21. LAZYBONES

I think we've run out of adventurous steam. All these months of excitement have left me feeling inclined to sitting around in cheap, sunny bars and having very little happen to me. After Laos, we managed to pass through Cambodia without really doing anything. In fairness, this probably put us more in tune with the locals than in any other country we've visited. They're not ones to over-exert themselves.

We did visit Angkor Wat, but I think pretty much everyone else in the world was there at the same time, so you probably already know about that. Then we headed to Phnom Penn, the capital. Busy, but essentially slow moving, like Hanoi on downers.

I didn't realise until I visited Cambodia the scale of the horror that the people have endured in recent history, which may explain why today they don't appear to give a hoot about anything. There's an occasional show of effort, but it's not really followed through. At our guesthouse in Phnom Penn, home-made signs had been tacked to the walls advising that drugs, prostitution, drawing on the walls and ironing in the rooms were not allowed. Well, the first thing the owner did after we checked in was try to sell us weed; he had women in the bar who if they weren't prostitutes were certainly over/under-dressed for the location; and someone had drawn a huge naked Buddha on our bathroom door. I can't prove this but I suspect there may even have been ironing going on in there. Scandalous.

Other than this naughtiness it wasn't a place that encouraged activity, rather having the feel of a Victorian madhouse or First World War field hospital about it: frazzled Englishmen and the occasional stray American sitting around drinking tea in their dressing gowns until late in the afternoon, staring dead-eyed into the middle distance and muttering occasionally to themselves. We tried to be a bit more active but the tourist sights of the city - killing fields and a former school turned Khmer Rouge prison - aren't the sort of things to write about in such a facile document as this blog.

Leaving Phnom Penn in a half-hearted search for adventure, we headed to more rural parts to visit some of the country's famous floating villages. Bobbing about on gentle waters seems to suit the Cambodian temperament, and charging foreigners $15 an hour to visit them seemed to suit the temperament of the Vietnamese lady who took us out there on her boat, so we didn't hang around long.

After that it was a few days in Kampot, a lazy river town populated almost entirely by ageing French drunkards and infant Cambodians who like terrifying foreigners by leaping out of the bushes and bellowing "Hello" at them, then we came back into Vietnam. Having realised we were doing not very much anyway, we decided we might as well do it on the beach, so headed for a lovely place called Phu Quoc island. Full of Russians, for some reason. Beautiful though. Mari, who's always more energetic and adventurous than me, went scuba diving, but I limited myself to snorkelling. The alien fish and blooming coral was possibly the most absorbing thing as I've ever seen as I bobbed a few feet above it on the service of the water. Even just bobbing about there was fun. I think I might finally be falling in with the local temperament.

20. BACK TO THE BIG BUDDHA

Buddhists: offering nothing in return

Back in Luang Prabang, the novice monks are preparing for the festival that marks the end of the rainy season and appeals to heaven for a good harvest. They nimbly fashion boats of shaped bamboo and blazingly colourful paper that they'll later float down the river dripping with lanterns.

In the sunshine outside their temples, the older novices fix together the pieces and whisper instructions to the more excitable youngsters who clamber around inside the dragon-headed boats.

Visitors are encouraged to talk to the student monks, who apparently like to practice their English. A fascinating prospect, but unfortunately it's a complete waste of time as they have nothing whatsoever to say. Activity without purpose or reward. Perhaps it's supposed to be; maybe there's some sort of lesson in there. But I think I can say that I don't need any lessons in wasting my time from a Buddhist monk. I'm already on the Seventh Level with that.

Obviously I'd like to say something more enchanting about the whole experience, but I can't. It was like tormenting animals: it's easy but it's not right.

We apprehended one of them who was lurking about near us as if he wanted a chat, but the boy was a nervous wreck: fidgeting with his robes, mumbling monosyllabic answers, shuddering his legs and gazing over our shoulders as if he was longing to be somewhere else. The whole thing had the feeling of an interrogation about it. Blazing sunshine, the unwilling suspect in baggy orange, Western persecutors towering over him... visions of Guantanomo Bay started nagging at my mind.

Have you ever tried talking to anybody who's recently joined Alcoholics Anonymous? I have, funnily enough.  It's piss in the wind. They'll answer you, but it's not really them. They've sort of severed the connection. This was a bit like that.  

