Mystery tour

I’m not sure what the word I’m looking for is. Won? Awarded? Voted? Whatever, Chengdu has become one of China’s three ‘best tourist cities’.

This surprised me.

Although it’s a really nice place to live – well, when the sun is shining anyway – there’s not much here to compete with things like the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Terracotta Warriors or the Great Wall. So I went on the Chengdu sightseeing bus tour to find out what I’ve been missing.

There are actually two buses, one going from the centre eastward and the other – an open top double decker – west. With the wind blowing through my hair (I wish…) and camera poised, I headed west first. An hour later, I’d not taken a single picture. There are pretty tree lined avenues, a few temples hidden behind brick walls and the pleasant bustle of a busy city but there’s nothing you can really capture in a single image. While the westward trip climaxed at the rather grubby Jinsha Bus Station, the eastward one at least has a definite destination: the Chengdu Panda Base. On the way, once again, there’s not much to see apart from a lot of shopping zones and quite attractive – even Parisian – apartment blocks but the end justifies the means (as it were).

The Base is world famous for its successful breeding programme of the Giant Panda. There wasn’t a lot of successful breeding going on when I was there though. In fact they were all fast asleep (if you want to see them at their best you should get the 7.00am bus). Still, it is a good place; you get to see the babies in the nursery being pampered in a very anthropomorphic way; lots of red pandas; and several landscaped and leafy enclosures for the giant stars of the show.

I really wish Chengdu well as a tourist city. But sometimes it doesn’t help itself. The tourist map produced by its own Tourism Bureau begins: “Chengdu, the ‘Fourth City’ of China - maybe her beauty is not as grand as that of Beijing… maybe her beauty is not as fashionable as Shanghai… maybe her beauty is not as open as Guangzhou…” But, on the plus side: “Chengdu women are as gentle as the water and can be good helpmates. They are good at keeping house…”

It is true, however, that the city has a very relaxed vibe (just look at the pandas!). It also has something Beijing doesn’t have: a proper river running through the middle of it. So the best part of my day was sitting in the sunshine on the riverbank sipping a bottomless glass of tea, slurping beef noodles and just watching the world go by.

Now that’s what I call Chengdu.

Happy New Year

It's like the set of '28 Days Later' here at school. Everyone's gone away. All the shops are shut. Worse still, all the local restaurants are shut. I didn't realise what was happening till the last minute so was lucky to get a couple of bits of chicken to keep me going over the weekend. Pretty fed up with it now but I still don't know when Spring Festival celebrations will finish or things get back to normal. At least the American fast food stalwarts are open if I make the trek into town. Colonel Sanders' chicken tastes a damn sight better than mine.

New Year's Eve was Saturday and it was pretty spectacular. I'm not sure if there was a public display in downtown Chengdu - there's actually a ban on fireworks inside the First Ring Road - but I chose to do what I think most Chinese do and stay in, watching the traditional TV spectacular, going outside only at midnight to soak up the atmosphere and sniff the gunpowder thick air.

The TV was fascinating. It was a bit like the Royal Variety Performance in the UK, a mish mash of song & dance with not a second's thought given to pushing any artistic envelopes. There's even a Chinese Lionel Blair who hosted it. Scary.

There were a few things, however, you'd not get on the Royal Variety show. There were three wonderful performances celebrating the army, navy and airforce complete with fantastically costumed dancers wearing combat fatigues, lots of gold braid or white flight helmets respectively. The background video, meanwhile, showed Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping, among others, shaking hands and smiling a lot.

Another set piece featured a woman celebrating the fact that it was her responsibility to do the housework. I can't see that playing too well back home.

Venturing down the road at midnight, you have to say the Chinese are good at fireworks. Big, big fireworks. I always remember them being stuck in milk bottles and being lit one by one when I was a kid. But here people buy huge crates of the things which look more like the rocket launchers you see on the back on trucks in war zones. Only war zones are probably a bit quieter.

Talking of which, school starts again on Wednesday. Fingers crossed for a happy new year.

