done with the Chinese population, apart, that is, from taming it. It has focussed their natural affinity for hard work and somehow aligned all their efforts so they pull together. Elsewhere in China everyone seems to be tugging in different directions, disharmoniously.

I like Hong Kong. It seems alive, fun and full of energy. It's like London's Square Mile but more intense and more stylish. And, that's it, it's organised and predictable. I notice, people-watching from the bus, the increased proportion of Western faces, though small, is significant. Seeing Western faces frequently in the crowds reminds me of home. Back at the flat we have a small problem getting in but it is quickly resolved and we plunge into delicious air conditioned surroundings and relax. We have just over 24 hours left to enjoy. Dinner is home-cooked fry-up, eaten while watching the sun set over the bay. Then we spend a wierd evening watching Some Mothers Do 'ave Em on TV. Llew plays endless games of minesweeper and I play the piano for hours.

Wednesday 30th and Thursday 31st July

Rise to tidying up and repacking for the very last time. We head into town for a final taste of Dim Sum. The weather is incredibly hot and sunny again. We spend the afternoon in HMV and some bookshops purchasing cheap CD's and stuff for the journey. It still hasn't sunk in that we are leaving - even on the bus to the airport. The evening sun plays on the smooth reflecting windows of the victorious skyscrapers, each a perfect, precise architectural monument to a city which can only grow upwards. I have grown fond of Hong Kong, like they said I would and it feels sad that I must now leave it, and China, behind. After all, remembering the good times, the motherland has been good to us too and the experience we have had will never be forgotten.

Now all there is to do is climb onboard a plane bound for Bangkok. Hong Kong looks like a fairy tale world of twinkling coloured lights as we reach into the clear night sky. Bangkok comes fast and we wait there for a couple of hours watching hoards of German tourists going home from Thailand. Then we are off on TG 910 bound for London and home. I sit next to a girl, Jo, who comes from Ripley and has been teaching in Hong Kong for the last year. We have an interesting time explaining what China was like - she, like many ex-pats, has only ever been to Canton which may as well be Hong Kong for all the real 'China' it displays. Jo is getting married in exactly a year (31st July 1998) at Ripley Castle. I'm invited to the wedding.

The flight passes quickly, although I get only four hours sleep. Llew sleeps like a log for six. And then, all too soon it seems, we are dropping over the Thames and home is here. It is raining and cold but still somehow the ordered calm and civilised world of London is attractive. Heathrow is no different to any other major airport in the world and yet here we feel reassured and strangely powerful. Things are possible here and not obstructed by foreign rules or regulations. The thing which strikes me most about being back in England is that people are so very polite. It is the other end of the spectrum from China's animal behaviour. People go around saying 'Sorry,' when other people bump into them. They say 'It doesn't matter, I'll wait,' and 'Mustn't grumble,' when they are clearly inconvenienced. I even find myself saying these things.

In China when the buffet trolley is wheeled along a crowded carriage, people who want to get by first spit on the floor and then clamber over seats and other passengers in an attempt to keep moving. In England, people find a spare seat and sit meekly while others apologise for being shortchanged and then continue their journey to use the sanitised toilet and the quilted toilet tissue. Which approach is better and which takes the stronger mind? My concept of politeness has been radically altered by watching the Chinese get what they want. Now I think a compromise would suit me best.

And so that's it. Back to England's green and pleasant land. To stability and a world which stays still. China is not such a bad place after all, if you can forgive it's minor frustrations. It is a world which is changing fast and may yet change the world with it. How can we ignore 1.2 billion people united in voice? Thankfully, for the moment, they are all shouting different things. Their day will come.

Home is exactly as I remembered it. Once again my world is now a smaller place, another country ticked off a long list. But I come away a slightly different person, my perspectives changed and my experiences enriched. I won't be home long. Somewhere, at the back of my mind, is the seed of a plan to, one day next year, set these travelling feet loose again.

Rise, early for us at 11am to vacate our room and have breakfast in the fiery sun out on the terrace for the last time. We head out to finish off our shopping, realising for the first time the ridiculous quantities of cloth and marble we are trying to take back to Britain. Llew picks up his outfit, neatly tailored. I buy another pair of trousers and Llew another top and some shorts in a mad rush to spend last cash reserves.

By the time we have eaten and the time has come to board our bus out, our bags are distinctly larger and heavier than when we first arrived in Dali. Our bus is just like before and we suffer the usual Chinese mentality "rush to claim seats that aren't yours". If only they could understand the word organisation, everyone would be so much better off. For some reason, although this bus is noisier, has an even less well-functioning gearbox and keeps breaking down, we actually get a better night's sleep than last time. I'm not sure if the same goes for the two American women on board who've been on the beers all afternoon and were under the impression there'd be a toilet on board. Some hope. Standard long-distance bus practise is start dehydrating yourself at least 6 hours before.

We chat to a Dutch couple and a German chap who are all a bit more relaxed. I wake up sometime in the middle of the night to find us travelling through a surreal landscape of red-sandstone. This is where they are building the new road but haven't yet finished. The road descends down the mountainside in a series of sweeping but narrow bends on what is now a barely passable building site. I look out to see the headlights illuminating a lunar-like surface with ruts I wouldn't consider driving a car through, let alone a bus full of slumbering tourists. But our driver suffers no such reservations and takes the bus slithering and lurching over the craters. Because we are going down hill and he's running a business, the engine is actually switched off to conserve petrol. So it's brake only. Interesting driving technique. There is one moment where we hit very wet mud and the driver has to use bursts of acceleration to send us skidding and sliding like some majestic ice-dance across the road.

Not everyone wakes up and I feel almost privileged to witness this: China at it's least safe.

Monday 28th July

Amazingly, we arrive on time after only 14 hours. So Happy Cafe it is for a Western breakfast in that unique Eastern style of not quite getting things right. On the way back to the Camellia, we weigh our bags on a set of roadside scales. 20kg for Llew and 23kg for me means we must do some careful optimisation if we are to get through check-in for free tomorrow. Decide to fill our handluggage with vases.

Crash at the Camellia and try to recover lost sleep. By 6pm we are ready to face China again for the last time. Kunming realises pretty quick that we have been to Dali since last we walked here since it is as two circus performers in baggy, striped, preposterous pants and tops that we make our last promenade through the warm evening streets. We find the tatty Beijing restaurant, deceptively hidden behind the stalls of a fruit market still bustling at 7.30pm.

The restaurant is cheap and the crockery is dirty. We wish we had Peter here to complain but we don't so we take China as China. We order some northern cuisine from the menu in Chinese, including Beijing Duck, squid soup and two chicken dishes. It is all remarkably tasty and we have plenty to get through. As usual we have chosen a time to eat when we are alone in the restaurant. Perhaps Chinese restaurants are always this empty. Filled to the maximum we heave our bloated bodies back for relief at the Holiday Inn followed by a last beer at the 'Cowboy'. Here we reminisce about our trip before a long and detailed discussion about marriage, of all things.

Our room is now full of Japanese travellers, sleeping under the eerie blue light of an insecticutor. I fall asleep after ten minutes of Paul Theroux. Tomorrow we leave China and it seems too soon - like an opportunity to stay longer is being wasted; like we're throwing away an investment we've made in getting to know this country and in all the fun we've already had. The frustrating moments fade, leaving only the good memories.

Sometimes though I get the feeling that it is the journey itself and the people-watching that I love the most about travelling and that the country itself just forms a varied backdrop on which our adventure is enacted.

This morning it seems our appetite for sightseeing has finally been sated. We were going to climb up the mountain today and experience great views down into the valley but a tragic lethargy has overcome us. We have saturated our desires for Chinese temples, pagodas, mountains and tourist spots. All we want to do now is what is so easy to do here in Dali, relax, lay back, eat, shop and read a good book. We have so little time left here and yet it seems to stretch before us like a new month. We have done the travelling bit and now we are stationary, it seems we must do the 'holiday' bit too. Our wish to rest is almost a reaction to the coming few days which will be exhaustively filled with our return travel by the slow, meandering route from Dali to Kunming, Kunming to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Bangkok and finally, Bangkok to home.

Today is shopping day. Yesterday was just a practice. So after a tasty lunch in the Sunshine Cafe we head for the shops. On the agenda today: clothes for us, batiks for the ladies and walking canes for Llew's dad. Haggling is half the fun and Llew and I specialise in clubbing together to buy two items from one stall-holder and trying it on for a 'bulk' discount. The shops seem to offer initial prices around about one a half times too high. General tactics seem to be offer them half what they say first and then converge one what should be about the right price. What adds to the fun is that fact that none of them speak, or claim to speak, any English at all. I purchase a complete outfit, tailored, for about £5. Okay so it's not quite my normal fashion but it's comfy, rather Chinese and kind of ethnically cool. They won't like it back home though.

Next on the list is a painting - a Chinese montage showing what feasibly could have been the gorges shrouded in mist, my most Chinese souvenir and quite special. Llew bargains hard for an ivory walking cane but can't get her to go as low as she went in practise yesterday. As we walk away we realise we were haggling (and quibbling) over 5 Y - about 40p. It's the principle which counts.

Next are some Chinese spices for Llew's 'Ken-Hom' brother. We buy bagfuls of unknown substances and kernels and come away with what should be a really interesting and smelly present - if we ever get it through customs. Trying them out later, in a cafe, we find one of the kernels has a lemony taste and if you bite into it, it leaves your mouth numb for ten minutes. Nice! Strong Yunnan coffee is the only thing to put it right.

Llew goes outfit purchasing now. Two Chinese tailor girls reckon they can make some trousers and a top up in his size in 24 hours and laugh uncontrollably when he drops his shorts to be measured. I understand part of their conversation in Chinese, which I can translate roughly for you here: '...I've never seen anything so small,' said one with a giggle. Batik shopping proves trickiest of all - there are so many to choose from. Eventually we collect a few pieces together into a rather nice selection. Then we grow tired of all this shopping and behaving like women so we head back for a cup of tea and a rest like old men instead. Our insatiable desire for reading leads us to trade in our fiction works at a local book exchange in return for far more serious titles like 'Basic Philosophy with Wittgenstein' and, slightly less tenuously, 'Riding the Iron Rooster' about rail travel in China by Paul Theroux. Both are quite likely to lull us to sleep on the long journey home.

Back at the guesthouse at 11pm, Steve is doing a guitar recital with a Frenchman. They jam together quite tunefully, although their taste is a little narrow. It is good just to sit there, watch the twinkling stars and the lanterns swaying in the breeze and feel a million miles away. Later I find out why Steve seemed so intriguing to my sixth-sense. It turns out he comes from Harrogate like me. He is 39 and has been on the road for seven years. We talk fondly of home and gradually his previously barely discernible Yorkshire accent returns quite heavily. His mum still lives on Leeds Road about 500 yards from my house and apparently she doesn't understand why her son travels so far and wide. Steve has settled in the last year and now runs a small music teaching business in Hong Kong, travelling in China regularly.

He has a 20 year old Chinese-Bai girlfriend in Dali for whom he obviously cares a lot. However, maintaining a girlfriend in China as a Westerner is extremely difficult and girlfriends are extraordinarily difficult to export. Steve has a very interesting viewpoint on China. He is far more widely travelled than either of us, clearly likes the country but has seen a side to China - the side his girlfriend lives in - which we haven't. It is the side full of the weak-minded, vulgar, nouveau-riche Chinese whose culture has been torn to shreds and bombarded by external pressures.

Although his opinion should wisely be taken with a pinch of salt, it is clear that many parts of China's society are rapidly descending into a mire of prostitution, corruption, drugs and HIV. We ourselves have seen the prominence of the late night 'barbers shops', 'gentlemen's clubs' and 'karaoke' bars. Their growth rate has been astronomical. Dali now has 25 dodgy karaoke bars with all the implications for local womens' exploitation, compared to only two last year. The government generally blames the rise in prostitution on an influx of rich Western tourists. In fact it is the increase in Chinese tourism coupled with the culture here which leads to using prostitutes as a status symbol of wealth.