Of course I could blame myself for all this, I could admit that I'm too demanding, too forward, too expectant of easy answers, too brash and too European. But I didn't. I blamed Mari. You're obviously making him nervous, I said; he's been educated in isolation with other young men, he's not used to talking to women. I need to talk to them by myself.

Mari was more than happy to let me continue my persecution of religious figures single-handed so I went off wandering the streets looking for another temple. Just walking the streets in Luang Prabang is fun in itself because they all have lovely names like Sissavangvong, Chittychittybangbang and Chattanouga-Choo-Choo, the tuk-tuk drivers are all asleep and there's a beautiful temple every few yards. Unfortunately I got pretty much the same response in every one.

Me: Is it ok if I watch you working?
Oldest novice: [Nods silently]
Me: The boat is for the festival?
Oldest novice: Yes
Me: It's very beautiful
Oldest novice: [Nods rather smugly, in my opinion]
Me: You've studied here for many years?
Oldest novice: Yes
Me: I've come from England. Life in Laos is different. I'm very lucky to have the chance to see this.
Infant novice: HELLO!!!!!!
Me: Erm... hello.
Infant novice: FA-RANG, FA-RANG!!! [Means, variously, 'Foreigner', 'Frenchman' or 'Long-nose', depending whose translation you believe]
Oldest novice: [Stern but indecipherable rebuke to the infant, sometimes followed by a slap on the head].
Me: Do you like to study here?
Oldest novice: Yes.
Me: Ok... well, maybe I'll just stand over there and take some photos. Is that ok?
Oldest novice: Yes please.

It's much more rewarding speaking to the ordinary people in Laos, particularly the guesthouse owners. They're all very animated. Madame Pap runs the cheapest lodgings in the village of Tad-Lo - seven mattresses lined up along a wooden floor - and is possibly the most charismatic person we've met in six countries. She says she's 45 but looks 15 years older; she's had a hard life, she explains. Her husband left her with four children to bring up and ran off to Thailand with a younger woman. He recently died from electric shock while attempting to change a light bulb. Madame Pap looks unperturbed by the news. She moves over to the light bulb and mimes out the action of a man being violently killed by electrification to make sure we get the point. Then she draws on her cigarette in the manner of a French philosopher and shrugs insouciantly, as if such an end were to be expected.

Her infant grandson is propped on the floor of her cafe, watching her wide-eyed. He also has "no Papa", she says. It seems he got sick, his belly swelled to an incredible size, then he died. Then his belly returned to normal, but by that time he was no further use to anybody. She shrugs again. It's very hot, she explains.

The child periodically bursts into unprovoked tears, as if he's understood something of the painful fates awaiting males of his line.

We were staying in a slightly more expensive place down the road - our own private shack, with larger and more interesting lizards hiding in the walls - but spent our days lounging in Madame Pap's cafe, which is the social centre of a village where nothing ever happens. Every day the manager of the tourist information office would come in for boozy three-hour lunch breaks then go and put big speakers on the window ledges of his office and blare out western rock music and snooze on the steps for the rest of the day. Local women trundled up, made half-hearted attempts to sell us trinkets, then passed out in the hammocks. If we ordered food, Madame Pap would light another cigarette and sit down for a rest. After about twenty minutes she might wander indoors in the direction of the kitchen. Another half-hour after that I might go in to find her watching TV and gently ask if she planned to start cooking soon. An hour later she'd emerge with a plate of noodles huge enough to make sure we didn't trouble her again for a while.

Down the road in Champasak, our host was the most easily amused man I've ever met. He wouldn't tell us his name; I did ask him but he just burst out laughing, like he did at everything else. At one point a German banged his head on the roof and I thought the man was going to explode with mirth. His biggest giggle, however, was reserved for when he sold us "VIP" transport arrangements to 4000 Islands. I should've known something was wrong. In the morning he walked us down to the river front, put us on a rickety four-seat wooden junk, and pushed us off while he stood on the sand shouting "good luck" and waving with both hands. I had the feeling of an early human setting off on an adventurous but naive sea discovery voyage, perhaps aiming to reach the moon. Amazingly we made it to the other side, and even more amazingly the bus turned up two hours later. Full. As I sat on the steps, my feet dangling out of the open door and over the bumpy dirt road, I wondered what the arrangements would have been if I hadn't gone for the VIP ticket. Maybe they'd have found some space for me on the roof rack. Well, at least it wasn't going very fast. If I'd fallen out I probably wouldn't even have died. Major skin loss and a big chunk out of my head, perhaps, but not death. I'm a VIP, after all.