Building sights

I am so lucky to be travelling around China 'off-season'. Everywhere I go there are very few tourists, prices are lower for a lot of things and I've had the pick of places to stay. There are a few backpackers around and the odd gaggle of tourists who, all wearing the same (invariably red) baseball caps, follow their flag-waving tour leader as they're herded from one spot to another but I'm glad I'm doing the sights now and not with a billion other people in summer.

Even the weather's been brilliant on the whole - clear, crisp and cool days with stunning blue skies. (Here in Chengdu, skies are a uniform milky white; it's like living in limbo weather and it plays with your head. So to get out from under nothingness was invigorating.) But for every Ying there's got to be a Yang: this is the time of the year when the tourist sights get themselves spruced up for the summer (and for the Olympics) so a lot of places I've been to are swathed in green construction tarps and obscured by scaffolding.

Throughout Beijing, streets are lined with hoardings covered by developers' visions of the future: lots more malls basically. Take a peep behind and you see shabby old shops, derelict and aerosol-sprayed with the Chinese character for "demolish". I've got no high horse to jump on here. Expecting Beijing to keep every last one of its grubbiest hutongs would be like expecting London to have kept its Dickensian squalor to "protect its past". It'll be interesting to come back and see what goes up instead in a couple of years' time though.

Outside of the city, too, this is the time to look forward to high season. I took a trip out to the Summer Palace (which, as the information signs all around emphasise, again and again, was ravaged by British and Japanese invaders). It's a huge park whose current form dates largely from the Eighteenth Century (although the park had been a royal retreat since the Eleventh) and is dominated by Kunming Lake which takes up two thirds of the park's area.

A bit disappointing, then, that the lake had been drained when I visited. Still, it was a good day out walking around this monumental puddle, over fairytale bridges, in and out of mystical pavilions and taking in the whole thing from the summit of Longevity Hill (it probably sounds better in Chinese).

In Xi'an too, construction is the order of the day. Even the hostel I first went to was being done out. Apart from making it generally bigger and better, the guy there said they were also putting in longer beds to accommodate foreigners more comfortably. He paid for a taxi to take me to their sister hostel which was in an even better location (it's the Han Tang Inn, if you're interested, and it got a five star rating from me for what that's worth).

Of course, the main thing most people go to Xi'an for is to see the Terracotta Warriors and I was no different. I took a public bus for the hour long journey and blindly got off when everybody else did. It wasn't the Warriors though, but the tomb of Qin Shi Huang - the first emperor of a unified China and in whose honour the Terracotta Army stand guard. As the Rough Guide says, there's not much to see on this huge mound of earth but it does bring to life the stories of what's meant to be hidden below. They say there's an entire city down there with rivers of mercury and heavens picked out with pearls for stars and the emperor's body at the centre of it all. Two and a half thousand year old booby traps await any intruders; I understand that some exploratory soundings have been taken to verify the truth of the legend but no excavation has yet taken place. It doesn't half make you wonder though...

The accidental trip to the tomb also gave a sense of scale to the whole monument. The warriors that have been uncovered are a further two kilometres west from here - God only knows what's in between and still to be found.

Reaching the army finally, you're met first by a vast car park and then the official souvenir superstore. You walk up an avenue of newly built and half-built, generally empty retail opportunities on your way to the burial site itself. To be honest it's all being done in the best possible taste and, as one of the world's top ten tourist attractions, you'd expect there to be a lot of development going on, wouldn't you? (The only thing that got to me was the persistence of the tour guides looking for trade - but I've had my rant about this already below.)

For all the construction going on though - and apart from Kunming Lake - I've generally not been disappointed by the sights I've seen. Crikey, you'd have to have a heart of clay not to be moved by the lines and lines of warriors staring fixedly ahead that greet you in the first gigantic hall erected over the original pit of the Terracotta Army. They say that, although the bodies were mass produced, the heads are all unique; they were all lined up facing east before being entombed beneath massive wooden rafters, straw matting and tonnes and tonnes of earth on top. You've seen the pictures, watched the documentaries and read the articles in National Geographic so there's not much more I can add here apart from one thing: do come and see them for yourself!

