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Feel like pure filth today, sitting in the staffroom with an age before my next and last class of the day. Overslept the alarm and have to do a single make-up class post lunch, which of course spans a deathly dull 3 hours, accompanied only by the faltering tinkle of Nutcracker being practised to death in the music room above my head.

I went to the small mountain town of Songpan in the first week of May, during the Labour Day holiday, one of China’s three National weeks of holiday per year. I was accompanied by 4 other ESL teachers. Well, 3 other teachers, as a ticket was lost in the ether during our journey to the bus station. This brought to a head the frustrations between 2 of the them, Evan and Richard (or Eva and Richar according to most of our students, who lack the ability to end any names with consonants), who are also conveniently apartment-mates. Richar threw the ticket at Eva (more of a symbol than anything else - that leaf of paper ain’t hurting anyone) and yelled just go! Slow burning tensions nurtured over 8 weeks blew up at that moment. I can safely say I had nothing to do with this unseemly business, because from half five in the morning I had been repeatedly purging the contents of my stomach, hunched over Eva’s porcelain. The anticipation of spending the next 10 hours sitting on a cramped Chinese coach juddering and rocking over a poorly surfaced winding mountain pass was not pleasant.

Having been in China for 2 1/2 months prior without illness, I had been strutting around, proud of my cast-iron constitution as others were falling prey to various ailments. Eva had the sh*ts in school, which would be an unthinkably terrible scenario - running out halfway through lessons to the school squatters, all to the amusement of your students? Forgetting your paper? Not quite getting there in time? I however, thought I was a contender. I could have been somebody. It was not to be. The root of this illness was late-night saokao. This translates over as Street Barbecue. Enough to start the alarm bells. Entrepeneurs wheel out portable trolley / grill combos, on which sit plastic trays replete with morsels of meat and veg impaled on wooden sticks. You pick out your selection, and then it is heavily brushed with oil and constantly doused in blizzards of chili powder and MSG as the stall-holder dextrously turns the sticks.

The setting is choice; a late night social gathering at the street corner, sitting round tiny fold out tables on dinky kiddy stools ( I have bust one when sitting down too fast when drunk), shooting the breeze as the night goes past. However, the next morning I was cursing myself for enjoying food left out on balmy nights with no hint of it being kept fresh, slathered with fairly toxic powders and pastes and cooked on something whose power barely exceeds a Fisherprice my-first-light-bulb-toy-oven. As is the case in such gastric disasters, I sat groggy and penitent, a sense came to me of how the particularly offending item (because i had narrowed it down in my deliberations, undercooked pork) smelt, tasted, the bristly texture of chili and MSG, the decrepit quality of the meat and its slither down my throat - still provokes shudders writing that now, and its nearly a month later. The stirring came to me as we were approaching our first stop off, a small satellite town called Dujiangyan (proud owners of an irrigation dam more than 2 millenia old, stat fans). I clambered over my friend to the window, and let loose. This was fantastic entertainment to the majority of the Chinese travellers on the bus, and peals of applause and laughter greeted my outburst. We ascended into the mountains, and started traversing winding, rocky roads perched on sheer escarpments, and as we stopped off for another break, the bilious rush rose again, so I ran to the nearest greenery to avoid making a mess of the road or street. Unfortunately it was an old Chinese woman’s (Tai po)vegetable garden. Her quite reasonable reaction was to rant incomprehensibly at me and spray my legs with her hose, gesturing that I should do it in the gutter instead. Another encore, this time one hour from our destination, again whipped back by the wind onto the flank of the bus. Although the laowai merely at rest is a spectacle for the Chinese, this was the all singing, all dancing version. The guy cleaning the bus at each rest stop was suitably unamused. A further, wrenching dry-retching finale followed as we reached our destination, and this cleared me out sufficiently. The weather was also a welcome antiodote to humid, hot chengdu, being cool and crisp at this mountainous altitude.

