1. Travellers are mostly idiots. In fact, this probably just reflects the fact that people are mostly idiots, but being a traveller provides more opportunities than usual for demonstrating one’s ignorance and bizarre notions about the world because travelling encourages the (usually mistaken) belief that you’ve seen things and know something of the world and its workings. Also: it is possible to ride a boat down a river near Guilin, through some of the world’s most bizarre scenery and in clear, sunny weather, and – on disembarking – to hear your fellow travellers muttering that the boat trip was “so bad it’s actually funny“. Presumably because of the lack of a cutting-edge soundtrack or interactive multimedia light display.
2. People are brilliant. Since leaving on my travels, it has begun to seem almost like a law of nature that almost the exact moment you become lost or confused, either physically or mentally, someone will tap you on the shoulder and say ‘excuse me’ and then provide the exact solution to whatever problem you are having, however abstract that problem might be (anything from ‘where can I sleep in this town?’ to ‘how can I charter a seaworthy vessel and crew at this ungodly hour?’). I don’t know why it should be that this happens every time while travelling, but almost never when staying-in-one-place.
3. Embarrassingly, most non-British Europeans (travelling Europeans, anyway) seem to speak three or four languages fluently. I can speak three or four words of French and German fluently.
4. Finally, a surprisingly useful trick: when presented with information that you don’t want to be true, it seems you can usually just ignore it and ask someone else until you get the answer you want. This is particularly useful when told that something is ‘impossible’. For example, if told that it’s impossible to get tickets for such-and-such a train, just ask someone else, and repeat until you get the required answer.

I’ll arrive in Moscow on Monday, and leave the following day for Tallinn, Estonia. After that, my route will depend how quickly I am able to locate a ship bound for the Kingdom of Sweden, in the far north, from where I have heard that it is possible to take another boat to the city of Newcastle. From there I will complete the journey to London in a locomotive of the Great North Eastern Railways.

Can’t write properly now: this internet cafe is among the most dimly-lit of places, and my eyes are screaming at me to leave! leave!

I’m in Yangshuo – a small town a little way south of the more famous town of Guilin. It’s a nice place, though with a slightly strange atmosphere that probably comes of a small Chinese town being filled with shops and bars aimed at Western backpackers. The scenery is incredible, but it would be much better to put up some photos than try to describe it (unfortunately, though, I can’t do that right now). Postscript: back in the UK, now I can add pictures!

Now I think about it, I never did actually explain quite what I’m doing…

For a while I’ve had two essentially unconnected, but mutually compatible travel plans brewing in my head. Firstly, ever since I visited Jess in China the year before last, I’ve been planning to go back and travel in the south of China for a month or so (in fact, two years ago I came back from China so excited that for a few days I seriously considered using almost all my annual leave to go straight back the following month).

Secondly, I’ve been thinking since I-don’t-know-exactly-when that I’d like to return from Japan (specifically the small island in Okinawa that I lived on for my first two years) to London without using any planes. I have two reasons for wanting to do this: firstly, since I have no deadline to be back in the UK, I can’t see any reason to use a form of transport that is much more environmentally destructive than the slower alternatives. I think human beings have a stunning ability to mistake ‘socially acceptable’ for ‘morally justifiable’ (I’ll have to stop here, lest this turn into a somewhat beside-the-point-at-hand tirade about the way most public ‘moral debates’ seem to concern what rights minorities deserve, and are conducted by people who see it as an unfortunate necessity that their affordable footwear is assembled by people in distant countries who work fourteen-hour days in horrendous conditions for just enough money to stay alive…)

Anyway, I’ve flown far too much while living in Japan, and it has left a bad taste in my mouth: how can I, knowing how destructive and wasteful flying is, legitimately claim to be concerned about the environment while continuing to do it, entirely unnecessarily, several times a year? “Yeah, I know it’s bad, but how else do I go on holiday?” doesn’t cut it any more than “Yeah, it’s unfortunate that these shoes are produced in inhuman conditions, but those other shoes are so much more expensive.”

That aside, my other reason for wanting to travel overland is: because it’s fun.

Travelling very long distances by boat and train can be a bit trickier than catching a single flight, but it’s actually much more straightforward than I’d expected (even getting my Russian visa – a notoriously frustrating one to sort out – only took a few days via a travel agent in Hong Kong who specialise in trans-Siberian travel). I’ve also found Seat 61 a very useful source of information, too – it has nice, clear guides to travelling by train and boat from London to just about everywhere.

[May just pointed out that comments weren’t working. I’ve fiddled with the settings and it seems they should be now (though I now have to delete 45 spam comments a day – pshk). Sorry about that.]

[However: now I seem to be getting bombarded with comment spam. I hope whoever is responsible suffers extremely awkward social situations and serious inconveniences and setbacks almost continuously until they stop. I’ve turned up my spam filter settings again, but please do let me know if your comment gets swallowed.]