Anyway, I don't want to engage in another prolonged Jeremiad about transport arrangements because I loved the country. And we did eventually meet a talkative monk. Maybe. On the steps of the Wat Phu temple, having cycled miles in the sun and dust to get there (VIP bikes - a full complement of wheels but no brakes) then huffed and sweated our way up the hillside. The temple was originally built as a Hindu worship complex - it's considered a template for Angkor Wat in Cambodia - but has now been taken over by the Buddhists. There's a very popular ceremony there each February where they slaughter a water buffalo by bleeding it to death and offer it's blood as a sacrifice. Now does that sound like very Buddhist behaviour to you? Locals love it, apparently, although I shouldn't imagine it's very popular with the buffalo. I couldn't get an answer to any of this from the monk, as he preferred to ask his own questions: where were we from, where have we visited so far, will we be going to his home town of Vientiane, do we like it Laos? Couldn't get away from the man. In fact, given the attitude to animal welfare, I've got reason to believe he wasn't even a real monk. He was much too interesting for that. Anyone can dress up in orange robes. I decided to get out of there before he invited us to his guesthouse and offered us some VIP transport tickets.

19. COSTLY TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON

Landing in Luang Prabang is like arriving in another world, even from Laos' nearest neighbours. And you've got to love a town whose name means "Big Buddha".

The misanthropic fever that infested me in Hanoi meant we abandoned our aim of completing this journey overland and got on the first plane out of the country. The alternative was three days of bus-bound torment, stopping overnight in Vietnamese outposts where there are probably still ageing  VC colonels who haven't heard that the war's over. Anyway, the flight took us sideways and backwards away from our ultimate destination, so it doesn't really count.

The otherness of Laos is there right from the moment we step off the plane in Luang Prabang International Airport. "Airstrip" would be a better description: a single ribbon of tarmac in an expanse of scrubbed yellow earth, jungle creeping in at the perimeter, overlooked by a single flimsy administration building. Everything is quiet once the propellers stop spluttering, but a marching military band and an African dictator on a podium wouldn't seem out of place.

Outside, the sunshine is thick and yellow as butter melting on a hot scone. Every sight and sound radiates warmth after the cold metallic clatter of Hanoi. Buddhist monks glide down the streets on bicycles, flame-coloured robes fluttering around them like fiery clouds. Colonial buildings in terracotta and dark, rich wood snooze in the shade of palm tees along the peninsula between the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers. The chirps of birds and crickets sweeten the air. Traders murmur and drowsy chants curl with the incense smoke from golden temples.

Nice, isn't it? But unfortunately we can't stay here.  Mari feels we haven't spent enough time wandering about in the wilderness - she'd have made a good Moses - so the next day it's a nine-hour bus ride to the hill tribes and jungles of the north.

The guide books promise that bus travel in Laos will be a miserable farago of breakdowns, overcrowding, vomiting locals and badly-behaved on-board livestock, but the slow climb up curved mountain roads turns out to be quite pleasant. The engine suffers only one minor breakdown, which the driver cures by hitting it with a stick, and we each have a double seat to stretch out on. We later met some people who'd hired a private minibus to avoid all the deprivations, only to have their driver invite along a man with a carrier bag full of live chickens.

The town of Luang Nam Tha is our starting point for a three-day trek in the Nam Ha National Protected Area. It's necessary to hire a guide for this, not least because the park is home to leopards, tigers, cobras, pterodactyls, polar bears, flying crocodiles, dragons, the Minotaur, and Cerberus, triple-headed Hound of Hell. Our guide, Voot, assures me I shouldn't concern myself with the tigers as those that prowl hereabouts are "quite small" and "oh, very very expensive sir". I think he might have missed the point of my question.

Luckily the fun-size tigers stayed away from us; the leeches did not. We regularly had to burn the little bastards of our skin. In spite of them I enjoyed the hike, up and down hills, through bamboo forests and along jungle streams, swimming in rivers, showering in waterfalls, and stopping in bamboo shelters to eat lunch cooked in bamboo tubes hollowed out into bong-like cooking vessels. Bamboo's really big round here.