It seems Chinese men treat their women with very little respect - particularly pretty ones. Girls from local rural villages support their families by working in the cities under terrible conditions. And with a population rise drastically favouring male children 145:100 at the last count, thanks to widespread female infanticide, the problem of a dominant and violent male culture looks set only to get worse. We have seen glimpses of the vulgarity of the Chinese mind-set but this gives a whole new angle on a dark and sinister China. Even the PLA (People's Liberation Army) is corrupt. They run many of the old state owned industries to pay for the defence of the country. Apparently with money, anyone can hire out a division of the army to put to their own personal use. Money is power and, in China, that means dangerous times ahead.

This morning it is raining gently again. I wish the sun would return - we have things to do. But we hit town anyway for a large Chinese lunch including a delightful dish of 'toasted goat's cheese', a local speciality which tastes a little like my socks might after a month without washing.

I am unfortunately persuaded, while eating this meal, by a street-peddling shoe-cleaner that my worn boots need repairing. Once again, I am inextricably reminded of Istanbul and the last time I got ripped off by a shoe-cleaning peddler. I am clear this time to map out the cost first and then trade my sturdy boots for a pair of ridiculous flip-flops while the guy scampers off with mine. Later they are duly returned, fixed and quite neatly patched for around £1 after a little bargaining.

Bargaining is the name of the game later when we hit the marble-vase shops in search of souvenirs. Having decided between us that purchasing policy is presents for family, girlfriends and friends as well as the dog and almost everyone else we know, we have a bit of a task on, not only to buy the presents but also to get them all home in one piece. The choice in marble alone is unbelievable. That said, we do manage to come away with some nice, if rather heavy, purchases. While in the marble district we manage to catch a glorious bitch fight in the streets. Several market traders seem to gang up on a girl who has either stolen something or insulted them. Mind you, the girl does well for herself - screaming, kicking, biting and punching - all in the name of public entertainment. Street brawls are famed in China for their ferocity and this seems no exception. It's great fun to watch until the PSB arrive to disperse the crowds. By 9pm and having shopped no more, we are ready for dinner - our now bizarrely synchronised body-clocks telling us it's time to eat.

The Star Cafe with it's "Best Brownie in Town" claim is happy to oblige and despite both our preferences for girl guides, Llew and I are not disappointed. We both manage filling meals of steak and garlic followed by two of the best brownies. We eat with two girls, Perdise an American and Kate, a Briton, who have arrived for a whistlestop tour of China from Japan where both have spent post-graduate years teaching English there. They have travelled by air so far and seem interested in our tales of ferries and trains. It is fun to off-load our array of recent anecdotes, which Llew and I can now tell in alternating sentences.

They tell us about Japan and life there. They are staying in No.5 Guesthouse and seem none to pleased when we tell them we heard there were rats in the dormitories.

A restful day it certainly is. When we rise at 11am, it is gently raining outside. Cannot believe it. It remains cloudy all day so we sit in the cafe, start with breakfast and settle in for the day. I share my toilet experience this morning with six, inch-long maggots and their long, wriggling tails. I know not what monsters they will become, only that they are making a spirited bid for freedom up the white tiled walls. This and the smell in the latrines all adds up to an experience which affects me deeply and conspires to bung up my digestive system tighter than glutinous rice knows how.

Natalie arrived here from Kunming last night and really did have the ultimate sleeper bus nightmare. She developed a terrible fever during the 14 hour trip and, like us, had no opportunity to stop and get water or even painkillers from her bag. Now the fever has passed but I pity her the experience. This morning she and a Frenchman are being taught the intricate rules of a military strategy game by an intriguing man, Steve, who has long blonde hair and bright blue eyes. He claims to have carried the game around the world twice and I do not blame him for treating it as a prized possession.

It seems a game bounded only by the imagination of a strategic mind. A traveller's treat. Still raining. And with souvenir shopping looking unattractive we sit here and play rounds and rounds of contract whist with toast and coffee on never-ending supply. Later when the air gets fuggy with dope fumes from a bunch of enlightened Aussies nearby, Llew and I move outside for a half-hearted game of chess. Amazing, I have finally found a man who plays chess less skillfully than I.

Then sit and read outside until the sky half clears. Something about the unhurried pace of life here in Dali is very refreshing and yet strangely unnerving and dangerously habit-making. We have done nothing all day. There are many long-term travellers here - a breed which I admire, respect and sometimes envy. To stand up back home and have the guts to leave behind a life you know and people you love is a sign of either total insanity or else incredible self-confidence and independence. Or conceivably, the desire to have incredible self-confidence and independence. Perhaps it is loved ones they are trying to escape from: travelling can certainly have its own therapeutic effect. Travelling alone you answer only to yourself - in a million new places you can have a million chances to be whoever you want to be to the temporary friends you meet along the way. It gives you chance to be free of old worries and look only to the future. Even so, making that initial leap must be daunting.

After being on the road for over a month now, many of my days are concluded by thinking this would be a fine life to lead if only I could somehow sustain it financially. And yet on other frustrating or exhausting days I am more likely to be dreaming of some stable existence where challenges come at me under more controllable conditions and that, more fundamentally, my next meal and sleep are guaranteed occurrences. There is, it must be said, a definite comfort to the non-nomadic life. I guess when it comes to the crunch, I'm no real long-termer. I'll settle for a brief holiday to escape the bounds of normal life, to see someone else's perspective for a change, to hone with fresh challenges my powers of reaction and ingenuity and perhaps take a small part of a different culture home with me.

Back, to a life where more important challenges are to be faced, refreshed, invigorated, with new stories to tell and most importantly, a desire to, at some stage, do it all again. Deciding that some activity is definitely called for, we head out for a late meal in town and a premature return to Chinese food which I really have become quite attached to. Llew and I sit there eating some very pleasant dishes, knocking back the beers and talking until closing time comes round at 2am. How our conversation is led, or driven, I don't know but we start with the in-depth academics of Darwinism, natural selection and Creationism and move on to role-playing and computer games until eventually, tongues loosened, we end up on one final and quite possibly boundless topic : the mysteries of women.

We ponder many questions but find no answers.

We rise late to a relaxing breakfast in the 'ethnic' Cafe-with-no-name in the gardens. Overlooking the trees and bamboo pavillions from comfy wicker chairs and sipping mango juice in the sun you could imagine yourself to be anywhere beautiful in the world - even paradise.

It is sometimes hard to believe that Dali is still China. That is until you get out and about. We hire two mountain bikes and head off in a northerly direction to see how far we can get. The scenery is rice paddies with a backdrop of mountains and a touch of humanity provided by the peasants tilling their fields. It would be refreshingly rural were it not for the noisy tractors and trucks which pound past us on the less than smooth road. We pass a huge petrol tanker which has recently crashed off the road into a paddie field and exploded. The wreckage is blackened and has left a scorched patch of rice which looks totally out of place in the near-perfect and so well-tended patches surrounding it. The accident must have left a few peasants cursing, as well as the driver dead, we imagine.

Eventually, some 25km down the road, and by now rather saddle sore, we come across a neat little village with impressive Bai architecture and wonderful backstreets with donkeys and small children screaming "hello, hello!o. The road leads down to the shores of an enormous lake. We stop at the lake side to tend our sores. The Chinese bikes are unfortunately too small and very unforgiving on these bumpy, half-cobbled streets. So we sit there, watch some fishermen mending a boat and fall asleep. By 5pm, having done little else, it is time to be making our way home. It is then we realise the true stupidity of our plan 'to see how far we can go'. On hired bikes, however far you go, you always have to go back. In our case that means another 25km. Getting back on the bikes the saddlesores are very bad indeed begin to curse the whole situation. Cycling becomes incredibly painful and we struggle back only by forcing ourselves on for fifteen minute slots and then stopping to stretch off.

Back at the ranch, a sit down and a hot bath at 'Jim's Place' is the only thing to bring us back to reality. Bizarre but very pleasant. Lying in hot water, gradually loosening up I suffer a terrible moment of home sickness and wish I were at home in a comfy bed with people who speak my language. But it soon passes.

When Llew and I walk out of the baths after a half hour soak we are weak as kittens and don't quite know how to spend the rest of the evening. We have two new room-mates which is good because Llew and I have mostly exhausted our topics of conversation and manage to communicate now by a series of grunting noises (which will come in handy back at college). Our room mates are both long distance loners. Jeff is a Chinese-American on a year out in China from University, to learn the language. Mark is a non-talkative Englishman from Taiwan. We go out for a beer and more food with Jeff but by 11pm the unprecedented exercise of the day is telling and there are yawns all round. Time for a very restful day tomorrow.

The bed is just a few inches too short to be comfortable, a bit like sleeping in a bath and by dawn my legs are painfully stiff. Sunrise over the mountains, however, as we drive along a typically mountainous path is special enough for minor discomfort to be forgotten. We roll into Dali at 9am, with bladders almost bursting with the accumulated pressure of 14 hours worth of dehydration. We dodge the touts and duck into the toilets to relieve ourselves. The bus didn't have a toilet and every time it stopped it was always moving again before you'd had chance to get your shoes on.

We decide to head for the No. 4 Guesthouse which has been recommended. We are not disappointed. It is basic but beds in quads are very cheap and there are hot water showers and washing machines. The toilets are stinking holes in the ground but that probably won't matter... Our two American friends are here also, which is a little unfortunate. The ruddy chap is in a dorm, and the journalist, now wearing a new and even louder shirt, has requested his own private room. He probably has an embarrassing genital disorder.

Dali is great. It is hot, sunny, peaceful and more people speak English here than anywhere else. There are a million and one tourist shops, stalls and street traders for souvenirs. The bubbly street life and the dark-skinned minority people here remind me in many ways of Istanbul. We have certainly come to a place where we can, fittingly, enjoy our remaining days in China. Amazingly, in one of the little streets there is a newly opened Internet cafe and for 20 Y I manage to check my mailbox in Cambridge where I find a message from Liz and we send one to Chris who ought to be able to pick it up somewhere on his way from New Zealand to Canada. It is truly amazing how close home can feel when you can reach out and touch it from a small town in the depths of China.

After a hearty breakfast we get stuck into our washing. It drys almost immediately and following a shower it is incredible how good a clean shirt, socks and undies feels after being a tramp for so long. Llew has a shave to tidy up his shaggy beard and comes out looking like a bizarre cross between Elvis and a Kung Fu hero. I am looking more and more like Noel Edmonds by the day. We spend the rest of the day wandering the streets bemused at the choice of souvenirs we now have to make.

Dali is famous for its marble, hewn locally into every imaginable shape of vase and ornament. Other shops are selling beautiful batiks and wall hangings. The prices are pretty reasonable too provided you are prepared to haggle hard. We decide to leave purchasing until nearer going home time but in the meantime have some practise at haggling and choosing what we will buy. Steaks for dinner in our continuing quest to re-educate our stomachs in the art of Western food digestion. We eat from tables out in the sunshine.

The beggars and the shoe-shine brigade are out in full force providing moments of amusement and some beautifully candid photos, which unfortunately were mislaid somewhere on the way home. And in the streets, the local Bai minority women in their coloured head-dresses peddle their silver jewellery to all and sundry. There is a distinct drug prescence too. We are approached several times by minority women who first offer jewellery but when they draw close whisper conspiratorially "Ganja, ganja, ganja", and smile a toothy grin. We have no idea if hash is legal in China but it seems remarkably prominent at times.

Dali seems to have a historical atmosphere and with it, a kind of independence from 'real' China unlike anywhere else we've seen. The surrounding area around Dali certainly has plenty to offer. Whether we'll see any of it is a different matter. Many people have said spending a couple of nights in a village called Lijang about four hours away by bus is exceptionally rewarding. However, right now, a whole week relaxing in Dali's sunshine seems incredibly tempting. We've done all our travelling now.