Songpan is in the middle of nowhere, a small cranny on the mountainous Sichuan / Gansu border, but as soon as we stepped off the bus, a neatly coiffeured chinese fellow with immaculate English buzzed up on his scoot-ay and laid out his agenda. The guy, English name Mike, is the Don of Songpan. He essentially runs the lao-wai hotel, is heavily involved in the lao-wai cafe, and owns the horse trekking company He has his fingers in many pies, including, as we would discern through his later recommendation of hairdressing establishments, the Puntang Pie. And all, I think, because he can communicate with whitey. It seems that his example has been taken on board by all of Songpan. As we walked down the sham-olde China fake tourist street, replicated Qing Dynasty architecture and replicated Qing Dynasty goods (and cowboy hats - this is a Tibetan town in the mountains), a toddler sprung out as quick as his doddering legs would let him, and yipped Hellohoware yooooooo! The age the kid was, I’m not sure that an English kid could do that… It was the same story, as we paced further, all the ma-mas sitting in their shops would spot us, grab their children, signal our presence to them and coax them to say helloooo! or how are you! The proportion of English speakers was startlingly high compared to a modern city like Chengdu. I suppose for most people in Songpan the tourist dollah is THE lucrative livelihood.

Although we had been told of the large Tibetan population of Songpan, there also appeared to be a Muslim community in the dwellings beyond tourist-trinket street.

One of our guides was Muslim. He was not called Dicky. The other guide, an ethnic Han-Chinese, was called Dicky, according to Don Mike. Non-Dicky was less fortunate and not afforded an English name, and due to Dicky patently being the alpha male, Non-Dicky would henceforth be Kato. After the initial meeting, we walked our horses through the streets until our trail began. Correction, ponies rather than horses. And as they were overlaid with camping equipment, our bags and more significantly me, I began to question their ability to trek for 5 days in the mountains. They were OK on the first mountain, some rests, some encouragement from Dicky and Kato, both verbal (a strange rhythm of whistles and tch!) and physical (whipping with branches, kicking in the head, that sort of thing). I noted similarities between the wheezing pony and my recently departed colleague in both physique and behaviour, so naturally I felt they should share the same name and christened it accordingly. This squat bulky pony was obsinate, refused to heed the sensible words of others and had a worrying habit of driving me close to the edge. The fit was seamless. We walked down the other side of the mountain to give the horses a break, and stopped off for lunch in a small Tibetan town. Rain threatened, so we moved on quickly, past the faded multi-colours of the countless billowing prayer flags, and ascended another mountain. The true abilities of the horses came to light; it was raining, it was deadly steep and slippy, and in all honesty I didn’t feel my horse and I were in a circle of trust, so I stepped off to walk for 20 minutes. It was incredibly tiring, we reached our campsite for the night, and were told in broken English that we had reached 4200 metres. Dizzy…. as I sat glassy eyed and panting, our guides brought out their cigarettes and heartily offered us one. While we had walked just a few hundred metres at altitude, Dicky and Kato had climbed and ascended both mountains on foot, guided, encouraged and beaten the ponies, and even reassured us (mainly me) in their broken English that we were not to worry. This consisted of the light-hearted OK! for casual use, and the exhortation No dangerous! when I seemed about ready to hop off D-. It was a little worrying that their strongest lexical areas of English were reassuring people that death was not imminent. We had supper (not meaning to sound like Lord Fauntleroy, but we were having many meals, so had to divide them somehow), some squash slathered in MSG (again - there is no escaping these noxious crystals) and hard, starchy, Turkish style flat-bread, par for the next few days. We were taken down to the Mineral Springs, a lush pool enclosed by a thick ring of pines and fed by a Kodak-moment waterfall. Dicky took us down a winding forest path, sinking empty bottles onto tree branches so that we could navigate back to camp, and seemed to be lauding the pool as an idyllic place to relax and splash about. We paid our 10 kwai invasive-cultural tax to Dicky so he could pass it on to the Tibetan natives of the area, then he disappeared. We stripped, reached the edge of the water and pulled up sharply - freezing, and surrounded by a carpet of frost. It was time to chicken out, but by this time a gaggle of Chinese tourists had appeared, and began to goad us in passable English that were we not to jump in, we would proclaim ourselves as cowards. I took the initial icy plunge and scrabbled up the bank towards my towel like a monkey on fire. I had second thoughts about drying off, principally to embarrass my reluctant friends, so I jumped in again, a quick doggy-paddle around the fringe, then a 10 foot bomb from a high bank. Despite the past entreaties of my school, there is something to be said for peer pressure, as the other two flopped in, and subsequently matched the electric blue pallor of my skin. Fortunately, Evan had constructed a fire in foresight. Otherwise, death. Let the record show: me first, and three times, then Olen, then infentesimly later Eva.