This week I am in Hong Kong. Good God, though – Hong Kong is pretty good. It’s a huge, beautiful skyscrapered city, like a condensed, livelier version of Tokyo, set on a cluster of small and pretty semi-tropical islands. It feels like an imaginary city: like someone has thrown together all these random bits and pieces of other cities and cultures to make a place that isn’t quite Chinese and isn’t quite European. “Trams? Yeah, let’s have some of those. And skyscrapers. And steeply sloping pedestrian-only streets full of cafés – yeah, like in Paris. And let’s have old nineteen-thirties-style ferries and a pristine subway system. And let’s run an 800m escalator up that hill.”

And then, you can get on a boat, and in forty minutes you’re on a lush, forest-covered island where only a few thousand people live, with a giant buddha looming out of the mist.

It surely can’t be China: in all the stations there are people protesting about [deleted]* and handing out leaflets denouncing the Chinese government. Which would get you in a lot of trouble only a few miles north of here. And yet it is…

I could live here, I think.

Only… hot! It’s only April, and it’s already like June in Okinawa. I can just about handle Okinawa’s August now, but I suspect HK might be too much for me.

The other thing I’ve done while here is buy my trans-Siberian ticket. So: I will be leaving Beijing on the 10^th of May, on a direct train to Moscow. Which will mean five days on a train. Which (I realise now) will mean five days without a shower. If you happen to be in Moscow on the 15^th May, avoid me.

* deleted – because it just occurred to me that it would be pretty stupid to use a word that meant this site got blocked by the various filters and prevented me accessing it once I’m back in China proper. The deleted word is the name of a religious movement that is, to say the least, not popular with the powers that be in Beijing.

• Chinese acrobats – possibly the actual most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. Imagine being able to do a backflip ten feet into the air and land perfectly on the upraised feet of someone else who’s standing on their head! You would surely be tempted to do it in public just to startle people.
• Whole skyscrapers used as TV screens.
• A number of Germans in medieval costume, including a man in full chain mail, trying to hail a taxi.
• A man putting his jumper on the pavement in front of a bus stop and setting fire to it, for no clear reason I could make out.
• Toilets with no cubicles. Shock! After two years in Japan, with its onsens and rotenburos (hot baths), I can now do public nudity, but public shitting (even by other people) is still frankly too avant-garde for me.
• Beautiful Yuyuan Ming gardens. Apparently designed for hide and seek – full of winding paths between (and over, and under) big rocks, hidden passages and crevices, little wooden follies, and dividing walls, not to mention tiny ponds and bridges.

Hmm, I wonder how I can put up the photos I’m taking…
postscript: I can’t.
post-postscript: now I’m back in the UK I can…

I’m in China!

More specifically, I’m in Shanghai!

Kyoto was freezing, and although the cherry trees were in bud I didn’t quite catch the blossom. I did get snow to make up for it, though. In my last few days in Japan for some reason I developed an inexplicable craving for ‘omrice‘ – rice wrapped in a thin omelette, which is odd in that it seems to be a Western-style dish that is Japanese. For almost the whole time I was in Japan I hardly ever ate it, and then right at the last minute I realised that it is brilliant and ate it at every opportunity.

I met up with Graeme and Kasumi for a last wander round Kyoto, and then on Friday morning I went across to Osaka and boarded the boat for Shanghai. I’ve ridden three boats so far (Okinawa – Kagoshima, Fukuoka – Osaka, and Osaka – Shanghai), and each one has been better than the previous one. The one to Shanghai was great – very comfortable, and much more sociable than plane travel. The only downside is that 36 hours after I got off the boat, I’m still swaying slightly, though that’s more strange than unpleasant.

Last night I wandered up and down the Bund – the grand European-style riverside in Shanghai – ate a big Chinese meal, and then went to a bar to see a great jazz band for free! I haven’t been to that sort of gig in Japan at all, and have missed it. The bar was full of people of probably at least a dozen nationalities, but had none of the artificial, limbo-like feeling that ‘foreigner bars’ in Japan tend to have – probably because foreigners are much less out of the ordinary here. The city is a crazy mix of ramshackle and futuristic. I didn’t really plan to come here, but I’m glad I have, and I’m considering staying a couple of days longer than I’d planned before I catch the overnight train to Hong Kong…

It’s the summer holidays, I’m on a tropical island, the sea is the temperature of a warm bath, and… I have to come into school and sit at my desk every day. Drinking coffee from a tin cup. Argh! I just want to go snorkelling!

So. Xi’an.

Thirteen sleepless hours later, at about half six in the morning, we arrived in Xi’an. First stop was the Youth Hostel, where we sat in the darkened bar and drank black coffee until our blood was circulating again and we were ready to go back out into the light.

On the way to Xi’an, I had been bugged by a niggling memory from when I went to the Miho Museum, near Kyoto, and saw an exhibition of pottery from Xi’an – I remembered seeing a photo of something beautiful and thinking “I have to see that at some point”. So when Jess suggested going to Xi’an, my reaction was “Yes! Definitely! Because then we can see the… the… um… the beautiful thing of Xi’an.” For the weeks leading up to going to China, I wrestled with my brain, trying to beat a more detailed memory out of it. By the time we got there, I’d managed to add only one detail: the Beautiful Thing of Xi’an had lots of blue tiles on it. Probably.