Llew has decided to start as he means to go on in the relaxation game with a visit to a professional masseur tonight. This one is recommended as excellent for travel worn muscles but we have heard that if you slip an extra few yuan in your pants with some of these outfits you get something more for your money. And come to think of it, Llew has been gone rather a long time. Sipping a beer as I am now, overlooking the gardens of No.4 Guesthouse as dusk falls and the lanterns sway in the breeze is the perfect way to end a day here and to begin to end our travels in China.

Our two room mates are cool - an oddly matching couple from Britain, Phil and Kirstyn. We swap stories and agree to meet them later for happy hour in the tree house bar of the guesthouse.

Rise to more Western food and feel ever so slightly ashamed at pampering ourselves. We head out to enjoy the sun and blue sky which has graced us for almost the first time on our trip. In the streets, I select and then fail to enjoy a rather novel Chinese ice-cream: corn-on-the-cob flavour with real bits of corn. Mmm. But the afternoon is successful, if a little expensive, with plane tickets to Hong Kong for our final departure in nine days time, bus tickets to Dali for tonight and at last, a successful phone call home. For dinner we celebrate by eating a local speciality 'Across-the-bridge-noodles' a famous kind of boiling soup in which you cook your own meat, vegetables and chillies. A thin layer of oil on the surface keeps the soup hot and the name comes from a wife who learned how to keep her hermit-husband's food hot when she carried it over the bridge to the island where he preferred to live in isolation. Millions of restaurants worldwide serving up cold soup could benefit from the technique.

In the cramped sleeper bus where we have a 5'10" long single bed-sized bunk to share between us, it is 8.30pm and we are still in the bus station. We thought the bus left at 6.40pm and we've been sat here with our fellow travellers since then. Perhaps Kunming's grown-up tendencies and semblance of order has given us higher expectations than we should have had. This is still China, these are still Chinese people and this is Chinese time. There are two middle-aged American travellers with us. One a ruddy loner in a red T-shirt, the other a journalist, a thin and weedy Woody Allen with bushy hair and an haiwaiian shirt. In them I see travelling spirits gone cold. They moan at the delays, raise their voices at the driver who doesn't speak English and let the situation get to them more than they realise. This is how age takes you unawares. This is the ugly vulgarity of boys grown old, trying to enjoy what they perhaps wanted and should have done twenty years ago, their tolerance and patience turned to stone along with their free spirit.

Llew and I lie back on the bunk, relax and go with the flow. Who cares if this journey gives us some hardship or takes two more hours than the twelve it should: the other Chinese passengers are not complaining. They are lucky to be on a bus at all. We use the two angry souls as fuel for our own amusement and we know by watching them handle this, we can handle it better. We've done it before and we'll do it again.

I smile out of the window at a young girl with solemn eyes and a bright smile in the bus next to ours. Even in the smelly, noisy, frustrating bus station, human moments like this are special. And then we are gone. Swept into the night like a box full of voluntary battery chickens, the bus takes its slumbering cargo down its own bumpy and tortuous route. The road to Dali is not built yet, so we're driving over the sand foundations. Chinese driver. Chinese time.

A thoroughly tortured and alternating hot and cold nights sleep gives way to a grey dawn. I brave the toilet for the first time and it proves to be an entirely unpleasant experience even without inhaling throughout. I dearly hope that yesterday's chilli is not ready for a second appearance. That would be really undesirable. What keeps me from being appalled by the journey is the breathtaking scenery outside the window.

Suddenly we have been transported to the roof of the world - a narrow cutting dipping in and out of tunnels in the side of enormous steep hillsides, every last inch of which provides for rice paddies farmed on terraces by the village communities below us in the valleys. I am amazed this limestone scenery is not more famous. It reminds me of the lake district back home but is twenty times larger, more stunning and more impressive. We are passing through real China now: villages connected only by footpaths and the occasional train. We have hot water on tap from a large wood-fuelled samovar at the end of the carriage and so we make more tea. Sitting here reading and watching the scenery flash by it could be Sunday afternoon back home.

The only minor annoyance is that every time we go into a tunnel, which is about every 30 seconds, the lights extinguish and reading becomes a tiresome challenge of chasing dark words around the page. Llew returns from the toilet looking drawn and haggard, clutching a rather out of place roll of pink toilet paper, his face wincing. Clearly yesterday's chill has made a re-appearance bringing new meaning to the eye-watering term 'red hot ring'. The rest of the journey passes without too much incident apart from when a mug of what I presume is tea is flung carelessly from a window further down the train and neatly soaks us through our open window. Almost as bad as being spat on. In Kunming, after a bus ride to challenge even the most crowded in London, we arrive at our hotel, the 'Camellia' which has cheap dormitories for travellers. We meet Natalie, a 10-month traveller about to go back to Britain to begin life as a lawyer, but in the meantime desperately enjoying the sights of the world and her own freedom. She has travelled the world alone, except for South America, and clearly loves it. Not too mad either.

Kunming is a great city. It is strangely Western, much more ordered than elsewhere (cars actually stop at traffic lights) and I guess for all these reasons is a place where other travellers conjugate. We enjoy our first Western food - burgers - for many days and like it so much we go on to have pizzas at 'Wai's Place' an almost legendary travellers hang out which is empty by the time we find it. We return to bed full, satisfied and just the slightest bit drunk on excellent Dali beer.

We dock in Chongquing, our final river destination, at 10.30am. At 6,300km long, the mighty Yangtze is the third longest river in the world and it sure feels like we've travelled a good proportion of its length over the last two weeks. Here at Chongquing, we leave the silty waters behind us and turn from them to the train to carry us onward.

But for now there are more pressing needs like breakfast: great noodle soup from boiling cast-iron pots. Then we part with Peter and friends, somewhat reluctantly because now we know we're on our own again, and head for the station. The only thing we were without while with them was freedom to do as we pleased. And I did miss that. At the station we know we have a challenge on our hands; this is the first time we've tried to purchase long-distance tickets in earnest. Our first problem is choosing which counter to go to. This soon proves academic since all of them are shut for lunch. We've done it again.

So we spend a while outside talking and being stared at until the time comes. Having dumped our bags and feeling mobile once more, we pick a long queue at random and hope for the best. Deciphering Chinese symbols we think we've seen a suitable train on the printed timetable above the kiosks: the 19:32 to Kunming. We have all the details scripted in beautiful Chinese characters dutifully copied from the book. Expecting to be turned away instantly with 'méi you' (no) we are at once surprised when our piece of paper does the trick and we are rewarded with two tickets as required. Just over £10 for a 23 hour trip. Feeling incredibly proud that in the face of all this potential confusion we have come away with exactly what we wanted within 25 minutes, we stride confidently away from the staring crowds and towards the centre of town.

One thing as a 'paleface' you can always be sure of in China is being the centre of attention. It suits us well. Centre of town turns out to be a good two miles away in the heat, but we are both glad of the exercise after four days of restless inactivity. Here we find a post office and telecoms centre, great for stamps but less useful for telephoning home since chargecards don't seem to work here. But Chongquing holds another delight: a bookshop stocking a selection of English fiction. Never missing an opportunity, we buy five hardbacks at knock down prices to read on the train. Suddenly all is roses. Avoiding the tempting KFC we head, instead, to a traditional Sichuanese restaurant. Sichuan is famed for its hot foods and extensive use of chilli. We are not disappointed. Our three dishes are, without exception very very hot with chilli-oil as their base ingredient. It is tasty but desperately painful. I try to hide my flushing face and the beads of sweat on my brow from the amused on-looking gazes of the waitresses around us. It is not as if we have not had time to get used to chilli - almost every food we have eaten here contains it - just that they use it here with such ferocity it leaves my mouth gasping for iced water. Beers actually have the same effect, as we discover, and so it is that at 6pm we stagger out onto the streets, belching painfully and just slightly merry, to do some supply shopping and hail a cab for the station.

Our train is really quite acceptable - open carriages with three tier bunks. It is clean, uncrowded and comfortable in hard sleeper, unlike hard seat hell which is probably raging only a few carriages away. We sit back, stow our bags, sip our green tea to which I am becoming strangely addicted, watch the scenery flash by and even in light of the fact we will lie here for the next 23 hours, are quite content with this travelling thing. Chongquing has been very good to us and with only ten days to go, it seems that despite it's frustrations, our experience of China is running out on us. I know I must make the most of it now, China will not stay the same for long.

The afternoon brings with it the news that the antics of yesterday caused more than just damage to the captain's pride. The boat has been damaged irreparably and we are to limp into the next port, Fengdu, at half speed to decant to a new boat. To make things worse, using our interpreters we discover the second boat has no 2nd class rooms available and instead we are given a refund and told to find another boat for ourselves.

At 4pm we leave the boat and are saved the bureaucratic trouble of trying to find another boat by as strange a group of people as you could imagine. First there is Peter, a hugely successful but now retired, 69 year old Hong Kong business man who looks not a day older than 50. He speaks Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, English and Korean and possesses an incredible and inspirational talent : people around him do anything he wants. Llew and I know a good thing when we see one so we agree to join his party, happy in the knowledge our lives will be made easy for a while. Second in the party is Patrick, a mad Chinese-Briton who seems to be part Welsh and served in the Hong Kong Royal army. He has the wackiest sense of humour I can imagine and starts discussing Welsh rugby songs with Llew. Third is a nameless Cantonese man who speaks English with a Nottinghamshire accent and used to own a Chinese restaurant in Grantham. The triplet are accompanied by three girls aged not much older than us. One seems to be a tart picked up by the restauranteur in Canton and apparently difficult to shift: he's since caught tonsillitis from her. The other two are friends of the ex-soldier and seem intent on doing as much pointless souvenir shopping as they can.

Despite their weirdness, it is fun to be with them and it is soon Peter who takes centre stage in our exploration of Fengdu, the ghost city. Very quickly after arriving we have given up the immediate prospect of finding a boat and are installed on a private tour of the city, organised on spec, with a bus and a cable car to take us up the mountain. At the top are temples to ward off the devil. We are taken past statues of mythical demons - plenty of fire and brimstone - as well as the ubiquitous Chinese tat-stalls. After passing the bridge of helplessness and the bridge of 'if you pass here you will become rich', where I trip up the steps... we are soon walking up the stairway to hell itself. Inside, the legends and myths of hell are not far removed from our own. The Chinese have 18 levels of hell, all unpleasant and portrayed in rather graphic if somewhat seedy, detail.

Finally, we are granted a meeting with Satan himself who turns out to be a rather smart looking statue in gold with a neat moustache and distinctly lacking in the horns, fangs, talons and trident departments. In fact I can't help noticing the rather ironic similarity between him and the Chinese Budda. We pay him homage anyway and walking slowly down the steps back to the living world, realisation dawns that on this trip we really have now been to hell and back. We retire to a Chinese restaurant having found our ferry departs at 8pm. Peter is on top form here too, ordering a multitude of tasty dishes and ensuring that warm beers are replaced with cold ones, dirty dishes are replaced with clean ones and the chicken dish is sent back when it proves to be too bony.

I am inspired by this man who says all those things people like me would say if only they didn't dare cause a fuss. Our dogged guide is still with us, smoothing over any problems and clearly being tipped very nicely. We end up waiting for a delayed ferry in a seedy karaoke bar. It is walking to this bar through the muddy backstreets of this lively town in the pouring rain that I suddenly see China as it really is.

There are barbers shops and old men having their hair cut, families together eating in rooms open to the street, women and babies playing in the street. The special thing is everyone is smiling, says hello and seems pleased to see us as we stroll by with our packs. For a moment we seem to be not the tourists we obviously are, but just humans like they are and a part of their lives. They're just happy to see us enjoying their country. China, despite all its problems, is about families, teamwork, living together and just getting down to life.

Karaoke is definitely something which should be outlawed. Forget censorship of the press, censorship of singing should be mandatory here. The girls, obviously well-practised, give it a try and spend hours crooning into an echoing microphone singing loud Chinese-pop. It's all a bit samey and out of tune. Llew and I only narrowly escape singing thanks to the fact they have no English words. On the ferry, when it finally arrives at 10.30pm, and after a surreal trek across wet and moonlit pontoons, it transpires there are no 2nd class rooms on this ferry either. No problem, says Peter who moves in with relentless bargaining with the Captain to get us an upgrade to uncommon 1st class accommodation for half the price. If I am anything like as active, arrogant, persuasive or inspirational as Peter is when I am 69 (not to mention still young-looking), I will be monumentally impressed.