Huaqing Pool is on the way back to Xi'an where, for centuries, emperors bathed in the waters from the hot spring (and where Chiang Kaishek was arrested in the 'Xi'an Incident', 1936). Today it's a collection of more modern pavilions and pagodas and the site for theatrical extravaganzas in the summer but, guess what, it was mostly closed for refurbishment when I was there. No great disappointment to be honest.


Xi'an is a lovely city though. I don't know if you've ever come out of the train station in Amsterdam but it's a fantastic sight with the Damrak stretching out in front of you; you feel you're at the heart of things straightaway. I got the same feeling at the station here; you're met by the majestic medieval city wall stretching away into the distance left and right while a huge arch invites you into the ancient city itself.


Thoroughly modern inside the walls, there are still plenty of sights to see but everything is on a manageable scale and you feel like you can relax here much more than in a megapolis like Beijing which just leaves you completely knackered.


But you've got to go to Beijing. You've got to see the Forbidden City. Surprise, surprise, two of the main halls were all wrapped up in scaffolding and mesh when I visited but the place is so vast that you can put the disappointment behind you and move on to the next amazing thing. It just gets better and better the further you go. The designers even had the foresight to build the whole thing facing south so you take all your pics with the sun behind you and, believe me, everywhere you look there's a must have photo. Hooray for digital cameras!

My final Beijing trip was the big one: the Great Wall which was initiated, incidentally, by Qin Shi Huang (remember him? The one under the mound of earth... the Terracotta Emperor... try and keep up.)

There are many different sections of the wall that you can visit. The most popular is the bit at Badaling which is the one you see most on telly. (For some reason I have the image imprinted on my mind of George Michael and Andrew Ridgley being there, way back, when they were one of the first western pop acts to play China. Odd really.) It's been largely reconstructed (oh, not that old argument again...) and is infested with hawkers, lined with souvenir shops, etc., etc. Basically, not the bit I wanted to see.


Instead we headed further west, stopping in the middle of nowhere to pick up a local guide before winding our way on foot up the side of one of the huge hills north of the capital. Two ancient watchtowers looked down at us from the highest ridge.


Eventually we scrambled our way onto the wall itself, standing up to see how it winds miraculously along the very highest parts of all the hazy hills stretching into the distance on all sides. Neatly paved and wide enough for a horse and chariot to pass, you wonder how the hell they did it. How many people died up here toiling in the freezing cold? But what audacity to even think of doing it - let alone getting it done. It's a place you have to see without the paraphernalia of the Twenty First Century to feel the remoteness and the vastness and the loneliness.

It's the one sight in China that I was most glad to find not under construction.

A little knowledge

She was selling what looked like black pudding from a frying pan at the side of the cobbled street in Lijiang's 'Old Town'. Could it possible be?

"What is that?" I asked in Chinese.

"It's a delicate mixture of pork fat and oatmeal blended with goat blood and a little of the local liqueur which is then roasted over a log fire and smoked for three weeks in a hut on the western side of the Snow Mountain", she replied in the local Naxi dialect...

No, of course not! Who knows what the hell she said? But it illustrates the frustration of knowing a tiny little bit of Mandarin which is rendered completely useless when people actually reply to you.

The black pudding was delicious though.

Not so handy gadgets

My Sony Walkman, Casio camera and Sony-Ericsson mobile are all beautifully designed. They're small, sleek, stylish and very user friendly. So much thought must have gone into the designs to make hi-tech accessible to a technophobe like me.

But take a look at the bucket of stuff I have to take with me to keep them all working! Is it asking too much for manufacturers to come up with a single recharging/downloading system so you could travel with just one cable?

A different world

When I left the UK, I wanted to do something "different". Well, it doesn't get much more different than Guilin in Guangxi province.

It also feels refreshingly 'different' spending a Wednesday on a bamboo raft being punted down the Yulong River.

Or simply doing nothing on a Thursday but drink tea on the terrace of a cafe in a village that's not changed much for a thousand years.