Despite the fact that we were only there for two days, I felt like a pretty hardcore traveller: partly because of sleep-deprivation – the air conditioning in the room in the (otherwise splendid) Youth Hostel wasn’t working so the room was stiflingly hot – partly because my luggage consisted of only a pair of pants and socks, a small towel, and Jess’ acoustic guitar, and partly because of the huge amount we managed to see in such a short space of time (and not having slept for two nights)… The Small Wild Goose Pagoda (pictured, top) is one of the strangest, most beautiful buildings I’ve seen. I was very glad we went despite the Rough Guide’s lack of enthusiasm for it – I’ll be less of a slave to the travel guide in future. The grounds of the Great Mosque were beautiful and incredibly peaceful, and when I passed through its grounds and saw the mosque itself, with its big, blue-tiled roof, I realised that it was none other than the Beautiful Thing of Xi’an itself.

Right. Although I haven’t even mentioned the Terracotta Warriors, life is pleasantly hectic at the moment, and so I have to go: it’s festival season on my island, so I’ve got to go to Eisa (Okinawan drumming dance) practice, and after that my friend Y-san is doing a Sanshin (Okinawan banjo) performance and workshop on the beach (picture below, taken with my mobile phone this afternoon) for a bunch of kids, so I’m going to that, and afterwards I fully intend to sleep on the beach. But before all that, I need a shower and something to eat. So…

中國

Guess where I’ve been? Only China, is what!

I went there to visit Jess who was living in Beijing and is now, as we speak, probably hurtling towards Europe across the icy tundra on the trans-Siberian express. Wearing, I would like to think, a (vegetarian) mink coat. To be honest, China is so big and exciting that my head hurts when I try and think what to tell you about it.

I spent the first few days seeing the sights of Beijing (北京). I hired a bike, which makes getting round Beijing much more fun – partly because the main streets are all outrageously, imposingly wide and long (which makes for boring walking), and partly for the edge that the threat of imminent death lends to sightseeing. There’s something thrilling about being in the middle of a flock of bicycles weaving like fish through traffic on a busy intersection.

I’m not going to do my usual thing of trying to describe how amazing the places I saw were. What can I really say about the Great Wall of China? It’s more than six thousand kilometres long, dammit. What can you say to that? Nothing, because words are very small things, and they would just bounce harmlessly off it, as its builders intended. All I can say is that you should go there without fail, and while you’re at it, the Temple of Heaven is also outrageously spectacular and excellent.

After Beijing, we travelled on the overnight train to Xi’an (西安). Thirteen hours in ‘Hard Seat’ class – from the ominous name (and my assumptions about trains in developing countries), I expected narrow wooden benches. In fact, ‘Hard Seat’ is very similar to Standard Class on a GNER train from London to Edinburgh. But still, thirteen hours is hard on the buttocks, and also on the mind (chances of sleep are minimal). We whiled away the night eating tomato omelette and fried rice in the buffet car (which is actually a lot better than GNER), and inventing a range of radical new metaphors and similes. There was a lovely community atmosphere in the carriage, and I gathered a crowd by trying to learn to count to ten in Chinese.

…Wait! This is really exciting – I just typed “counting to ten in Chinese” into Google, because I tried writing how the numbers sound to me (“ii, ar, san, su…”), and then thought ‘wait! there must be a proper way of writing them in roman script! I know—I’ll check the internet’. And it turns out that there is only one occurrence of “counting to ten in Chinese” on the whole internet, which makes that a Googlewhack, which is a rare and beautiful thing, even if it does link you into Chapter 14 of a story called ‘The Wedding’, which begins:

Meilin, unlike her cousin and most of her family, had no magic. She could not sense nearby sources of power, nor could she manipulate the elements to aid her in battle. Nevertheless, her spine tingled with a sense of danger.

Right. Since (a) I’ve sidetracked myself, (b) I’ve written more than enough anyway, and (c) it’s past home-time and I need a coffee … I’m going to stop writing now. I’ll tell you about why Xi’an is interesting next time. Goodbye.

Nothing to do with China, this. Or Japan, for that matter. For anyone using Windows XP: I found an interesting little feature yesterday. Try going to control panel > display > appearance, clicking on effects…, and then selecting ‘cleartype’ (from the drop-down menu) as the method to smooth screen fonts. Look at that! A lot of the fonts become a lot more pretty-looking and legible. It’s a bit hit and miss: certain fonts become blurry, but others (like boring old Arial and Times New Roman) become much prettier. That this nice little feature is so tucked away as to be almost impossible to find is so typical of Windows’ bad design (I still can’t get my head round why you press a button labelled ‘Start’ to turn the computer off…), but it’s worth knowing about. Oh, by the way, I think it might only work for lcd screens.