This man is God and we now have a two berth cabin with English TV showing 'Allo 'Allo. Unbelievable. A couple more beers, a shower and then glorious sleep.

A comfortable nights sleep is ended abruptly by the ships horn, raging at 7.30am, followed by a stop in a small port until 11am. We get up and wander out for breakfast. Without a map, we find ourselves in a small shanty town on the edge of the real city streets. The roads here are mud mires but there are plenty of appetising smells and places to eat. You might imagine the East End of Victorian London to have looked like this. Children are playing in the dirt, shacks are built from corrugated iron and tarpaulins. Huge pots full of noodle soup steam over charcoal stoves.

I notice that all the Chinese are impeccably turned out - in their uniform of flannel trousers and shirts for the men and floral dresses for the women. Whatever the living conditions of these patient people, they take great pride in their appearance. We fill our stomachs with two bowls of very spicy noodle soup and come back to the ship satisfied that if the journey is to be broken with such great stops as this, our journey will fly by. Incredibly, we both manage to go back to sleep until 3pm when we finally wake in the stinking heat and prepare to move. We spend the afternoon constructing a washing line outside in the wind, eating half a huge and tasty watermelon and planning Llew's forthcoming birthday party which, like anything which reminds us of home, proves to be great fun. Remarkably we are not disturbed by our friends all day.

The scenery is beautiful and bucolic and with beers in hand we are able to relax perfectly. Everything is going swimmingly. Even the washing is drying. At 8pm we reach Yichang, a port where we collect another queue of hopeful passengers. Our cabin becomes home to two teachers who speak very rudimentary English and we communicate with them by writing sentences on paper.

Yichang is home to the existing Yangtze Dam and we have to pass through a lock of epic proportions to pass to the other, higher, side. We are courteously allowed out onto the deck to watch the elegant procedure. There is room for about eight ferries (and probably three sports halls, come to that) inside the walled boundaries of this huge lock. Insurmountable concrete blocks rise, 1984 style, to the moonlit sky above us, glistening with slime. We can reach out and touch the side as we float gently to the top. All too soon we are flung into the colossal Yangtze once more. It seems that we will pass at least some of the gorges under the cover of darkness.

Thursday 17th July

I wake at 2am to catch a moonlit glimpse of towering rocks on either side of us in a rather surreal waking dream. We are woken for real by a port stop at 6am. Outside the window is a bank of dense fog, shrouding any possible view of the gorge we must be in but soon it clears, rolling back up the gorge and leaving a patchy blue sky and some rather photogenic swathes of low-level fog against the rocky cliffs. For the next four hours we are to be held enrapt by the sheer beauty of this scenery. Rock faces and densely wooded hillsides, misty gorges stretching away on both sides, little fishing boats and houses perched precariously on cliffs. I shoot rolls and rolls of film but the lens tames the scenery, it never captures it for real.

The sights are made more impressive by the inevitability of the Yangtze Dam project which, in 2008 will flood these gauges to a height of 185m above sea level and create a lake 550km long stretching from Chongquing to Yichang. The hydro-electric power produced by the pent up energy of these waters will supply more than 20% of China's demand. More significantly for us, in four months time all tourist traffic along the Yangtze will stop as the Chinese government prepares to evacuate some 1.2 million people from the affected areas where they currently make their living. Quite where they will go is never made abundantly clear, but their fate is unfortunately likely to involve urbanisation. Whatever our views on the ethics of the project, China have made it clear we are to be the few remaining Westerners who will ever set eyes on these beautiful gorges before they are buried forever under the Yangtze's silty waters.

At 10am we are treated to an at-first alarming but then exciting incident as mid-meander, our boat lurches towards the left hand bank and sets a course for the rocky cliff with some considerable speed. Either the Captain is completely incompetent or the galley-boy has taken control for a shift. Whatever, there is the inevitable and violent jolt, followed by the sort of noise you get when four floors of passenger ferry are thrust to a standstill by large rocks. Our subsequent recovery causes a minor rockslide from the hillside and we leave some rather nasty blue paintwork on the bank.

There is first a moment of panic amongst the passengers as we all expect a rapid sinking, but the mood quickly turns to amazement and then amusement as the crew desperately try to back us up and carry on as if nothing happened. Spending a couple of days on the bank here, shipwrecked would have been quite fun and we favour our chances of survival over most of the yellow-capped Chinese tourist groups on board. At 11.30am the boat stops for five hours, enough time for real tourists to go on a smaller boat trip up the three 'lesser' gorges. How appropriate this title turns out to be, not because the scenery is unimpressive but because so many other negative factors contribute to making our decision to go and see the gorges a bad one. First, we have to fight for our seats, Chinese style, and then pay an extra 10 Y 'Protection for foreigners' which clearly goes straight into the pocket of the ticket collector. Second, the number of people on the boat and the number of tickets sold fail to match by one ticket. The Chinese operators, thinking the yellow-capped tour group are to blame, spend over an hour hunting for the missing ticket, only to find after considerable frustration that it was Llew who had not surrendered his ticket portion. Smiles all round, but these are Chinese smiles which mean 'face' has been lost.

So we head off on our bundle of laughs tour, already late and couped up in this tin box of a boat with 60 yellow-caps of the very worst breed. The internal tourist industry in China is patronised by those who can afford it: China's new up-and-coming nouveau-riche. In old China, the only way to be materially successful in life was either to be a Party hack or have contacts in the Party or in shops prepared to do you favours. What a surprise to find then, that in describing the character traits of these nouveau-riche I might feel it no over-exaggeration to use words like: smarmy, arse-lickers, cheats and liars. We've got a boat full of them and their single, fat, over-attended kids. One of the great features of our boat is a roof which slides right back to give everyone the optimum view of the gorges rising above us. Unfortunately, the Chinese do not like being in the sun and so seem intent on closing the roof to keep the sun from their eyes. Whenever it is opened some fat Chinese woman orders it closed. My impression of their nation is further damaged, beyond reprieve this time, by the plethora of bottles and packaging they throw into the waters of the very river they have come to admire. Ask any one of them what condition the Yangtze is in and they will frown and say 'vely dirty, vely dirty,' but that very same person will toss his polystyrene food box, complete with chopsticks, over the side and watch it float away without concern.

We come away extremely dispirited with the whole affair, bogged down by mid-holiday blues perhaps, but almost hating the Chinese for their intolerant and irresponsible characteristics. At 8pm, we are back on the boat and I am in the shower, washing away the troubles of an arduous day. The day is not over yet though, for just as the soap gets in my eyes there is an enormous jolt and we are surprised, though not as much as the first time, to find we have crashed again. Our boat has inexplicably struck the bank once more, this time splintering the roof off a small fishing boat moored there and coming to a halt with a judder.

Needless to say, the village community who have just lost their only fishing boat are none too pleased and a huge argument ensues by torchlight from the dark bank. We sit beached for half an hour, presumably while compensation is paid and begin to wonder just what regulations are in place for the safety of passenger ferries like ours. Then we quickly realise the clever Chinese government has devised the ultimate way to eradicate illegal and dangerous ferry operators on the Yangtze: they will simply flood them all.

Dinner is noodle packs again, the third meal in a row. Reluctantly preparing these bowls of dehydrated starch is a process of hopeful expectation followed by guaranteed dissatisfaction. They don't actually taste so bad but they come nowhere close to a proper, hearty meal. Sleep comes easy after a beer and despite a very hot sticky night, we sleep right through from 10pm to midday.

Sleep is comfortable until 9am when a cold shower wakes me up for today's ferry catching. We check-out and grab some food on the way to the port. I leave Llew with the bags eating breakfast while I trek off to do some brief supply shopping. Since we have such a long journey ahead of us, I decide to stock up, but carrying ten large bottles of beer in my arms, half a mile down a hot, dusty road proves to be a bit of a challenge. I am rewarded by a million smiling Chinese stares and all I can do is laugh and pretend I'm doing a deodorant ad for Lynx.

Our little incomprehensible friend on the 3rd floor of the backstreet ferry office has some bad news for us. His "felly engine ithe wlong[sic]" which we take to mean his ferry is inexplicably broken or else non-existent. Luckily he is prepared to refund us and apologises profusely but nothing he can say can reinstate our plans which now lie in tatters. Surprisingly unfrustrated - we've grown used to expecting the unexpected now - we catch a bus back to the other Pavillion port. Here we are lucky to get tickets on another boat leaving at 6pm tonight. It is even slightly cheaper than the first. We dump our luggage and aim to fill our afternoon at the Pavillion itself which was on our to-do list anyway. The Pavillion is another typically commercialised Chinese tourist place, consisting mostly of over-priced trinket shops and over-descriptive Chinglish. In the heat we fall asleep on benches inside the walls and while away the time that way. Later we head for a huge slap up meal which is superb.

We talk of home, day-dreaming of cool summer drinks in Cambridge, English food or rowing at sunrise - all thoughts designed by our subconscious to spirit us away from this world and keep our sanity intact. As we board the ferry I am sweating more than ever before - it really is very, very hot today but still the sun stays weakly behind its cloudy shroud.

We have decided to change our pre-planned route quite drastically once we reach Chongquing. Originally we intended to travel by train down through Guiyang, Guilin and Canton - three major cities on the route back to Hong Kong. But we are tired of cities. Tired of the dirtiness and the relentless building work. Also, the train schedule means we would get at most three days in each city - not enough time to get to see them properly. So we have changed our minds. Now we will travel by train to Kunming, Yunnan province in the south-west corner of China and then by bus to Dali, an ancient walled town and a mecca for travellers, still in Yunnan province but at the Tibetan foothills. There we can spend a week in more relaxing surroundings and meet some other travellers. Finally, to get us back in time we will fly out of Kunming to Hong Kong. It's a more expensive option but not by much and it will be far more enjoyable.

The ferry is a bit scabby but we have a sink and air-con - all the necessities. It seems pretty empty. As we set off we sit on two beds facing the window with the last of our unreplenished stock of English books and the sweat running off us in rivulets. At least now we know we can relax totally for three days. And the scenery? Reeds, flat reeds as far as the eye can see.

Doing our washing in a huge bucket on the foredeck, we bump into a young Chinese lad who speaks some English. We soon realise any thoughts we had of peace and quiet are to be nullified by this one lad who hopes to spend the next three days with us practising English. Oh thank you lord. He is nice enough, but it is late in the evening and neither of us is really in the mood for small talk. His pronunciation is terrible - "Lolls Loyce" being his most memorable phrase, leaving us puzzled for minutes in a conversation on high-class cars. Later, he returns with five student friends of his, three girls and two more lads, all travelling together on our boat. They would provide an interesting insight into Chinese student life I'm sure, if only I could keep my eyes open and concentrate on asking them profound questions.

Talking to them is made even more difficult by the need to cope with their never-ending flow of compliments for us. Flattering though it is to be constantly told we are strong, tall, handsome and beautiful, we can hardly reply. Although these students are our age, they seem remarkably innocent and immature. I guess it is the result of over-extensive censorship on everything they are told and a very careful policy to ensure children grow up slowly. The difference is very noticeable. When I ask them whether any of them have girlfriends or boyfriends, they look at their feet very shyly and then shake their heads. At University, girls and boys sleep separately in bunk dormitories of twenty or more in what must be rather worse than an extension of English boarding school-style life. I can't help feeling sorry for the lack of privacy they must endure during some of the most important years of their adult lives. However, the legal marriage age in China is 20 for women and 22 for men, so I suppose there is no rush.