The region is one of those 'must see' spots in China with its crazy pointy hills rising eerily above the lazy green waters of the Li River. And the boat trip up the river is one of those 'must do' things (sadly it was a pretty hazy day so my photos don't really do the landscape justice).

I'd met a girl on the train from Kunming called Apple who advised against stopping in Guilin itself; she recommended heading straight for the downstream town of Yangshuo. She turned out to work there in one of the many tourist offices and looked after me very well during my stay!

The guide books describe Yangshuo as a sleepy place, somewhere to chill out. But this is one of the problems with guide books: with the lead times involved in putting one together (and perhaps you don't have the latest edition either) what you read might have been written two or three years ago. Yangshuo is no longer sleepy although it's still a pretty cool place albeit one hundred percent geared to tourism. There are no end of hostels and guesthouses and pretty streets stuffed with souvenirs. (Bar 98, by the way, is a great place for a few beers and one of the few proper, decent bars I've come across in China!)

The new 'sleepy place' is an hour's bumpy bus ride north east to the village of Xingping whose shambolic buildings and muddy lanes date back to Qing times. A great place to chill out for the day, I guess that in a couple of years this'll will be as busy as Yangshuo. If I was a property developer I'd be salivating.

Picture perfect

Okay. Fair cop. I’m a hypocrite. I slammed the fake, movie set creation of Huanglong Xi village for purporting to be from the Ming Dynasty when it’s actually more bling than Ming.

But I just loved Lijiang, way down in the south west and just a couple of inches from Myanmar/Burma on my big wall map of China.

Largely flattened by an earthquake in 1996, it has been restored/rebuilt so that, ironically, the ‘Old Town’ is in fact newer than the so-called ‘New (modern) Town’. The contrast couldn’t be more clear. Climbing Lion Hill at the very centre of the town, to one side you see a sprawl of pretty utilitarian, concrete buildings but to the other there’s a sea of clay-tiled, traditional roofs all jumbled together, eddying this way and that.

Perhaps I was just lucky to visit in January when there aren’t so many people around (the narrow, winding streets might be hell in high summer) but there was a terrific lazy vibe about the place. Historically even, Lijiang would submit itself to the rule of any new emperor to save them the bother of coming to conquer the place; in truth, they knew that the town was so remote that they could go on living autonomously anyway.

The bus journey to Lijiang confirmed this remoteness. It’s situated on a huge plain surrounded by mountains on all sides – like being a tiny pea on a huge dinner plate. The plain is incredibly fertile, the climate generous, the mountain air pure and the isolation quite glorious. (A further 140 kilometres up the road is the town of Zhongdian which takes this idea of perfection even further by renaming itself Shangrila.)

At the top end of the town is Dragon Pool Park whose crystal clear pool reflects both the park’s pavilions and the majestic Jade Dragon Snow Mountain on the horizon. It’s the quintessential China photo-op and absolutely perfect.


I'll be back.

"But I asked for a sea view..."

(My room at the Halfway Guesthouse, Tiger Leaping Gorge.)

Gorgeous

There's a possibility that Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan will one day be flooded as part of another colossal hydroelectric project. Even back in England, it was top of my list of places to visit and, having walked its entire length, it didn't disappoint...

The legend goes that hunters were once chasing a tiger through this 35 kilometer long valley, two and a half hours north of Lijiang. The tiger escaped by leaping across the gorge at its narrowest point - a legendary leap of about 30 metres across the Jinsha Jiang (Yangzi River).

What's definitely true (according to the Rough Guide anyway) is that it's the world's deepest canyon and (according to me) it's a bloody long one.

There are two routes you can take along the gorge: the high and the low. The latter follows the road so it's not such a pleasant hike but you do get close enough to hear the rushing of the water. The high route gives staggering views down to the river seemingly miles below, along the valley in both directions and up to the snowy peaks including Yulong Xia Shan (Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, 5596m).

Taking a bus from Lijiang to Qiaotou before the sun rose, I had met Thomas from Germany and Florenzia from Argentina when we stopped half way for a breakfast of baked sweet potatoes. This was fortuitous. Not only were Thomas and Florenzia great company but when the hike turned out to be a lot harder than I'd expected, it was really good to have their encouragement.

