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8 hours every other day on rickety buses skipping along unsealed roads, cramping legs stuck to ears, an old man’s dozing head slumped on my shoulder and his drool slipping precariously down his lip, cut-and-paste hostel placards shoved in my face on arrival, itchy sheets, bed bugs, underlying planks broken in 2, snoring (often my own, needs to be said)…

For these reasons, 2 hours tapping away amongst the spitting, slurping, tunelessly wailing, shouting, staring, raspingly chatting on mobiles and farting denizens of a net cafe late at night is becoming unpalatable.

Close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and sing la la la la la la until I have the leisure to write it all in an unseemly batch and back date them.

Lead with your headline story they say, so in a Tarantino style fractured narrative, it is day 4 of Big Hairy Laowai’s journey through Western China, and he is being unceremoniously sheperded into the back-seat of a Police (Jincha) Car, to be taken to the station for questioning.

It was my first full day in Dali. I grabbed some breakfast baozi, picked up my mountain bike from the hire shop and rode to nearby Erhai Hu (Ear-Shaped Lake). This meant traversing the cobbled streets at half seven in the morning, dodging commuters, school kids, the open stream that runs through the town, people lugging baskets, motor vehicles and everything else a semi-pedestrianised Chinese street can throw at you. I slalomed with considerable finesse, passed through the eastern gate and rode down to the lake for an early morning view, before rejoining the main lakeside highway. Field workers were lazily pedalling their way to the day’s crop, so I rode half a foot outside the bicycle lane. Bulky tour buses blaring their horns chugged incessantly past my left shoulder.
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So, the evil empire graciously permitting its employees a 3 day holiday (read - could not attract any potential students), I took the cue and shot off to Emei Shan with Caligula and the boy. Emei is one of the 4 principal holy Buddhist mountains in China, and offers a rewarding, atmospheric ascent to its 3099 metre peak and several fascinating cultural sites on the way. More importantly, it is infested with monkeys. My Chinese experience has shown me that monkeys are the base currency of universal humour. See mancub, they wanna be like you (ooo), wannna talk like you (ooo), walk like you (ooo ooo ooo) but are stupider and clumsier, while there’s none of the taboo of laughing at mongloids, Farrelly Brothers style. Oobee do. It suited one of my classes to change my name to monkey, and whenever I held up a picture of a monkey in an animal vocab lesson, it drew peals of laughter. And I just thought it was an example of British irony. What other word could you spontaneously utter, aside from flange to liven up the dullest of dinner conversations, job interviews or court proceedings? I would have ticked the Emei Shan box at some point anyway, but stories from travellers of these Tibetan Macaques jumping out from the trees to steal from hapless climbers, hopping around temples and battling with government appointed old-women-with-sticks for mountain supremacy made me approach the trip with unconcealed relish. Monkey relish! See how funny that was?
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My friend Ole (n) is one in a million. Maybe a million and a half. That’s roughly the population of Santai, a relatively small county in Sichuan province, and he’s the only one who needs to shave daily, celebrate Xmas and sit while he sh*ts - he’s the one resident whitey. Although he has constantly visited Chengdu, I have never been out to Santai until 2 weeks ago, and have since been again.

Its always welcome to get out of the city in much the same way as its a pleasure to get back to it. Your bus extricates itself from the encircling tangle of ring roads marking the liveable city, passes through the wheezing chimney stacks and factory yards of the industrial belt and enters into everyone’s image of China proper. The horizon expands until it is boundless, and you are among the wide open farming plains. Vigorous, fecund vegetation strives above the competitive mass and arches shoots across the bows of its neighbour, swamps buildings, infests dividing hedges and threatens to dominate. Narrow, labrynthine chasms are cut into these imposing fields, through which families knowingly weave in order to tend their crops. As the city is left further behind, small hills approach and become rolling mountains, little brothers of the great ranges that enclose the Sichuan basin. Those nearest are pocked with swathes of trees, those in the middle distance coloured with lifeless dull blues, those behind shrouded with the layers of mist that characterise all landmarks in this province to a degree.
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Last week was a welcome break. Not that I needed the week holiday, sandwiched between the end of school semester and summer camp, for any kind of recharge of the teaching batteries, far from it. The last couple months have been cruisy. More a chance to get out of the city and escape the everyday’s-a-Friday-when-you’re-a-flaky-laowai-teacher hedonism bubble. Nearly didn’t do it - the prospect of another easy week in Chengdu - to complement the previous 12 - nearly swung it. But myself and Eva, ex-co-employee of the Evil Empire, made our way to the train station late Sunday night. Train stations, considering the immense city populations, are always thriving, constant rushes for departures, swathes of people settled outside on mats, or squatting down, passing the time with newspapers and dojitsu, hours and hours at a time, cabs rushing in and out, and the inevitable calls of the hawker.

The guy next to me in this net cafe keeps drawing all of his phlegm up through his nasal passages and just unloading it on the floor. Doesn’t bother me on the street, but when its in this proximity, I can hear every fricative scrape along the canal, and its spattering an inch from my be-sandaled feet. The worst though is the noodle eating - first of all the tumorous, invasive suck then the wet slap of the lips as it is ingested - real personal bugbear. You’re allowed the occasional I-hate-China moment for sanity’s sake.
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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.
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