But the highlight was overnight stays with local people. Northern Laos is ethnically rich and colourful and hosting trekkers helps tribes maintain their traditional lifestyles. We stayed one night with Khmuu people and one night with Lanten, sharing delicious meals (the raw duck's blood I could take or leave, mind), singing and drinking in the dirt-floored, bamboo-walled village bars.

These places are still remote enough for foreigners to be a source of fascination to local children, rather than a depressing begging opportunity. The children taught us rude Laos songs and I tried to help them with their English: they eventually managed a passable version of When the Boat Comes In but mangled The Blaydon Races beyond any sort of recognition. Lovely children, though. Happy as any I've met and completely undemanding of anything except a response to their curiousity. In the morning they followed us out of the village in a delighted rabble and turned out to be harder to shake off than the leeches, although in this case we were discouraged from repelling them with naked flames.

We even had the chance to visit the local school, bearing gifts of text books (the headmaster was delighted) and a football from me (the headmaster managed a thin smile). I was a touch disappointed with the response, particularly as I'd had to bargain energetically to get a decent price on the ball in Nam Tha market. When I tried to mime out to the stallholder that I ought to get a discount as I wanted to give it away for local children to play football, he seemed to think I was threatening to kick a baby if I didn't get the price I wanted. Didn't help.

Back to Nam Tha, then a two-hour minibus ride north to Muang Sing. This is the end of the road as far as travel in Northern Laos is concerned, a one-track frontier town with nothing beyond except the Chinese border (told you we were going backwards). There's really nothing to do here if you're not trekking - and even Moses admits we've had enough of that for now - except eat whole birds on sticks and drink Beer Lao. This is the only beer available in most of the country: asking for beer will get you nothing but blank stares, but say "Beer Lao" and you'll get a big, delicious bottle. It's as if they don't know there's a drink called Beer that's enjoyed in the rest of the world and think Beer Lao is their unique national secret. Well, it certainly helps to wash down grilled beak, and that's good enough for me.

18. TRAVEL SICKNESS

Hanoi is a collective madness; a pulsing hive of humanity where people are propelled, ant-like, by the momentum of the group rather than individual logic. The shared imperative - to move, to trade, to eat, to live - absorbs them into one great writhing organism and frames a snapshot of humanity as a single bloatsome parasite on the skin of the planet. To be alone among them is to be an alien species. They certainly look at me like one.

We are staying in a dilapidated guesthouse in the bowels of the old town. The buildings, the roads, the motorbikes, the people that clog the streets like dense fat, are all part of this single, breathing thing, this living machine, that swallows space and shits out rubbish everywhere. Viewed from above, all the motion might have an ominous multiplying pattern. From within it has the intensity and voracity of disease.

The only respite is Bia Hoi, the world's cheapest draft beer, sold from roadside stalls at around 15p for a big glass. Yesterday we sat at one of these stalls and watched a funeral possession. A line of ancient Buddhist nuns, spindly and shrunken, filed past us bearing flags and incense. Next came a band of men dressed like Greek holiday entertainers, playing mournful music and clanging bells. That's when I began to suspect it was a funeral and put the camera away. An old man shuffled backwards in front of the minibus that bore the coffin, bowing and nodding and muttering to the young relative who walked beside him carrying a black-framed photo of the deceased, an uncompromising-looking old woman. Behind the minibus a couple of hundred mourners plodded without expressions of grief, white bands tied round their heads. The procession turned away onto the main road, bringing a single artery to a momentary standstill. A few minutes later the band returned, instruments slung lazily over their shoulders, followed by the chattering mourners. A single cell in the body of the city had expired, and life buzzed on undisturbed.

People must grow up, marry, reproduce, spend their whole working lives and die in the old town without any sense of solitude, peace, and perhaps individuality.

There's not even escape from the fever indoors. Downstairs in our hotel a male and female staff member engage in bone-clattering arguments, roaring in each others faces, gesturing violently, shaking the floor with their stomps. I think they must be related. Several times they look likely to go for one another's throats, but instead the argument goes on, spiraling ever upwards in intensity when you thought it had started at the maximum, banging into our heads and battering away any hope of peace.