Another very clear example of censorship comes when one of the girls asks us about the Tiananmen incident while reading our guide book. We read out and explain the story as it is written in our book including the rather tragic part where Chinese tanks drove through and over groups of student demonstrators. Our Chinese friends have obviously been only told a fraction of the truth since they claim there were no tanks and no deaths - only arrests. Even when we describe our personal memories of watching the tanks squash one particular demonstrator on BBC news at the time, they are unable to believe our story. In the end they agree on a compromise between the two stories but seem to have been so heavily brainwashed into thinking the Chinese news agencies publish the whole truth and nothing but the truth that they are unprepared to believe anything different. I had no idea censorship could be that effective. Llew and I hurriedly try to usher the conversation onto topics free from content we could be arrested for divulging.

Eventually, with promises to return tomorrow, they all go to bed and we collapse. We enjoy speaking to Chinese people for the stories they have got to tell, but it always seems such an effort to make conversation.

The beds here are coconut or bamboo matting and surprisingly comfortable. This morning we are headed for the docks, a convenient 100 yards away, to catch a ferry to Junshan Island which supposedly has much to offer us sightseeing chaps. On our way we are nearly bowled over by a bunch of what we now call "Sampan Lamma?" ladies - always a bad sign in China. They are trying to sell us a ride to Junshan on a small boat for 60 Y when we know the large ferry can get us there for 15 Y.

Just coming off the large boat is a one of our fellow Lau Wai's - an American who looks just as keen to see us as we are to see him. We agree to meet up later for dinner. The 45 minute journey by boat is relaxing if not very exciting. We both day dream of home in quiet contemplation. Thoughts reconciled. Junshan, like many places of particular interest in China, has fallen foul of the tourist trap. They charge us 30 Y just to get off the boat onto the island - we are the ultimate captive audience. The "attractions", a mixture of temples, statues and bizarre fairground sideshows, are all signposted in lavish Chinglish. However once away from the crowds the leafy peaks and views over the lake and tea plantations are quiet, peaceful and relaxing.

We have eaten only an ice-cream all day and kind of expected there to be somewhere to eat on the island. By 3.30pm we are pretty desperate, but no enterprising Chinese have taken advantage of the hungry crowds and the only thing on offer seems to be more ice-creams or noodle packs. These are definitely to be reserved for emergencies only so we return, hungry, to Yueyang.

We meet Matt, our American friend, for dinner. He turns out to be a Geology masters student at Michigan University and has been to Hong Kong like us and then Guilin, Guiyang and Yangshuo all on our pre-planned route. He is heading home in a couple of days. It is his first time travelling outside the States and he seems fairly naive in his habits but learning fast. He is the stereotypical loud-mouthed American, and clearly having travelled on his own he is glad of the chance to speak to other Westerners. We get a good ear-bashing from him but Llew and I were running out of things to say to each other anyway.

We pick a new restaurant and enjoy friendly service and some excellent dishes. And some less excellent ones like whole-fish stew. Nice and savoury, if a little grotesque and bony. The spicy bean curd is surprisingly good. After some more beers we retire to our room. Our grand topic of conversation for the evening is working out that using our student, commission-free travellers cheques in association with the preferential Chinese exchange rate we could actually make money changing pounds to Yuan and back again. In our slightly merry state we can't see any catch and resolve to raise a million pounds and do it regularly.

We wake at 6am no better for the experience, with mouths like rotting carpets, and force ourselves to get up. The train for Shaoshan leaves at 7am and thanks to our "friend" we have no tickets. Reality says we actually have no chance of getting to Shaoshan since queuing for tickets rarely takes less than an hour and this early morning proves to be the start of one long drawn out nightmare which we can only blame on our "friend". When 7am has come and gone without buying tickets we sit around the filthy station eating dumplings, sipping water and plagued by begging children. We are both feeling unwell - more from the coffee than the brandy I think.

The only bus that goes to Shaoshan today is the 90 Y tour bus. The local bus which should cost 9 Y doesn't go today because it's Sunday. We decide to bin Shaoshan altogether and head back to Yueyang. But we need to change money and get the tickets. On a Sunday, and for non-Chinese speaking, hungover and exhausted Brits this just seems too much of an obstacle.

We eventually persuade our hotel staff to books us tickets back to Yueyang, even though we checked out this morning. Then we walk up the main street to the Lotus hotel where money can be changed today. They also have a pleasant coffee shop where our caffiene withdrawal symptoms can be tended. Sitting in there is a big low point on our trip. I look at the tickets and establish the departure time as 12pm. So we collect our bags, go back to the station and go through to the waiting rooms for half past eleven. Only there do I discover I have made a huge error and in fact the departure is at 16.22pm - the tickets cost 12 Y.

So it becomes apparent we have another four hours to spend in Changsha, Satan's toilet. Even with the benefit of hindsight I cannot describe how bad this felt. We sit outside in the pouring rain almost crying with despair. Then, with almost deadly decisiveness we resolve to rectify our moods no matter what the cost. We go outside, get a taxi, go back to John's cafe, order a three course Western meal and pamper ourselves completely. We stay until 3.30pm drinking, this time, endless cups of cold water and slowly becoming human again. It turns out to be the best thing we've done all week.

It is a good job we have repaired our mood because when we get on board the train, the truth about hard seat reveals its ugly self. Last time, it turns out, we had it easy. This time the carriages are stuffed. Every last inch of space is packed with Chinese people and their baggage. We force our way on, lever some room for ourselves and our bags and try to prepare mentally for the prospect of two and a half hours of this. We are standing with our bags under our feet in the gap between carriages. It is so hot that I soon look like I've had a shower and everyone else seems to be spitting, smoking or shouting. At least we are head and shoulders above the crowd and can breathe a little easier. When the train moves there is a slight breeze.

The most annoying thing is the people who try to move through the crowds - supposedly looking for some space where there is none. Two and a half hours of short, fat Chinese women trampling over my feet, and digging my ribs as they barge past, does my patience no good. Often the same woman comes back and forth four or five times. I have rarely been so unpleasantly confined. We command sanity and respect by singing rousing revival hymns at the top of our voices but it is our rendition of "Alice the Camel" starting at twenty humps that really winds the Chinese up...

My horror is complete when a steward attempts to wheel a fully-laden buffet trolley through the crowds. I just can't believe it. Anyone who has ever witnessed a BR buffet trolley being wheeled along an Inter-City and seen the number of knees knocked and feet squashed will understand instantly the level of destruction and discomfort this one man manages to achieve on a train whose aisles are stuffed full of people who, for the way they are treated, may as well be heffers on a cattle train.

I cannot last one minute longer when we finally disembark and stand dazed on the empty platform at Yueyang. We wait there for a few long minutes in complete silence as the train moves off. The final straw is Llew discovering the bunch of bananas we bought for the trip has exploded all over the innards of his rucksack.

We nearly get ripped off by a taxi-driver who claims his meter is broken on the way to the cheapest hotel in town: at 70 Y a night our place of choice. The girls on the desk rebuild my faith in China. They are friendly and speak English. The nightmare is over. A relaxing cold shower and a fine meal in a nearby restaurant including lobster-like shrimps from a tank outside is all we need to bring life back. I think it is our dogged determination never to give in to frustration (oh, and the revival hymns) that keeps us going and carries us through.

I can't help but think of Liz and how much a hug would repair my mood.

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.

Breakfast is a rather repugnant vegetable stir fry with whole green chillis sold over the side at a local port. It is the best we can hope for. Llew has seen the on-board canteen serving what he referred to as sewage and I know Llew well enough to suppose that when he refuses to eat something, it must be really bad. I'd rather go hungry.

I sit writing this at the front of the boat in our viewing lounge which is pleasantly breezy and has huge leather sofas. A relaxing day reading on board is ended by a calming hour watching the darkness close softly around rural expanses of flat farmland. There are no stars, only dark clouds, but the flickering, twinkling lights of the ships and buoys ahead are beautiful. Peace and calm and time to think. This is why I have come travelling.

Back in the cabin a nasty leak from what we hope isn't the toilet upstairs has left us with a growing damp patch on our carpet and an acrid smell. And we have been joined by two business men. They seem a little annoyed at first to be sharing their presumably high status 2nd class room with two scraggy Westerners but fortunately they cannot express their feelings in English so we sink into an uneasy silence and get along just fine.

Thursday 10th July

We arrive in Wuhan early - 7.30am. We disembark and try to buy our onward tickets for Yueyang but eventually discover - having painstakingly copied out the Chinese symbols - that we must buy them tomorrow on the day of departure. Undeterred we decide to head to the Yin Feng hotel, a short walk via some filling pancakes. The hotel is clearly too stylish for us. We have ensuite bathroom, a gym somewhere downstairs and satellite TV. We head out to see a temple, one of Wuhan's scarce attractions. En route we pass through a street market which is probably more interesting and certainly more full of life. Amongst the chillis and the ridiculous vegetables are live frogs in bags, snakes, eels and chickens cooped up in cages, every now and then getting to watch one of their number having its neck wrung before being sold. But despite the background of nature at its harshest, the snacks being served up are delicious. One particular satay stall owner seems to take great delight in making the world's hottest kebabs for us to eat. We justify ourselves and elevate our status by putting them away with delight much to the amusement of the Chinese, before dashing round the corner as gracefully as possible to purchase and consume two bottles of iced water each.

Later we try an authentic (that is, basic) restaurant and order by pointing at dishes other people seem to be enjoying. This works both ways. The Sichuan chicken dish we order is excellent (and hot) but the sauteed Eel not quite so good, bringing back as it does memories of the street market. Sucking pieces of squidgy fish from its backbone will never be one of life's greatest pleasures for me, although, to be fair, it actually tastes pretty good and comes with a sauce containing whole garlic cloves. bRight up our street.

It is Isabell who wakes us today at 8.40am, twenty minutes before she promised, and finds us in no fit state to sight see. I get this sinking feeling that the relentless pace of yesterday is going to go on and on until we leave Isabell behind. It's not that we are ungrateful for her showing us round, just that her pace and unending enthusiasm for finding Llew a wife never gives us much choice in what we really want to do - which is sleep some more. At least, though, she has brought us a great dumpling breakfast.

It is not long before we are herded onto a number 1 bus and taken to see a museum of Chinese history. Overriding most of our discussions is still Llew's future choice of Chinese spouse and even Llew is getting worried now that Isabell might be serious in wanting to set him up with a good cook. I picture him shacked up with the large breasted lady from the restaurant last night and hurriedly usher the mental picture away; it's not very pretty.

After a quick lunch in the same simple place as yesterday and a further recital on the piano to satisfy Isabell's desires we go to our room to pack. Isabell insists on helping but eventually we convince her to leave. We have enjoyed her company and are grateful for it, but the whole experience has left us drained. Travelling is really about solitude, or if not solitude, then at least the freedom to choose what you do and when you do it. For me, being guided is what cheap American package tourists get and not what I really want. We wave her off, promise to write to send her some photos and then collapse for an hour, relieved we are finished.

When the cleaning lady seems to make it broadly apparent, even in incomprehensible Chinese, that we must leave, we gather our belongings and head for the port. Our taxi driver loves his horn (don't they all?) and delights in giving us a ride we'll never forget. My sarcastic laughter - designed for Llew - only drives him on and he seems to think he is impressing us with his film-style car chasing. The glint in his eye as he sends bikes and mopeds scattering makes me fear for China if she ever grows up and starts having private cars. Shaken, we arrive at the port and sit to wait for our ferry. A watermelon gathers us a large crowd and dark eyes watch us consume it. Later our "helper" from the ticket office makes a second appearance. Gossip or news of two whitemen clearly travels fast here. He invites us into his office to wait, which sounds remarkably civilised until he tells us he is a policeman. But we're not under arrest, he just wants to practice his English on us. Once again we become reluctant guinea pigs for a pronounciation class. He is desperate to exhaust our small talk and wear our fractious patience paper-thin. We last for an hour and then make our excuses to leave.

Our boat has even more pseudo-class than the last one. On our floor are potted plants and leather sofas and in our room we have en-suite bathroom and TV. This is the life. There are four beds in our room and for a moment it seems we are to get two more passengers but one look at us is enough for them to change their minds and go elsewhere. This gives us the perfect opportunity to enjoy a spontaneous and relaxing evening drinking beers and eating the noodle packs we brought with us while watching, amazingly, the British Lions Rugby match in Johannesburg on TV. Just like home really.