Normally, guide books are pretty conservative in their time estimates but we made the first marker just about on - not ahead of - schedule. And that was the easy bit! The killer was the section called 'Twenty Four Bends' (some say 'Twenty Eight' but I wasn't counting) which is a dusty winding path going straight upwards to a height of 2600m. It was the toughest walk I've ever done but it felt great to have done it.

Some people try and charge through the gorge in a day but we soon realised that wasn't just impossible but would be pretty daft as well. Taking regular breathers was a great excuse to just pause and look around. Every bend brought new, even more wonderful vistas of the craggy mountains opposite all set against a perfect blue sky and clouds merging with the snowy tops.

The 'Half Way Guesthouse' is another example of pretty unimaginative naming but it gave us a good target to aim for. It could have been the roughest hostel in the world and I'd still have been happy to get there; as it happens it turned out to be one of the best I've ever stayed in. My room looked out right over the gorge. It even had an electric blanket on the bed.

We hadn't seen many people all day, which was nice, and there were about a dozen of us who sat down to eat some decent food and to drink a beer or two before tiredness took over. Wow, what a day. I'd forgotten how good fresh air could be!

The second day is a lot easier as you gradually head downwards past waterfalls and through terraces of greener than green fields of rice. The goal today is Sean's Guest House which is halfway between the valley floor and the jagged peaks and directly opposite Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. We sat outside, sipping Tibetan butter tea in no rush whatsoever for a minibus to come from Qiaotou to pick us up.

Now, this is what I'd come for.

Oops! I did it again

Remember a long time ago in Shanghai I got ripped off by the ‘Art Student Scam’? I thought I was just being friendly to some Chinese students and ended up being coerced into spending over RMB 500 on a painting? Since then I’ve even read about this con in the Rough Guide – albeit a bit late for me.

Well, I’ve gone and done it again in Beijing. Unbelievable. This is the ‘Tea House Scam’. After visiting the Forbidden City, I was going up the hill at the north end to get a panoramic view of the capital when two girls – students from Wuhan, don’t you know – struck up a conversation and kind of drifted along with me as I climbed the path.

Sure, it’s obvious what was happening in hindsight but, at the time, it just didn’t cross my mind what they were up to. God knows, I didn’t want the company but I’m just too damn polite or socially inept to rebuff people. At the top of the hill, however, I managed to distance myself from them among the other tourists and get back to sightseeing on my own.

But they returned and suggested going to Beihai Park. “No, I need to go back to my hotel, thanks.” I thought at the foot of the hill we’d go our separate ways but, as we were going past a tea house, they suggested just having a cup together. Okay, what harm could it do?

Sitting round a small round table, a hostess theatrically brewed a selection of tea leaves and gave us small cups to sample each one. The girls babbled on non-stop. After about eight or ten teas, the ceremony came to a pretty abrupt halt: “it’s time to pay”. The hostess reached for a price list and plonked it, unceremoniously, in front of me.

Was that 65 or 650 Yuan ? Was that altogether or each? And then the penny dropped (doh! finally). I was furious. RMB 650 is about a week’s wages. You could buy a new mountain bike with it. It’s a colossal amount of money. Doing a runner occurred to me but images of police and cells and deportation also occurred to me at the same time. Who knows? Perhaps I should have scarpered but I paid instead. The only small consolation was being able to tell another tourist at another table what was happening before he’d gone through the whole menu.

All I did was try and be nice to a couple of Chinese girls. I hope they rot in hell.

Trains, planes and automobiles. And buses.

Chinese trains are incredibly reliable and punctual. Just as well if you’ve been booked on a ‘hard seat’ for the eighteen hour journey between Chengdu and Kunming. Another minute longer and you’d probably never be able to walk again.

There are five ‘classes’ of train ticket you can buy. ‘Soft Sleeper’ is a private room with four bunks and steward service; the most expensive way to travel, you can even reserve all four bunks to have the place to yourself. Or you can get lucky and have it to yourself anyway if no one else has taken any of the other ones.