Up four narrow flights of stairs our room's unshuttable window faces out over the street. The city wails like a spoiled or starved baby. Even in the middle of the night, lone cars blare their horns into the darkness where there's nobody and nothing to get in their way. Just before 7am, hopelessly distorted public speakers start crunching out screeched propaganda speeches alternated with stirring orchestral music mangled by the ancient PA system. It stops at about 8, but by that time the shrieking, beeping and buzzing has built up into a single, constant, insurmountable blare that strangles my brain.

So the only purpose of the morning messages and music, as far as I can tell, is the same as the piss-boiling pop ballads that are slurped out with melodramatic posturing by hideous male/female duos on screens in every bus and train in the nation: that is, to fill the empty spaces, bombard the air with noise, and make sure that the people, already starved of physical room for living, don't enjoy a single moment of empty psychic space either; not one silent second of individual thought. And it's working. On all my travels through China and Vietnam, all those journeys, all that time spent watching, I have not seen a single person reading a book. Not one, young or old.

They've been bought off instead with baubles, trinkets and toys: they prod, finger and fumble with any sort of electronic device that generates loud noise and flashing light, dress themselves up like fairies and pose for ridiculous photos, fizz towards me from every direction on their zingy little motorbikes. It's been put to me that I have to appreciate that people in this part of the world work so hard, but it isn't true. They work long hours; that's not the same thing. Everywhere you go families of five sit outside their shops staring blankly into space; three men staff the ticket offices of empty tourist sites where one would be too many; taxi drivers lounge on their motorbikes in the sunshine, whispering to tourists in the hope of avoiding a job. Policeman patrol unresisting neighbourhoods stuffed six to a golf buggy as if expecting a riot. In our hotel it's impossible to get on the computers because they're monopolised by indolent staff members watching the same stupefying pop on YouTube.

The only people who work hard are the hawkers, clinging to me like sweat everywhere I go. They're impossible to repel, offering pastries, shoe repairs, T-shirts, spring rolls. All day they pound the streets, morning to midnight, impossible to discourage, rolling with the knockbacks, feeding off the tiny sustenance of the sales. The same boy who repaired my boots half an hour ago follows me to tell me they need fixing. Trying to fend them off distracts me from avoiding the motorbikes and black-windowed cars that surge in all directions at every intersection. These people are going to get me maimed or killed. This is madness. I have to get out of Hanoi.

17. ZOOM AND THANG

Cat Ba Island is, according to our guide book, Vietnam's "adventure sports Mecca". By Mecca I suppose they meant the most sacred site of Islam, but the island's main town has more in common with the chain of popular bingo halls. Gaudy neon lights reflect in the blank eyes of pleasure seekers and the grinning teeth of touts, and the whole place has the tawdry whiff of a Blackpool holiday about it.

True, the island itself is alive and breathing with beauty: wet, dense jungle, vegetation exploding across the hillsides in stunning varieties of green. In the harbour, ancient limestone karsts spew hundreds of feet upwards into the mist like sudden molten eruptions while red-sailed junks, shanty houseboats and tiny fishing craft loll on the warm green waters of the South China Sea. But I can't enjoy any of this at the moment, because I'm stalking through the sweat-fogged evening town looking for a man named Mr Zoom who I believe has stolen my underpants.

Zoom runs the cheapest guesthouse on the island - a bargain four US dollars for a double room, and the mosquitoes eat for free. For the first two nights we stayed with him, his big, jolly presence was inescapable - sleeping on a campbed in reception, buzzing up alongside us on his scooter as we walked through town, serving up food in his nearby Mr Zoom's restaurant. Then, a couple of days ago, we gave him our laundry. He said we'd have it back within 24 hours, and he hasn't been seen since.

At the same time as he disappeared, the hot water stopped working in the hotel. Cat Ba has experienced a tourist boom over the last ten years and far too many hotels have been built. Dozens now stand near-empty along the sea front; in Zoom's we're the only guests apart from a silent man on a laptop. I'm worried that the value of our laundry has exceeded the plummeting value of his business and he's decided to sever his hot water supply contract, abandoned the hotel and gone off to start a new life somewhere far away with my underpants.

The issue has now come to a head as we've signed up to go on a trek through the jungle tomorrow and it strikes me that I ought to at least start off wearing clean underwear, given the likelihood that something will go wrong.

I stomp towards Zoom's restaurant, like most on the island nothing more than scaffolding poles and tarpaulin with plastic furniture underneath and outside. One of his underlings approaches to greet me.