It is not until long after we go to bed that things begin to go wrong. There is a lot of noise outside around midnight and suddenly our door bursts open and a young couple are ushered in by the austere stewardess. She switches on the light and the young couple are treated to what must be a truly horrid sight. Their gazes flit from the two prostrate Westerners lying in underpants and barely covered by sheets in hot and sweaty beds to the mountains of half-cleaned washing dangling from string across the windows, from the travel-worn rucksacks half spilling their contents of dirty socks across the carpet, to finally rest on the empty beer bottles and half-eaten noodle packs scattered over the dressing table. It is hardly an inviting sight for what I later presume could have been a honeymoon couple hoping to enjoy their first night of marital bliss. I wake up and smile half-lidded at them, but this could hardly be expected to help and their poorly disguised reaction of disgust is audible even across the language barrier.

They are ushered out and I turn out the light in the rather premature hope that now we might be left to sleep. In fact the stewardess goes off in search of a most unfortunate and awkward threesome of Chinese men who are substituted as our room guests and expected to make whatever use of the two remaining beds they can. They make considerable noise and in the end two of them sleep, rather willingly it seems, head to tail in one bed. Luckily, they leave at 10am and neither Llew or I move until then.

This morning we are up early, anxious to be looking our best for Isabell. For some reason we feel something is expected of us today and so we'd better look smart. This is difficult to achieve with few clean clothes and a ragged beard, but the thought is there. We spend the day traipsing round the Purple Mountain which is, for the Nanjing people, the equivilent of one of our stately homes. There are museums, temples and craft shops and a hugely impressive mausoleum built for Dr Sun Yatsen, the man who led the Kuomintang Nationalist party in the early 1920's and who is hailed by many as the founder of modern China. Unfortunately his body was pinched and now resides, perfectly preserved, in Taiwan where the Kuomintang party sought refuge in 1949 from the newly formed PRC. And their leader's body was not all they pinched, when they left they took with them the entire gold reserves of China. Good skills.

Ours is a day of interesting but exhausting walking. We learn a lot about Isabell and she a lot about us. She thinks Llew is very handsome - particularly in sunglasses - and can't understand why he hasn't got a girlfriend. Is there no end to this man's powers? She has a boyfriend too. Today is the day I take my first real experience of proper Chinese toilets. These consist of a hole in the floor and two foot-plates, and usually, but not always, some sort of flushing mechanism. The ones in the hostel are, I'm assured, relatively clean but nevertheless the smell of ammonia is overpowering. The appropriate etiquette is something that must be experimented with - I certainly don't get it right on my first go. Balancing over a stinking hole is not one of the easiest nor pleasant things I've ever done. But even this unpleasantness is beaten later by the sight of Llew scrubbing his underpants clean. It seems he has only brought one pair.

We eat in a very simple, basic, restaurant with Isabell. The food is delicious and prepared so quickly I wonder if they have all the dishes on the go all the time. The cook is a large-bosomed middle-aged lady who is very keen to check we are enjoying her food by sitting around watching us eat. Evidently foreigners are a rarity. Later we drink some beers in Jack's Place while Isabell drinks tea and tries to determine the type of Chinese wife which would most suit Llew. This turns out to be one who cooks good Chinese food and doesn't understand any English.

In a piano shop, bizarrely located two doors down, I am forced to play for Isabell, having foolishly revealed that I played earlier on. I manage to draw quite a crowd and it is good to know that with Llew's singing ability and my playing we could always busk our way around China if we run out of cash.

I wake this morning after, on balance, not a bad night's sleep. It is surprisingly cool and outside the wide, silty, chocolate-coloured waters of the Yangtze flow past us rapidly. We stopped in the middle of the night at Natong where the noise of dropping anchor sounded, to my dreaming brain, like a thousand jittery tea trolleys being wheeled along a metal corridor.

At 10.30am, all set to disembark at Nanjing, it suddenly transpires we aren't yet at Nanjing, we're at a small town called Yangzhou. Realisation dawns that we've managed to board the slow boat to China and it takes a minute or two to realise that the sailing times given in Lonely Planet are for travelling downstream rather than upstream against the current. All of our timing estimates are wrong. Still the nice thing is we have no urgent needs to attend to, no places to rush to, so we can just sit back and enjoy the experience of travelling itself. At the time, travelling seems to involve a whole lot more sitting and staring at passing scenery than memory ever recalls.

The stop does bring one good thing though and that is breakfast. There is a rush for everyone to get off the boat to buy their dumplings and noodles and to get back on again while some more lumpy looking freight is stowed on board. No one seems to understand the concept 'to queue' and it is a challenge to fight your way in, demand what you want and pay for it, then retreat rapidly clutching hot dumplings. The prize is well worth it and breakfast is filling and tasty.

Now all we can do is sit out on deck with our hats and our sunglasses, enjoying the heat and waiting for Nanjing to come to us. At 5pm, after a considerably longer time than expected, we finally arrive in Nanjing. In the port, we are faced with our first real taste of staring. All the Chinese and especially the older generation are incredibly curious of us and gather round to look. Just me buying an ice cream becomes a huge entertainment for them, especially as I misunderstand that the seller has no small change. We are once again indebted to an English speaking man who steps in to help is as we try to buy tickets and get hopelessly confused. Without this kind of polite help, progress would be very slow.

After an unneccessarily long taxi ride into the centre of Nanjing by a driver who seems to think we're here to be ripped off, we arrive at the University where we hope to get some beds for the night cheaply. We are halfway through our 'looking lost' routine when a girl who turns out to be a student here offers to help. Our plan has worked. We are very grateful for meeting Isabell, as she calls herself, who proves to be extremely useful in our quest to get to know Nanjing. It turns out the taxi driver dumped us on the wrong side of the campus but Isabell kindly agrees to walk us over to the accommodation and within half an hour we have student rooms for two nights pretty cheaply. They're on the 17th floor, have beds like planks of wood but have their own (Chinese) TV.

Isabell dashes off but says she'll come back tomorrow at 9am. There seems to be little choice in the matter for us but we don't mind - she thinks Cambridge is a "very famous University" and seems quite impressed that we study there. It must be our four day-old stubble making us look stupid. Directly opposite our block are some restaurants which look promising for filling empty stomachs. We have less than £7 between us but still manage a fantastic meal of Sichuan Chicken, Roast Duck and rice and dumplings plus six large bottles of Tsingtao and still have enough for a taxi fare tomorrow. It is without doubt the best Chinese food I have ever tasted, here or at home, and I am suitably impressed.

The beers are consumed at "Jack's Place", a quiet little bar over the road. Inside we swap our stories with Adrian, a traveller and general bum-arounder from Liverpool and Brian, an American studying Chinese here. It is good to talk.

Sleep at the hotel is refreshing although there is not enough of it. We intended to get up at 7am and go for our tickets but that was clearly too ambitious. It is 12pm before we are standing outside the ticket office and have that soon-to-become-familiar realisation that we've turned up in lunchhour. After a wait, obtaining tickets still proves tricky. Having found the appropriate ticket counter we survive only with the help of a local man who cannot speak any English but whose success in helping us lies in repeating loudly at the clerk whatever Chinese words we manage to pronounce. With our guidebook and much finger stabbing at words like 'boat', 'today' and 'Nanjing', we eventually come out with two tickets for this evening. A great sense of achievement overcomes us - the triumph of human spirit over the language barrier.

I jump forward in time slightly now to sitting in the ferry terminal waiting to depart. I am sitting writing my journal and we are the only two Western faces in a sports-hall sized waiting room stuffed with Chinese and their assorted brightly coloured luggage. Behind me are a dozen Chinese men all staring over my shoulder and exclaiming loudly as they watch me slowly write this sentence in English. They are incredibly curious to see us Lao Wai (lit. pale faces or foreign devils) as they call us, even in a place so seemingly Westernised as Shanghai. Wherever you look there are dark eyes trained upon you, watching your every move. There is no resentment or hostility, only a kind of curious awe. I'm sure if I had as little money as some of these people and saw some obviously relatively-rich Westerners strolling around, able to travel freely and having a great time, I'd probably think the world was pretty unfair. It seems their well-nurtured National pride prevents them feeling such resentment and presumeably the careful censoring of external news means that many of them know little about the rest of the world. If they do then they are deliberately given the impression that the Chinese are superior as a race. There seems to be nothing wrong with this though and the Chinese are, for the most part, remarkably courteous and helpful.

Jumping back, we eat lunch in Sichuan Lu, a street devoted to snacking. The fried and steamed pork-filled dumplings are really very appetising as well as very filling. A lunch for two costs £1.50. In one place we are called into a tiny restaurant to sample their dumplings and to be watched by a group of five or six people who we take to be the owners and cooks. Remarkably the owner speaks very good English, apparently from his "business in Europe". He assures us that Llew has very good chopstick technique (and by definition I don't!) but that we both eat like Westerners, by tearing the food apart. Quite how we should be eating we never find out but I fail to see how I could be any more dextrous or delicate in my rather awkward control of these two bits of wood.

We while away the afternoon in the Yuyuan Bazaar and Gardens. The Bazaar consists of a million and one trinket shops set in fabulous "real" Chinese buildings - putting me in mind of a Buddhist monastery. The gardens are a tranquil array of fishponds, bridges and houses, reputably 19th Century in design although we find that Chinese architecture seems to have changed little in two thousand years of history. Clearly they discovered the right blend early on - red stained wood in a snaking design - and haven't seen fit to change it ever since. Either that or all the old buildings are modern fakes. Amongst the American tour groups we find some space to sit and relax and see more white faces than we've seen all day.

Certainly in the wait for the ferry we are the only ones. We had hoped there might be some Western travellers to meet up with on the ferry but it seems unlikely. Without exception our fellow travellers are Chinese with huge lumpy baggage, going home or going away we can't tell, but they're clearly either exporting or importing something. As the boarding gates open there is a huge surge of people - seats or beds are to be fought over. We sit back and let the crowd subside, hoping desperately that our 2nd class accommodation is not too heavily competed for. Luckily we get preferential treatment with a separate stairway and plenty of uniformed cabin crew to show us to our room. We are on the upper floor with windows onto the deck and the room is very nice... at least compared to things we could have imagined. There are two beds with rush matting and blankets, a sink, bedside lamps, velvet curtains and a blissful air conditioning unit.

A subsequent exploration of the rest of the boat justifies entirely our extra expenditure. Below us is a seething mass of people stuffed into 12 bunk dormitories (it's worse on the floor below in 4th class). The air is hot, full of smoke and walking down there the nostrils are immediately assaulted by the acrid smell of urine from the latrines. There is no air conditioning, only fans to spread the smoke about. But to be honest the Chinese don't seem to mind these conditions - I begin to understand now why they show no compassion for the conditions they subject their captive animals to: they quite happily subject themselves to worse.

They set about their business making noodles and tea with boiling water provided in huge jugs. Someone is selling bananas and watermelons, another ice-creams and a third, somewhat more tenuously, is selling poor quality women's clothing from lurid manikins. We feel distinctly superior in that we can retreat to our cool cabin upstairs whenever we need to. Our toilet has a locking door and a wooden seat, their's has no privacy whatsoever. Our cabin attendant, a chubby middle-aged woman in a badly fitting uniform, pops in to throw us (literally) our keys. And then once again to throw in some blue boxes which turn out to contain soap, toothbrush, flannel and combs - neatly increasing our feeling of superiority even if having them thrown to us makes us feel like animals in a zoo.

As dusk settles and the dockside lights recede, I spend a few moments leaning over the deck rail in the warm evening air, enjoying the breeze and watching this strange country go by. In four weeks we cannot hope to understand how the Chinese work. We can only watch them go, enigmatically, about their strange business and learn to give them some of the respect they deserve. Their cities may be polluted and wasteful but they are decent, honest, exceptionally hard-working, long-suffering and friendly. And they have a spark of life about them which is hard not to like.