We made it back as dusk drew in, so we sat together in the communal area (two posts supporting a ragged tarpaulin sheet) played some cards, drank a little baijio (which even Kato joined in with - infidel) and through communicating with Dicky and Kato in a mixture of Chinese and English, topped up our primitive han yu.

Everyone was growing a little tired, so as the fire faded to a liminal glow, we passed through the bucketing rain and retired to our tent. Being the last one in, it was my brief to close up the entrance tent-flaps. As the weather was so severe, I devised what seemed a cunning plan in my beijiu haze. I took off my shoes, placed my hands in them, and crawled bare-footed and shoe-handed to the entrance, a fiendish conceit that would ensure neither my hands nor torso would be muddied. This pragmatic approach encountered a hitch when I realised that I could not practically remove a hand from its respective shoe-encasement without either having to plant it back on the muddy ground or have my trunk collapse on it. Beijiu exacerbated this conundrum, and I was arched for several minutes in this jungle-cat pose, complaining bitterly, all to a chorus of wheezy laughter that only a drop of the clear stuff (especially at 4000 metres plus) could provoke. It was resolved when the clamour woke our guides, and Dicky came to bail me out. Not something to impress the grand-kids.

After this farce, I anticipated a night of sweet oblivion. However, I was set on a rigid, uneven patch of ground, and Sergio (an Ibizan native who I was sleeping next to) developed an unnerving tendency to shuffle his torso into position and gyrate his groin frenetically against my prone form in an attempt to force me out towards the tent perimeter - a move later termed The Ibizan Grind. I may not be the ideal sleeping partner in a tent, but still… never camp with Europeans. A rough night became a beautiful morning. While we were sleeping, a thin patina of snow had fallen, the horses were roaming and the panorama of successive lofty peaks, lush forests and swooping valleys were decked with thin morning fog. Konica, colours are calling me….. The ground was a thick swirl of mud and slush however, and inspired very little confidence in D-, particularly in light of the previous day’s misdemeanours. I fought my primal survival-instinct as we rode up the mountain, we dismounted and descended by ourselves, slipping and tumbling four-legged through a boggy forest. Caked in mud and insidous damp, I was sharply mindful that it was my only set of clothes for the five days.

Although the saokao was no longer causing me to vomit, it was badly affecting the other maintenance shute. Awkwardly regular considering jogging up and down on C-, messy and untapered, and fluorescent yellow. Apologies for the vulgarities. I remember how I shuddered when C- (the person) informed me that it was her time, and also how her physiology was more suited to squatters than standard western toilets, backed up with a lengthy point by point explanation of the logistics involved.

The 5 day duration that we had all agreed at the outset was now in jeapordy however, as Sergio was complaining incessantly of his throaty flu and other vaguely connected respiratory illnesses, and wanted to go back to Chengdu to recover. The Chengdu that’s covered with a thick canopy of smog. The strength of this argument’s logic was threatening to surpass even mine during the tent-closing incident of the previous night. The traditional Chinese medicine that Sergio was popping on a minutely basis was having little effect, so Olen offered him his scarce supply of Western Pharmaceuticals. Having been in China all of 4 months, Sergio took the party-line and resisted the mumbo-jumbo potions of this strange and terrible American witch -doctor, and returned to leafing avidly through his Encyclopedia Britannica in an effort to find names for the new, ever-more dire and esoteric spate of afflictions that had set in over the course of the last half-hour.

