Beijing: Apr 10 - 17

BEijing (sleeper train)

Climbing up the Walls

When I was eight or nine we bought a kitten.

Cat I was a slow-moving ball of orange whose care was meant to steer us children away from lives of wanton selfishness. Dad ended up feeding it most days and all I really learnt was that I prefer dogs. Nevertheless, when it shuffled off its mortal coil some years later, we were soon at the pet shop, lined up for a replacement.

Hunan: Apr 5 - 9

Yongzhou

The House that Jack Built

We met Jack in Yongzhou.

We had just arrived and were beginning our daily game of looking for a cheap hotel. When he called out, 'Hi, how you going?'--he was sitting on a motorbike parked in front of a shopping centre--his face was so honest, his English so clear, his demeanour at seeing a black and white guy riding past so refreshingly calm, it was all we could do to stop.

Guangxi: Mar 24 - Apr 4

Wuzhou - Daoshu - Taiping - Mensheng - Yangshuo - Guilin - Quanzhou

Last in Translation

The language barrier is set higher in the Middle Kingdom.

In Hong Kong numerous travellers warned us that it stopped being easy once we entered China Proper. You have to communicate on their terms, they said. No one speaks English. In a world where everyone else I meet speaks three or four languages and looks bored with each, the Chinese would, with a few exceptions, be stubbornly, trend-buckingly monolingual--well, at least we'd have that in common.

Guangdong: Mar 21 - 23

gaoming - zhaoqing - de qing

Chinese Concrete

Forget pandas, Ming architecture and Confucian riddles. That's a painting. To begin with, China sprawled like a country-sized construction site.

Earth-movers and semi-trailers rumbled past pounding jackhammers, tracking dirt and scattering gravel. Elderly Han streetsweepers with milky eyes and faces like carved wood worked their oversized straw brooms towards the road shoulder. There sit mounds of crushed rock, broken concrete, cement and rebar.