Like the closet-romantic that I am, my thoughts drift to the future and to home and I wonder, not for the first time this trip, why it is that I actually come travelling. In my experience travelling can often be harsh, confusing, sometimes sad and frequently, great expectations are slashed by the unforgiving blade of surprise. But always travelling gives you an unparallelled ability to watch another world from the inside, to experience exclusive sights that others seldom see and to feel privileged as a first time explorer observing life's wonderful spontaneity. Always it is interesting, stimulating, exciting and without doubt relentlessly and (when you're not doing it) annoyingly addictive. All I know is that moments like these, watching the gently glowing lights on the bank as they float by and day-dreaming of everything ahead, can never be taken away; never written down or re-lived. They can only be experienced by actually being here and living through these minutes. And herein lies the attraction of travelling. It is not borne out of the conditions you put yourself through, but how they change you inside, how they make you see yourself, for the first time, from a different and enlightened perspective.

It is for all these reasons, positive and negative, that travelling appeals to me. Llew and I have decided to grow beards whilst we are in China. This is the second day of unshaveness and not the first, I'm sure, that I will live to regret the idea. However, as we both agree, this is probably the only time we'll ever get to grow a beard and not have to be around people we know. How long I manage to last the experience without reaching for my Gillette Sensor, only the photos will tell.

The reason for such a uncharacteristically early rise is that Llew and I have to collect our visas today. Once again our timing at the Visa office is impeccable. Whereas last time we came wanting to apply for visas and the queue for "Collection" was enormous, this time the situation is reversed and despite hundreds of people applying for visas, we are able to dive straight in to collect ours. Two visas, all present and correct within twenty minutes. A remarkable achievement in our battle to outsmart bureaucracy and red tape.

Today, our last day in Hong Kong, we are to brave Ocean World despite the heavy rain. We wave Graham and Riemie and family off as they leave for Britain and then take a cab to the theme park. The rain means no queues but it also means some of the attractions are not open. We spend the afternoon traipsing round the extraordinary mixture of educational and thrills 'n spills attractions. The cable car ride over the penisular and the log flume are easily the best.

We retire to Dim Sum in the Middle Kingdom (a Brief History of China) which reveals remarkable facts about Chinese culture. We trace our horoscopes. Chris and Llew are 1976-born 'Year of the Dragon'. I am, unsurprisingly it seems, 1975-born 'Year of the Rabbit'. The qualities are fitting but just wait till those back home find out.

Later we collect our belongings and pack while watching Return of the Jedi and eating pancakes. I can't sleep. We have to get up at 5.30am to catch our flight and I am woken just as I've dozed off by a farewell call from home at 2.30am. I feel a bit like I'm on a rollercoaster, chug-chug-chugging upwards to a point tomorrow where China begins and our train goes over the edge. There can be no going back.

I am desperately excited but also nervous. The next four weeks could hold surprises both good and bad. Whatever, that stomach plummetting feeling as we plunge over the vertical drop will be a challenge in itself.

Friday 4th July 5.30am.

Last minute dash to get dressed and scoff a bacon and egg sandwich before the taxi arrives. Somewhere in that mad half hour we both manage to shave for the very last time in four weeks but I'm rushing about too much to note the significant or savour it. We leave Chris behind this morning on his travels to New Zealand and onward around the world. Somehow we also manage to leave him our dirty dishes and duties to clean up the house... Flight KA 802 is remarkably prompt and efficient. The pilots are Australian, the food - shrimp omelette with croissant - definitely cross-cultural. Shanghai is clear, hot and incredibly flat and spacious compared to Hong Kong. Outside the airport we are suddenly immersed in a frightening world where there is no English. At least in Hong Kong every sign is bilingual and there is at least a recognisable strain of English character to the place. China is totally alien. Here we are alone in a "deaf-and-dumb" existence with our sign language, our phrase book and our intuition. And intuition is sadly lacking in our first move which is to accept the advice of a tout at the airport who tells us the hotel we are looking for has been closed but that he can take us to a good cheap hotel very close to the centre.

I have my doubts about the idea as we get into his car but not enough to decline the offer. In the end we get stiffed for a very expensive taxi ride and a ludicrously far out-of-town and overly priced hotel. The trouble is no one speaks English and we are so thoroughly tired and confused that finding somewhere else seems impossible to our minds. At least we are starting high, even if we cannot sustain this level of luxury all the way through. The taxi-driver claims we are placed 5 minutes from the railway station but he turns out to have been a blatant liar and we later discover the hotel we really wanted wasn't closed after all.

Anyway, after two hours of sleep we venture out into the burning sun and walk to the station. It is a walk which takes us 45 minutes along a busy motorway using a combination of maps and a local man who walks with us dutifully most of the way, surprising both of us by not trying to rip us off. At least our faith in the Chinese people, so nearly shattered at such an early stage, is almost restored. We definitely won't be trusting the touts again. Our journey takes us through back-street Shanghai, which although more spacious than the high-rise tenements of Hong Kong, is equally less sophisticated. No more of the mobile phones and pagers of Hong Kong. It is a bit like how I might imagine Victorian London to have been - with petrol fumes and mad rickshaws thrown in for good measure.

Just walking through is a fascinating and sometimes shocking insight into the way some people live. From what I see I cannot believe that this country ever actually achieves anything. They may be hard working but how do they all know to pull in the same direction? Round here, selling something seems to involve a lot of lazing round in the shade, staring intently at foreigners like us walking by. Our aim is to get to the ferry office to book our onward tickets to Nanjing tomorrow and had our hotel been anywhere like reasonably placed we might have stood a chance. Unfortunately despite our long walk and expert navigation of the limited tube network we arrive at 5.15pm, too late to do business. We resolve to return early tomorrow and spend the rest of the evening sampling the delights of Shanghai. We find a delicious, if greasy, canteen of the communist ilk serving excellent dumplings and cheap delicacies.

Then, satisfied, we take a remarkably civilised stroll along the Bund, a promenade along the river front which smacks of Shanghai's European influence. From the style of the architecture along the front you could imagine for an instant you were in London or Prague or anywhere but China. When contrasted to the anarchic whirl of life on the streets leading up to it, life on the Bund is a most relaxing experience. There are many people out enjoying it for this reason and as the setting sun plays its last rays across the stone fronted town hall it is difficult to ignore that there is a certain magic to Shanghai. We decide to find a cheap bar to celebrate our arrival in China and locate a suitable one described in Lonely Planet. Nice idea, but actually finding this bar, supposedly in the University area, proves to be almost a life-consuming task. Shanghai is a well spread-out city and our walk, while it may be interesting, takes us on a 7-mile hike out into the suburbs. We don't really mind because we are walking through parts of the city we'd never see otherwise and parts which give a real feel for what Shanghai is but it seems a ridiculous distance to walk even for a beer. I feel sure that if we'd been seeking a famous sight or temple we would have given up much sooner than we did.

As it turns out, despite practicing our Chinese directions on passing policemen, we never actually find the bar we're searching for. At 9.30pm we eventually come across a small bar which turns out to be worth the walk since it is ice-cold and has a great atmosphere. The relief to get out of the heat and the fumes of the street, even at this hour, is incredible. So we wash some fumes down our throats with Tsingtao, discuss the merits of China, raise our glasses to our trip and eventually catch a cab back to the hotel to correct whatever navigational errors we made. Despite its stress and bustle, this city feels lived in and fun and I like it very much.

Later, much later, Llew tells us that the path which eventually led him to be discovered, slumped outside the apartment door at 8am was a torturous one involving bars: Joe Bananas and Carnegies, girls he can't remember and a stripper dancing on the bar.

The headaches and the pain from drinking Carlsberg leads me to decide never to drink it again. The 28 chemical preservatives used to supposedly keep it fresh in the hot climate make me feel very unpleasant the morning after and contribute to one of the worst hangovers I've ever experienced. To our shame it is 3pm before we are even moving and our day is almost completely wasted, just like us last night really.

We make a trip to the 'Football Club' to which Graham and Riemie belong and which serves as a kind of pseudo high-class country club for expatriates. It has the marbled lifts and bow-tied bell hops and, more importantly for us, an inexhaustible supply of ice-cold lemonade to soothe pounding heads. With a view over the Happy Valley Races, a million bars and restaurants and numerous lawns, pitches and pools this is one every expensive piece of real estate, plonked as it is between nestling tower blocks in the middle of Hong Kong. Apparently the Jockey Club, one of the most profitable businesses in Hong Kong, desperately wanted some development land from the Football Club and, in return, paid for the new clubhouse and facilities to be built. They didn't skimp on their designs.

I spend a shivering night on the floor under a single sheet in the air conditioned bedroom but never seem to develop the concious state required to do anything about it until I wake up five minutes before the alarm goes off annoyingly at 8am.

Late to bed means late to rise. Sloth-like Llew stays in bed after being woken by Andy and his mates in the middle of the night. It takes a huge cooked breakfast wafted under his nose just to get him to open his eyes. We leave at a shameful 3pm to go to Stanley Market. It is raining. In the bus queue there are some Chinese who seem to think that "SAR Day", as today is being called (Special Administrative Region), and the end of the British rule means that Brits stay at the back of the queue.

We eventually get on the fifth bus which comes along after some forceful pushing. Stanley Market is touristy and tacky but quite cheap, but we're not really looking for souvenirs this early on in the holiday and besides most of stuff is made in China anyway and will be significantly cheaper bought at source. After a quick bite to eat we return to the flat to get changed for our "Big Night Out". Llew is eager to relive his rookie Lawyer days, which seem to have consisted largely of doing very little work and drinking inordinate amounts of beer.

The Chinese firework extravaganza is at 9pm tonight and something not to be missed. We head out to Kowloon to eat at the first place we can find - Spaghetti House. The streets are so crowded tonight it reminds me of Edinburgh at New Year. We have an hour before the fireworks are due to start outside and the feeling in the queue as we wait to be seated is one of polite but aggressive impatience to eat as quickly as possible. It turns out that the Chinese couldn't organise a piss up in a Tsingtao factory. Supposedly experts at firework displays, they don't do very well in making them easily accessible. Our view of the proceedings, packed as we are into the end of Nathan Road with a million other Chinese and their families and cameras and mobile phones and extra helpings of small children, is further obscured by large buildings in front of us. So much obscured in fact, that for us, the "Fire-and-Lighto experience they promised with claims like "three times as expensive as the British fireworks" ends up being something that happens to other people.

Needless to say the more cost efficient British fireworks last night were a resounding success. We are left with the small pleasure of trying to whip up the expectant Chinese crowd into a frenzy. By cheering loudly and pointing at the sky excitedly we discover we can start a wave of cheering and activity as everyone around us thinks something is happening. The ten minutes of fireworks we actually see would be quite impressive if they weren't hidden diffusely by all the smoke produced and the low cloud. At the end of the day $100 million is pretty much wasted on a damp squib. Later we have the misfortune of being enticed into the Beer Castle - another of Llew's old-time haunts. But inside in the refreshingly cool bar we satisfy ourselves with cold Carlsbergs and enjoy the entertainingly active clientele - a German girl sat in the corner with her mother and two older men throwing beer mats at a fat man stood at the bar.

When the evening grows old we try to stimulate our flagging conversation by sending a red rose to the German girl. She laughs shyly and later, when she leaves, comes to thank us. She has to go home to her hotel now but would we like to meet her tomorrow? In a hazy world we shake hands and agree to meet her at 11pm tomorrow back here. Llew rubs his hands in the most distressing of manners. Two girls sitting behind us turn out to be a good laugh although it is long past quality conversation time. 'Liz and Bryony' are Brits who live out here but are at university in England. They are rich, spoilt and obviously spend their holidays boozing on Daddy's money, part of the lively ex-pat youth scene upon which Hong Kong bars thrive.

Chris and I, with too much Carlsberg inside us and thoughts of girls back home decide at 3am it is time to call it a day. After all it is 12 hours since we got up. Llew is still going strong (well, still going anyway) so we leave the man to his rabid death at the hands of Liz and Bryony and grab a taxi home.