His terminal condition lifted with miraculous rapidity when we caught up with another trekking party halfway down a dull tarmacced road. Amongst others, there were 4 young English girls. Even Dicky and Kato spotted this upheaval of spirit, and began making aptly juvenile jibes towards the Spaniard. We camped up (easier for some than others), and then made our way to the fabled Hot Springs, an hour’s walk and a fairly steep 75 kwai admission. Evan, Olen and I had complicitly decided that this attraction would make our trip. Not only would we enjoy it, but it would also act as a perfect mid-point palliative to get Sergio back on track. We effused at length about the Springs, trying to convince both Sergio and ourselves that it would make the 5 day stretch bearable for his limited constiution. Suiting the Iberian motif, it was our Eldorado a much talked-of, nebulous legend that would make any arduous journey worthwhile. We climbed inexorable steps and passed countless lakes and pagodas, before we set our eyes on this anticipated majesty. As it turned out, it was in fact our Eldorado, the equally legendary crap British soap opera set on a Spanish Time-Share and cancelled in its first series. It was certainly not hot, and the spring was unquestionably limp. No-one was submerged, or even near to it. Dozens of Chinese tourists sat languidly around the rim, stretching the infrequent toe to the water in genteel fashion. Having come this far, we had to go in, and I was again the singing-dancing laowai pioneer. The pool floor was comprised of jagged wooden planks that jutted out at crazed angles, all covered by drifts of lime-green slime. This, coupled by Sergio’s unsuccessful attempt to get some from any of the girls around that evening’s camp-fire, pointed to his early departure and a logistical nightmare for us. Every two riders need one guide, so Sergio couldn’t leave with either Dicky or Non-Dicky. We eagerly suggested he swap with one of the girls and head back to Songpan with their group, but their time frame didn’t allow it (that sounds like a bit of a brush-off in typing hindsight). So we compromised. One more day for him, but one less day from the schedule. And the day in question was the biggy.

We turned off from the banal tarmac and passed several creeks and a Tibetan cowboy on our way to the base of Songpan’s loftiest peak. This meant traversing a narrow, treacherous and long-since overgrown path (all seemed as such riding D-), clogged with brambles and suffocated by withered branches. Initially, we were enthusiastic about the challenge, and that our guides should place such faith in us. This notion collapsed quickly, as it became apparent that a rider couldn’t possibly have ventured up it in over a year. I envisaged my local newspaper at home, and a lengthy article about my demise in some corner of a foreign land, the way I always do in any mildly threatening travel situation. I was following Evan’s horse’s ar*e as well as his horse (ha! Wildean sophistication) and as D- edged too close to Evan’s steed on a narrow ledge, it performed a jitterbug shuffle, which Eva reacted to with admirable survival skills by barely slipping his feet from the stirrups and tumbling to safety, while the horse juddered uncontrollably down a 50 metre bank to a creek below. Eva was understandably shocked, as if he had not been able to extricate himself the horse may have been upended by his additional ballast and tumbled over him several times. The reaction of our guide’s? Dragging the horse gruffly up the bank and booting in the head. These guys were cowboys. Not in the Carol Vorderman Kitchen nightmares mold but more the sh*t-eating John Wayne version.

We decided to walk the extra 200 metres or so to the campsite. Sergio continued to recuperate, so the remaining three of us set off for a Famous 5 adventure. At 4500 metres, things were moving slowly, lame jokes became funny and staring into the distance became a way of seeing things.. that were… a little bit…. further…. away. In these conditions, and having the experience of walking up that one really big sand dune at home, we decided to track to the very peak. No set path, no gloves, ripped to sin by hordes of brambles, the peak kept eluding us, as every time we reached it, another peak would arch slightly and invitingly above. 20 minutes spent climbing before a break became 10 became 5, until walking 10 steps was followed by 10 minutes of leaning back against a suitable rock and admiring the stunning vista of the range. Time to give up we decided, but not before naked hairy laowai pictures at dangerously high altitude, which may yet be spread on the web to further propogate the Yeti myth. We descended in the space of 5 minutes to the communal smoky, ramshackle hut. Altitude, tiredness, smoke, Sergio flashing his head-strap reading torch in our eyes - it was a long evening. Hard rain clamourous thunder and bolts of lightning whipped down and hurtled through the rafters. I stepped out for a moment to escape the smoke, and saw green pulses sheeting through the sky, and asked myself if this tempestuous night was some kind of forbearer of Judgement Day, or alien invasions, or some kind of blockbusting f*ck-up, until Eva reminded that Songpan has an airfield. Ahem.

We set off at the start of day 4 on our mission to baby-sit a near-collapse Sergio back to Songpan (let the Sergio record show that the night after, back in Chengdu and alone, he felt sufficiently well to go out drinking and hook up). We continued our ascent by horse, but the near-summit was sheeted in thick ice, and following Evan’s slipping and sliding mare was not conducive to my mental health, so I hopped off and walked the remnant. My guides convinced me to assume the saddle again, but in a further behavorial tic that convinced me absolutely of the symbiosis between this plodding beast and my ex-colleague, it began bucking and drove towards the precipice. It was roughly the same point in both relationships that both mares had bared their true mindsets, obsinate, selfish, throwing tantrums like a toddler and unwilling to put up with me any further. Some of you may sympathise with that last point.