"Yes sir! Please sit down," he grins, muscling me towards a table.

"Where is Mr Zoom?"

"Yes sir, here!" he says, pointing to the sandwich board saying "Mr Zoom's".

"No, no. I need to speak to Mr Zoom."

"Here."

"Mr Zoom, the person. The manager."

"OK!"

It occurs to me this very helpful man can't understand a word I'm saying. I test it out.

"I haven't changed my underpants for two-and-a-half days," I tell him.

"OK!" he says again, the same can-do grin fixed on his face.

I prise myself away and head back to the hotel. Another staff member is sleeping on Zoom's vacated camp bed. She snaps to life when I arrive.

"Where are my clothes?" I ask. Having just woken up, she looks, understandably, as if I should know that myself. "Washing," I say. I struggle to think of a mime for 'laundry'. It's times like this I wish I wasn't such a lazy sod about learning local languages.

Somehow, though, she understands my mime and luckily she doesn't think its a game and come back with a mime of her own. Instead she plucks out two bags of freshly clean and refreshingly cool pants, although they're a bit sweaty by the finish. Zoom eventually re-appears a day later, having been to Hai Phong, no doubt in his own underpants, and the hot water is magically restored. To be fair, the island is so sultry we never really needed it.

The whole thing makes me feel I might have trust issues with the locals. Zoom, for instance, is not an international underwear thief but only what he purports to be: the intensely friendly owner of a bargain hotel and restaurant. To test out my new found confidence and trust, we book a full day adventure cruise and transport to Hanoi with a character calling himself Mr Victor Thang.

It's not a name that inspires trust to Western ears, is it? Furthermore he speaks quietly, unlike everyone else in Vietnam, which makes me wonder what he's up to. He seems very nice, though, and there isn't much else to do in Cat Ba town apart from wander up and down the sea front laughing at badly translated restaurant menus that offer dishes as exotic as "Fat Body of Religious Interest" and "Appealing Comedy Discharge". (Both out of our price range, thankfully.)

Not pictured: old ladies in Benny-Hill style pursuit

And what a fine time we had on Mr Thang's tour. The most entertaining thing I've done so far is hire a motorbike scooter in the hill town of Sapa, largely to escape from some persistent tribeswomen traders. But Mr Thang's tour ran it a close second, the only drawback being that on this occasion we weren't being pursued by cute little indigenous old ladies in traditional dress. We boarded the boat at eight, basked on the upper deck as it cruised among the bay's hundreds of rocky islets, enjoyed a delicious on-board lunch with a merciful absence of comedy discharges, and spent the afternoon kayaking through caves and lagoons and leaping from the boat into the warm, still sea. Last stop was the beach on a place called Monky Island. We trooped all the way to the highest point on the island in the hope of seeing a monkey but there were none, which made it doubly frustrating to find a couple of them sitting in the beachfront bar when we returned. To be fair, the monkey's tried to make up for it by stealing people's clothing and biting a Vietnamese holidaymaker on the bottom. How we laughed! She's probably got rabies now.

And so ended our stay at 'adventure sports Mecca'. We never got to play bingo, but the trip did restore some of my faith. And Mr Thang's ferry and bus tickets even got to us to Hanoi on schedule, the first on-time transport I've encountered in Asia.

16. THE MONKEY HUNTER

A gentle cruise along the river.

After the romance of Beijing, our train journey south to Guangxi province is grittily realistic. It's a 27-hour trip in the "hard sleeper" class: bunks are stacked three high in compartments of six and it's enough to make me realise I'm not, perhaps, as hard as I thought I was when I booked the ticket. I should've gone for the more expensive "soft sleeper", or maybe even "bloody-great-wine-drinking-poofter-in-a-cravat sleeper". But there's no such thing. Hard sleeper is the second highest class available. The lowest is something called hard seat, where you probably have to be harder than the bastard lovechild of Rambo and Margaret Thatcher just to get in, and from which the passengers stagger at the end of the journey looking like extras in a film about Japanese PoW camps.

We had the top bunks, which put us closest to the air con but also, unfortunately, closest to the speakers. The Chinese love noise. Noise of all colours and pitches, as long as it's loud, preferably irritating, and ideally highly repetitive. The speakers start whining at 7am with warbling Chinese pop and folk then go on until late at night with a film soundtrack consisting entirely of screeching tyres, deafening machine gun fire, women screaming and a bloke saying something like "We're gonna kick your ass" in a Chinese-American accent every 15 minutes or so. I didn't have the heart to look at the screen.