‘Soft Seat’ isn’t available on all trains but does what it says on the tin, really.

‘Hard Sleeper’ describes a carriage that’s stacked with rows and rows of bunks, three high. There’s not much privacy but it’s really not a bad way to travel. The only question is which bunk to take? The bottom one has enough headroom above it to be used like a seat during the day – but your fellow bedmates are as likely to sit on it as you so you can’t always stretch out when you want to. The middle and top bunks are pretty cramped in all directions but if you don’t fidget too much you’ll sleep fine.

And then there’s the ‘Hard Seat’. Ouch. I spent eighteen hours bolt upright on one of these from Chengdu to Kunming. Although the seat’s not literally hard, after that amount of time it might as well be. There’s no leg room, especially as everyone in my carriage seemed to be moving house that day and had all their belongings with them crammed into every available – and unavailable – space.

Finally, there’s the unreserved seat ticket. The cheapest option, it gets you on the train but not much more. If, as usual, all the seats are spoken for, you stand or, more probably, squat in the aisle. It’s grim for everyone and, although people were getting off at each station on my journey to Kunming, only more got on every time as we trundled into the night.

‘No smoking’ carriages are a bit of a joke too since you can puff away at the ends of each one – and there aren’t any doors. As an ex-smoker, that didn’t bother me in the slightest but one thing I’ll never get used to is spitting indoors. In restaurants, on buses or the aisles of trains, people haul the phlegm with dramatic hacking coughs from the pit of their lungs and deposit it with a certain flourish on the threadbare carpet. It’s good etiquette, I think, to rub it in a little with the tip of your foot.

People were really pleasant though. I’ve been on night trains in England and have felt genuinely threatened by fellow passengers tanked-up on lager after a football match or something. Here there was just a sense of stoicism: we’ll get through this, just take it easy. I thought it was great how, when someone left their seat to go to the toilet one of the squatters would immediately take the vacant space and sit down. Returning from the WC, the sitting passenger would give the interloper a few more minutes’ comfort before both exchanged places once more. I like that sort of thing.

In both Hard Seat and Hard Sleeper sections, an army of neatly uniformed stewards busy themselves all through the night checking tickets, sweeping up rubbish, emptying bins, closing curtains, making everything seem as normal as possible. One trolley brings cooked food which smells progressively worse the colder it gets, the longer the journey goes on. Another is stuffed with crisps, beer (hooray!) and pot noodles. As on Russian trains, there’s a constant supply of hot water in each coach so you can make your own tea – or soak your noodles – to keep you going through the night and to wake you up in the longed-for morning.

07.17. Kunming. Tired. Grumpy. I thought I’d get a hostel and take a time-out for a day while I decided what to do next but the taxi driver had other ideas and took me to completely the wrong place. Totally uninterested in my complaints, he wasn’t going to be persuaded by my protestations, especially since I’ve only learnt phrases like “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon” and “The pagoda in the middle is blue”.

So I trudged back to the station. I decided I didn’t like Kunming much. So, great, let’s go on another marathon journey, this time on a bus!

For some reason I thought Lijiang was about one hour away from Kunming. It’s actually nine. But blimey, it was a great journey. The coach was one of these hyper modern ones with really comfy seats; you sit on a kind of upper deck while the driver – and the baggage – is below. Unfortunately it also had video screens which, in China, means only one thing: nine hours of Jackie Chan.

You can also get ‘Sleeper Coaches’ which, instead of seats, have rows and rows of metal bunk beds screwed to the floor. I thought they were pretty cool when I first saw them but imagine they’d be unbelievably cramped and unpleasant after a few hours. Unlike the train you’d not be able to take a walk to stretch your legs. And as for road safety… hmmm.

Another thing I’ve learnt recently is that you’re never likely to get stranded anywhere. Wherever you go there will be private mini buses jostling for your custom ready to take you to the nearest town for a few kuai. Or likely as not you can pick up a lift from a private car – just make sure you agree a price first.