Despite the continuous jibing from that point forth from Dicky and Non, I put my trust in my feet. I assented with New-Testament magnanimity to their refrain zuotien, ni shi naanhai. Mingtian, ni shi neurhai (yesterday you were a boy, today you’re a girl). I was convinced as we followed the breathtaking spine of the mountain range however, to jump back on.

Dicky invited us back to his pad for lunch, and upon the promise of a further day-long trip, the remaining 3 of us signed up. That evening, and heavily fuelled with beijiu, we strolled around downtown Songpan, made 2 babies cry at my very appearance, ate some Arabic bread and won a game of outdoor pool despite the gnarled baize, staggered table-legs, avid audience and the odd miss a ball, put another back on the table rule. On our return through central Songpan we observed the town’s evening event from the vantage point of the city walls. 500 people or more line-dancing in the local square.

This was the last day that I would ever ride C-, thank God. We trekked out over a gentle mountain ridge to a Tibetan monastrey. Though it was a pedestrian ride, I still didn’t trust my horse too much, and asked to walk wherever it deviated mildly from the norm. I thought she had one last surprise for me.

By this time Dicky had been revealed as non-Dicky, and Non-Dicky was truly Dicky. Like the Tale of the Prince and the Pauper, no? Forcing through our naming logic, the artist formerly known as Dicky, then non-Dicky, had logically to become the Green Hornet.

At the village we followed some trudging old women around the village, and watched them as they spun lumbering brassy prayer wheels in a clockwise direction (pretty dull) and took pictures of all the ornate decorations, prayer-flags, prayer-wheels, rambling yaks, like a good tourist should. A small boy, the monkish disciple thing, was overjoyed to see us and guide us around the temple structure, the majority of which he had intricately painted. We crossed to a riverside field for lunch with the boy trailing us, so we played football with him. He asked us for e-mails and phone numbers, which we duly obliged him with. I doubt the village had the capacity for either, but he valued the paper as a prize in itself, as he seemed a little lonely stuck out there.

We presented our guides with large glossy photos from our trip, some beijiu and a carton of ciggies. Time to come home for the last time. And this is where the controversy of my Chinese name began, as it has been made apparent that for cultural (let that read novelty) value, every mid to long term roundeye must have one. So the guides decided upon Da Xi, which they translated through charades as Da = big Xi = strong. A little dull and generic for a big foreigner I considerd. I wanted monkey in there somewhere. I suggested, with little understanding of Chinese grammar, Da Mao Hotzer Wan (= Big Hairy Monkey King) but they were having none of it.

When I asked them to write the characters for me back at the village, they reacted sheepishly and we discerned they were illiterate. They had also got the oral components wrong - Da Li is Big Strong. Da Xi is either Big Happiness (sounds like a Las Vegas Drag Act) or Big Rhino. Maybe they were being facetious. I don’t know if Chinese names are like poker hands, you can choose to stick or hit again. It seems to have stuck though, as other laowai are referring to me as such as well as Grandma from the local noodle shop. On the way down to Songpan, we ran into a huge Muslim funeral procession, which embarrassed hat-less True Dicky a little.

After roughing it for 5 days, all remaining 3 of us acted like little b*tches, and were pampered for the rest of the day before our bus the next morning. 10 kwai (80 or 90p) was enough for a hairwash, cut, shave and a upper body massage that often seemed on the verge of transmuting into a lap-dance, from a local salon for over an hour. Don Mike recommended the place with a knowing smile and complicit wink. A further 50 kwai brought an hour’s full-body massage (the most painful experience of my life, and had to be curtailed early due to my yelps), a foot massage and medical foot treatment, which basically amounted to the poor woman busting out the industrial strength clippers and file to pare down a monstrous Chernobyl toe-nail on my left foot. It was followed by a few beers and a pizza from the laowai hangout, before we made our comparatively uneventful way home. No blowing of the chunks this time, but the driver’s decision to go 6 hours without breaks certainly tested the bladder.

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