At the end of all this we emerge blinking into the heat of Guilin, a steamy and magical landscape. The city is built along the banks of the Li River and surrounded by limestone karsts. The stone being less dense that the surrounding earth causes it to compact and pile upwards hundreds of feet into the air like gnarled and rocky tower blocks or soaring abstract sculptures. I've never seen anything like it.

There's a huge park where you can walk among the peaks and even on steps up to the top of the most accessible ones. You can also see monkeys, but unfortunately we had only just found some when a local man came tottering along the path shouting what sounded like curses up into the trees. It looked to me like he'd spent the morning drinking himself into a rage over some imagined grudge between himself and the monkeys - maybe one had stolen his wife, cheated him at cards or crashed into his car without insurance - and he'd eventually decided to come and have it out with the furry little bastards once and for all. Sure enough, he soon produced a catapult from his back pocket and started taking aim at the primates. Somebody managed to calm him down before he did too much damage and the monkeys had a chance to show that agility beats evolution in hand-to-paw combat. They'd have torn him to bits.

Hoping to enjoy the scenery among a little more sanity, we headed out to the town of Yangshuo, where you can take a cruise along the river on a bamboo raft. We seemed to be the only people in our hostel but the river itself was like the M25. Still, it was pleasant enough to sail among the karsts, waving at the other tourists passing us at a distance of inches. We spent the evening drinking in a local bar where we'd been led to believe that the proprietor, a pot-bellied woman calling herself Monkey Jane, would eventually get naked and swing from the rafters. I wanted to see if any of the locals would come in and take pot-shots at her with their catapults. Didn't happen, unfortunately.

Next it was another 24 hours on the train west to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province. From there we headed North to a mountainous region where Mari wanted to do a trek along something called Tiger Leaping Gorge and I very much didn't. It's one of the deepest gorges in the world, stretching a brick-shitting 3,900m from the highest point to the furious bubbling waters below. I decided to wait in a pleasant little market town called Shuhe eating bison meat on sticks. Apparently there weren't any tigers to be seen leaping the gorge anyway. What a rip-off.

We'd come by bus, but the only tickets available for the overnight return journey back to Kunming were in the dreaded hard seat. I was steeling myself to have to be punched repeatedly in the stomach by a shirtless man in a bandana to prove my fitness for the ordeal, or maybe eat my own turd in a sandwich of broken glass, but all I really had to was elbow my way through a very lively throng and see off some sort of madman who was competing for attention at the ticket window.

The journey itself wasn't as bad as I might have expected. It's crowded, sweaty and uncomfortable, of course, and many of the passengers look as if they live on a train, carrying all their possessions in tattered old rice sacks. They stare at us like zoo animals, obviously wondering what rich foreigners are doing in here. Policemen occasionally saunter through the carriage brandishing batons and shout at people who didn't seem to be doing much wrong. A group of young men loitering around the medieval toilet chunter on at me and giggle to one another, probably delighted to have shown their mettle by insulting an Englishman in a language he can't understand. But most of the people seem to treat us as guests, giving up the more comfortable window seat so Mari can rest her head and try to sleep. Doesn't happen, of course. A westerner would have to be narcoleptic to sleep in here. But some of locals, lugging their lives around the province in search of a living, look like they're enjoying their best night's sleep in months.

So I was hard enough for the hard seat after all. But I might still need to practice my Rambo-like qualities. Next stop is Vietnam.

15. THE BEIJING WALTZ

Transport for locals

Beijing is the last stop on the Trans-Mongolian Railway, completing a journey of almost 7,000km for the creaking, tired trains that shimmered youthfully out of Moscow a week before. For us, with diversions, expeditions and stops, it's taken more like three months. Although our wandering will continue from here, it still feels like the completion of an adventure to arrive in this thriving city of 16 million people, all of whom seem to have gathered outside the station to greet us. Most of them are in the taxi queue.