After Lijiang (in the south west), road and rail journeys took me to Guilin (in the south east) where I discovered that sometimes special discount deals on flight tickets can make flying a viable proposition. Because you’re making trips within the country you tend to forget that the actual distances involved are often the equivalent of going from Leeds to Istanbul – and you wouldn’t think twice about hopping on a plane for that, would you?

The in-flight food’s not too good though. Last time I had one sachet of desiccated bits of lemon and another of gherkin slices. Oh, and a fairy cake.

The overall service is good but, from Beijing, I ended up flying from an airport that isn’t even mentioned in the guide books. It was all a bit third world, an ex-military airfield I think that has been quickly converted to civilian use. There was a couple of hours delay but they gave us a free hot meal and it was no real hardship.

Coming into Chengdu, I thought I’d save a few kuai by taking a private car instead of an authorised taxi. Not a good idea, to be honest, especially late at night. Once I’d got in, the driver had to keep doing circuits around the airport car park while he searched for a second passenger (if he stayed in the same place, he’d get nicked). That was a surprise for a start but eventually we drove off into the night. Only then did it occur to me that he could dump me anywhere and I’d not be able to do anything. He could take my money, my passport, everything. Oops. I tried desperately to recognise any passing landmarks to reassure myself but in the end we made it to CFLS safe and sound. And, what do you know, he even stuck to the agreed price.

Phew, it's nice to be home.

Not very Michael Palin

I’m afraid I told a rickshaw driver where he could go with his bloody rickshaw. I’d told him I didn’t need one already. So what’s the point of following me and mithering me even more? I’m hardly going to say, “Oh, actually you’re right, I do want to go somewhere. It had completely slipped my mind! Thanks, let’s go”.

For the last three weeks I’ve been nagged and nagged and nagged mercilessly: postcards, picture books, tourist maps, little terracotta figures, those magnetic bean things, military medals, Mao buttons-badges-posters (you name it). Hey, everyone’s got to make a living but why can’t they take “no” for an answer?

It’s like being bitten by mosquitoes. One’s no problem, a minor irritation. But they just keep coming. And the more of them you squish or swipe, the more that turn up to have a nibble. And that buzzing, the buzzing that seems to come from nowhere!

The worst was at the Terracotta Army and the tour guides there. As you’d expect, they spoke good English but, weirdly, none knew the word “NO”. By the time I’d made the twenty minute walk from the bus stop to the entrance of the actual site, I was pretty hacked off. The final would-be official guide was quite staggeringly rude, implying I was too stupid to appreciate the exhibit without her help (how could a mere westerner possibly understand the complexities of Chinese history?) We had words; her last, spoken with real venom, were “I hope you live to regret it”.

Yes, welcome to the Eighth Wonder of the World from your friendly representatives of the Chinese government.

It’s not been the only thing that’s wound me up recently either. Take queues – or the absence of them. Up to now I’ve been pretty philosophical about the scrum to get on the bus. It’s just a different culture, a different way of doing things, nothing to get hung up about. But when you’re in a queue of just two people and a third person pushes in front, you start to wonder what the hell is going on? And what’s the point of pushing in a queue boarding a plane for god’s sake? Your seat’s reserved so what do you achieve by shoving others out of the way? Or, this is the best, why would you jostle and push in the line as it shuffles its way past Chairman Mao’s pickled body? Wouldn’t you actually want to hang back a bit and prolong your visit rather than hurrying to the other side of the hall as quickly as possible? In single file, everyone gets exactly the same view, you’re not allowed to stop to gawp or take pics, so why shove the person in front?

Why, why, why?

Does Michael Palin, ambassador for everything thoroughly British and good, ever lose his temper? Does he get ripped off in restaurants where the ‘English’ menu bears no resemblance to the local one – in either choice of food or prices. Does he get pissed off with having to haggle for absolutely everything: “But I haven’t got time to haggle!” Does he perhaps tire of people in restaurants not just casting a curious glance but staring fixedly at the apparantly amazing sight of a foreigner? Does he ever wonder where the line is between being respectful of other people’s culture and just having the piss taken out of you?