Perhaps it is the lack of sleep but I feel distinctly homesick this morning, a feeling I haven't had for years. It is that uneasy travellers' malaise caused by having to settle into a new and often unsettling place where all normal routines have been thrown out and instead everything around you is confusing, strange and alien. It usually passes with time.

We make an attempt at an early start and I think even Graham and Riemie are impressed with us leaving the apartment before 11.30am. To be honest so far they haven't seen much of us when we've not been sleeping. We head for Central and the MTR (Mass Transport Railway), Hong Kong's curiously spacious underground system. Compared to the street above, the freedom and space down on the airy, wide platforms of the MTR is relieving. It seems to have a comforting breezy climate system all of its own. Of course the relief is only temporary. It lasts just about until the next train arrives, when the platform becomes much like anywhere else in Hong Kong: a sprawling, hurrying rush of people moving in every direction, fighting for themselves.

The MTR carries us over to Kowloon, another world again. Here is older, less well developed and some would say more run down than the Island itself. There are no skyscrapers, no banks or investment houses, only shabby-looking tenement blocks atop densely crowded shopping streets. I have never seen so many shops beckoning for attention in one street. Nathan Road, the main street, is just mile upon mile of material extravaganza. A digital phone store squeezes between a hardware store selling junk and a fragrant food shop with glistening whole-roasted ducks hanging outside, beady eyes still staring. Kowloon surely satisfies over and over the Chinese' love-affair with tat, gimmicks and bric-a-brac.

The heat is oppressive and the smells varied. Every step brings a different odour. Some, fragrant, put me curiously in mind of old ladies' wardrobes. Other supposedly fresh food odours make my stomach turn in protest. I can only hope the food on sale in China is more edible than the smell seems to portray. The stink of MSG-tainted delicacies is enough to make me feel unwell. We wander for what seems like miles and end up in the bird market. Seeing 'Bird Market' advertised we are instantly reminded of Cambridge's nightclubs back home but fortunately this bird market is of the millions of tiny tweeting creatures, tweeting from equally tiny cages, variety. Offering not much sympathy - the Chinese don't give a damn - we head for Dim Sum and satisfy our hunger that way. Outside the restaurant as we go in a man drops part of the fish delivery in the filthy gutter, then proceeds to pick all of it up and put in into the display tanks. Shocked but putting this minor incident out of our heads and not supposing for a minute that it is in any way representative of the hygiene standards of this place, we get on with our Dim Sum which is actually very good and reasonably free from unidentifiable offal which seems to haunt many of the dishes we've seen. Disregarding this, Chris manages to get offal anyway with his dish, which seems to be largely comprised of lumps of chicken lung.

Next we decide to confess our sins (for not helping to free the birds and cracking poorly suggestive jokes) and go to a monastery. At Tseun Wan - the furthest stop on the underground - we are told there is a Taoist temple complex called the Yuen Yuen Institute. Obviously Taoists like living in complete isolation because they have hidden their monastery very carefully. Following cryptic clues in three guide books we eventually find bus 81 which takes us there. Unfortunately we don't realise until it's too late that we've found the 81M which stops short and lands us stranded in a housing estate where we are the subject of much interest by the locals. After deliberations we decide to walk the rest of the way, uphill. It is hot and humid and the route takes us through what appears to be a kind of official shanty town where once again we are the centre of attention as we dodge open sewers running down the street. Surprisingly quickly we come across the temple and spend a peaceful ten minutes there in the ornate surroundings before closing time. It has great views across all of Kowloon and over to the peak.

So it is that, dripping wet once more, we board the deliciously cool bus and grab the MTR back to Kowloon harbour. Llew's memory serves us well once again in finding first Delaney's Irish pub and then Harry's bar - a kind of Chinese-Western hybrid bar. So we quickly knock back the San Miguels and feed on pork and beef noodles. Later and quite bizarrely, Llew rings up an old friend who just happens to be having a party. Would we like to go? Well...

Travelling to this guy's apartment is an experience itself. Chris gets his left trouser leg soaked in a hilarious roadside tap incident - just what you need when turning up to a sophisticated party - and we all make ourselves a few enemies with our now rather ragged walking abilities. Upon arrival we feel slightly uncomfortable to gate-crash the party at 9a Mosque Junction where everyone else is dressed up for the evening, we're in scruffy travelling kit and Chris has an unfortunate damp patch. But there's free food and drink so we soon fit right in. In fact, most of the guests seem under the impression that we're there to operate the bar. This is a misunderstanding which suits us just fine.

We are very grateful to our hosts, Mark Lomaz and Bernie, his bubbly Chinese-English wife, who don't seem to mind having three friendly gate-crashers.

Today we take a long hot walk to the 'Peak', on the hills rising high behind the apartments and dominating the skyline of Hong Kong. By the time we get to the top in the almost tropical heat I look and feel like I've had a shower with all my clothes on. To the million or so Chinese already at the top who chose, wisely, to come up by tram we must look like intrepid Amazon explorers. Either that or crazed exercise freaks.

The views are very impressive even if somewhat spoiled by the number of people to be waded through before being able to seeing anything. From the peak you can watch over the whole of toy-town Hong Kong - much as the Gods might. A whole metropolis packed into one small eyeful. Tiny aeroplanes take off one a minute from the water-bounded runway and skyscrapers bask bright in the reflected sunlight from all the other skyscrapers.

So we sit on the top eating our lunch, admiring the views and cursing the crowds before taking the steep tram down the hill to Central once more. The heat is exhausting for a walk around and anyway most of the big buildings, like the Bank Of China we'd hoped to get inside, are closed for the holidays. So we troop back to the flat for another dose of air conditioning and a home cooked garlic monster for dinner.

My night's sleep - my turn on the 'short-straw' living room floor - is punctuated by Andrew returning at 3am to watch loud American soaps on TV and shortly afterwards (or so it seems) by Robert and his cartoons at 8am.

Our first proper day in Hong Kong (after a day recovering from jet-lag) is spent running around after Chinese visas, Hong Kong dollars and airline tickets to Shanghai in a race against the clock before offices all over Hong Kong shut down for the 5 day handover holiday starting tomorrow. We manage to achieve everything reasonably easily though - visas and flights, our gateway to China, for under £150. Later we decide to head back into town by the remarkably efficient 'Public Bus' - a never-ending chain of minibuses which herd people around the city - to sample the night time delights of Hong Kong's ex-pat party district and back-alley intoxication centre - "Lan Kwai Fong".

We choose to eat first at a restaurant whose name is as memorable as the latter part of the evening. We choose it mostly because its menu is conveniently in English and seems to be remarkably lacking in either living or tentacled creatures. We are soon digging into savoury and conventional sounding dishes like 'Beef in Oyster sauce', 'Roasted Pigeon' and 'Duck in Ginger', filled out with bowls of steamed rice and washed down with tea. To eat with there are only chopsticks and Chris seems to have altogether more difficulty with this dexterous concept than either Llew or I. We have already refilled our bowls twice before Chris has succeeded in picking up his first peanut. He claims indignantly that the waiter has greased his sticks for sheer comedy value but we are not convinced.

Particularly bemusing are the white jelly-like items accompanying the duck. Thinking it to be squid or other such seafood, I have already eaten one and Chris is halfway through his - with it dangling unceremoniously from his chin - when Llew suddenly works it all out. 'They're ducks feet!' he declares proudly, almost failing to disguise the almost sadistic pleasure from watching Chris's expression rush through disgust and out the other side into horror.

By 11pm, onceLlew has sucked every bone completely dry at least twice, we decide to venture outside. Some Chinese men are erecting a huge inflatable doll of some kind in the gap between two apartment blocks and since everyone else seems to be enjoying the spectacle, we decide to stop and watch too. The huge mass of silk is causing some difficulty for the men, flustered by their audience, because it is twisted and can't inflate properly. However it is not long before they succeed and the significance becomes all too apparent. The doll turns out to be a huge red woman (symbolising China) dragging along by the hand, rather reluctantly it seems to me, a gangling pink child (Hong Kong). The amassed crowd of lagered ex-pats and young fashionable Chinese seem to be loving this Chinese propaganda stunt but we resolve to come back later with a kitchen knife and watch her rocket. We end up in 'Mad Dogs' English pub where they are celebrating 'The Last Days of The Empire' and despite beers being more than £3 a pint we settle in and stay until 3am.

By this time we've had enough and head for the ubiquitous kebab shop to get our rationed lumps of microwaved chicken in pittas which actually taste very good to beered-up tastebuds despite costing an extortionate amount of money. Then we spend half an hour trying to persuade a taxi-driver that he actually would like to take three staggering Westerners dressed in shorts and drenched in kebab sauce on the twenty minute trip home. Unsurprisingly, none of them seem too keen. Nevertheless by 4am we are back at 'Baguio Wan'. It is still burning hot and sticky outside but air-con and beds are calling. Our first night in Hong Kong spent in an English pub. Shocking.

Hong Kong, that wonderfully civilised and characteristically British island seemed the perfect place to make an entrance into China. During our stay in Hong Kong we are joined by Chris, on his way to work on a Geography dissertation in New Zealand.

Hong Kong is an incredible place. Nothing is as you would expect it and everything seems to be a jumble of different cultures, styles and designs all living together seemingly in harmony and certainly in close proximity. Hong Kong's success is a tribute to the nature of the Chinese - they are slave drivers to themselves - never ceasing to be busy or to bustle with whatever they are doing. The futuristic marbled walkways of the banks and skyscrapers, providing for the ceaseless trade of stocks, shares, futures and options, huge production lines fabricating money from time, tower over a world beneath which is about trading of a different kind. At street level there is a wild, ever-changing world of tiny backstreet alleys filled with closely packed shops, barbers, tailors, supermarkets and restaurants. A million things to buy and a million people to sell them to you - all at once in noise and chaos. To the uninitiated it is confusing and daunting but at the same time exciting and colourful. I am frequently amazed, not that this world exists, but that it actually works at all.

My first impressions are of a hot, poorly maintained and over-crowded city. People said Hong Kong would grow on me, but the only thing I find growing on me when I first arrive is profuse sweat followed by a kind of nervous exhaustion at being assaulted and overwhelmed by so much life at once. We stay with a family in Hong Kong, Graham and Riemie Coulson, who are brilliant in making us feel at home. Their apartment is quite large by Hong Kong standards although adding three six-footers to the three children already in residence hardly leaves much room for living. The view from the balcony over the world's busiest waterway is exciting as well as impressive and helps to give a feeling of space which, one day into our trip, I still find hard to be without. The natives seem to thrive on the lack of it.

At first glance, there appear to be few positive reasons to go to China and even less to commend it over, say, five weeks on a beach in Thailand; the toilets are medieval, the customs are unpleasant, the people are hawkers, spitters, starers and litterers, all the means of transport are noisy, dirty and sometimes dangerous, the cities are polluted and smelly and frequently tourists are charged three times as much as locals. Not having ever visited before however, I felt convinced that in all of this great giant of a country there must be plenty worth seeing, and that if there wasn't that travelling there would be a fine experience anyway.

So it was that I persuaded Llewellyn John, a worthy travel companion having already been to China once before, to accompany me on an adventurous five week back-packing journey across China. I had no real agenda, nothing I was going to hold China to showing us, only a kind of unbounded curiosity about the country and what lay behind its mysterious shroud. The Chinese people have been through the political mangle more times than most and their lives have not been made easy by such great and often violent change. Without doubt a traveller in China should expect the country to have its fair share of oddities and individualities. I tried to take with me an open mind although it was often far from easy to keep it open and I hope that along the way I gave China a second chance to prove my foregone conclusion wrong.

I recount here simply the story of our travels : Tales from the People's Country. Getting into China is no longer the great problem it once was. Our plans revolved around flying to Hong Kong, staying there for a week to enjoy a glorious moment in China's history - the 1997 handover of British Hong Kong to China - and then make our way into China to travel for four weeks.