The place contrasts with everything we've seen so far. It's both more modern and more historic than any city we've visited; verdant with trees, bushes and parks where Ulaan-Baatar was desolate with dust and rubble; and unlike anywhere in Russia, it offers all sorts of eating, drinking and sleeping possibilities that don't come at a cost equivalent to losing your eyeballs. We attacked the city's street food like hungry dogs, which is probably what most of it was made from. Finally, unlike Russia or Mongolia, most of the people in Beijing are sober, and some of them even appear untouched by heriditary madness.

All this pleasantness, and the fact that I've visited before while Mari hasn't, gave me a relaxed and proprietorial air, as if I were something of an expert. This confidence took a bit of a knock when I agreed to a rickshaw ride that turned into a half-hearted attempted mugging, but even that didn't really come off. The driver took us down a back street and demanded 100 times the agreed price; once he realised the intimidation wasn't getting him anywhere he stomped off feeling, I hope, thoroughly humiliated by a good telling-off from Mari. What a little shit (the rickshaw driver, not Mari).

Everything was going so well, in fact, that I even felt secure enough to visit a local barbers. You'd have to be demented to submit yourself to any Russian or Mongolian man armed with scissors, razor blades and alcohol-based products, and over time my hair had grown so luxuriant and bushy that it was causing delays at passport control. Hutongs - teeming alleyways and courtyards where generations of Beijing families have lived out their lives in cramped community - are lined with local barbers. Unfortunately I picked a place that featured barber's chairs, mirrors, sinks, scissors, razors and gels, but didn't seem to be in the business of cutting hair. After I'd convinced the man to do it he went about the task so hesitantly, and had to be so coaxed into continuing after every few snips, that I'm convinced it wasn't a barbers at all and all that equipment was used for some other sort of business. God knows what. Maybe it was a high-end Halal butchers.

Eventually he gave up altogether and wouldn't continue for anything, clearly not buying the idea that I might like all the parts of my hair cutting to the same length. I had to finish it myself back at the hostel. Mari would have helped if I could've waited until she stopped laughing, but by then the hair would've grown back even more joyfully abundant than it had been in the first place.

Equipped with my experimental new haircut, we visited the tourist sites - the Lama Temple, with its 18-metre high statue of a giggling golden Buddha carved from a single trunk of sandalwood, and the Forbidden City. The huge palace complex was built in the 15th Century by the first Ming emperor at Hollywood expense, and five centuries later finished up being the setting for an expensive Hollywood film, so maybe he knew what he was doing all along. In between it housed the simmering court of concubines, eunuchs and mandarins and each successive Son of Heaven, until the last boy-Emperor was dethroned in 1911 and exiled within it to his own lonely opulence while the Empire dissolved into ashes outside the walls. Today you can buy an audio guide when you go there and have the whole thing mellifluously explained to you by Roger Moore.

Mari also went for a trek along the Great Wall with our friend Christoph, but the last time I was there I became paralysed with fear I would fall off. Recalling my Altai humiliation I decided to give it a miss.

Instead I stayed in town rambled through the hutongs. These are really the place to be. You can get lost for hours, watching the old women gossip, the children play, and the old men taking an afternoon stroll in their pyjamas or playing endless games of chess. When you're thirsty, you stop at a small shop for a 40p bottle of beer and drink it outside on a tiny stool in the sunshine. Every street is a market; people lay out cloths of exotic fruit and the air crackles and sizzles with the cooking of all kinds of meat, vegetable and insect. (The scorpions are crunchy but sadly lacking flavour.) This is how we spent our days.

Evenings were even better. At first we had passed them drinking with Aaron and Lambert, who we'd met in Mongolia and bumped into again trying to make a living selling pizza on Beijing's main tourist bar street. They were living in a tent on the roof. Unfortunately the whole thing turned sour when their local sponsor/business partner - a temperamental American called Justin - hurled the portable oven across the street, cast over their trestle table like Jesus in the Temple, and screamed "IT'S ALL FUCKING OVER, YOU HEAR ME?" while trying to persuade them they were drawing too much attention to themselves and might fall foul of the police. With such insightful management, the enterprise was doomed.

Instead, Mari and I took to sitting in the little neighbourhood between the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower, watching the local life. At night a man would bring a speaker out into the square and all the street's old people would gather to waltz in their pyjamas to Strauss under the stars. Eventually, we even got the courage to join in. Well - Mari waltzed, I stumbled and tried to avoid her toes. Nobody seemed to mind us being there. You couldn't do that in Ulaan-Baatar, and in Moscow you'd get shot.