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.