Bu Ming Bai

Khabarovsk
Khabarovsk, 2 September 2006.
I made my way down to the Amur River and looked at the hills of China a mile away on the far shore. In midstream lay a flat deserted island, as useless as the others over which Chinese and Russian troops killed each other hand to hand in the winter of 1969.

River boats chugged past flying the Russian flag. Overhead an old single-prop training plane made joy flights along the midstream frontier, waggling its wings and diving to freak out the Chinese. Kids glided along the esplanade on in-line skates. Groups of old ladies sat chatting in the shade of birch trees in the river park.

A Chinese guy came past, sweeping the footpath. He was from Harbin, and had come to Russia on a work visa, drawn by the higher wages on this side of the border. I asked him what life was like here. He stared across the river for a long time, then shook his head.

I found a little outdoor bar with a view of the river and mesmerizing Russian pop music on the stereo. As I started on my second schooner, three locals staggered up and started talking. “I don’t speak Russian,” I said, with Cleese-like élan. This was their cue to sit down and discuss the natural history of Australia for a while. One of them picked up my Russian phrase book, which I’d placed over my glass to keep out the wasps. While he riffled through it, his friend picked up my beer and drained it in three gulps, gazing at me over the rim with eyes as blue as lapis lazuli.

At six o’clock, with the sun still high, I strolled back to Komsomolskaya Square. Two army vehicles – a covered truck and a bus – were drawn up beside the little stage at the river end of the square. At that moment, 17 members of the local army musical troupe stepped onto the stage, immaculate in officers’ caps and tunics. Battle-worn speakers cranked out a tune, a little crowd gathered, and so began two hours of entertainment as thrilling, hilarious, and full of love for music as you might pay $200 to see at the Sydney Entertainment Centre.

They began with seven or eight military songs, superbly rendered in chorus or as solos and duets, each introduced with Slavic relish by a diminutive MC in an enormous Russian officers’ cap. Then the men’s dance troupe took the stage to an announcement that the laws of human movement were to be temporarily suspended. Dressed in army tunics and soft-soled dancing boots tricked up to look like combat clodhoppers, they did things so eye-wateringly difficult with such nonchalant zest that I hardly dared to blink. When the women’s troupe joined them, looking like air hostesses in khaki, the result was graceful, funny, erotic and inspiring. Then more singing, this time love ballads and folk favorites, before the male dancers returned for an awesome karate ballet, to be followed by a spot of burlesque, more songs, and on and on.

As the troupe packed up, I strolled over to one of the performers and established that we had no known language in common. Despite this, he managed to convey that he was a retired officer on a pension and worked with the troupe for extra money. He was a singer, he told me, but also (his eyes lit up) he played the trumpet. He produced it lovingly from its case. It was American-made and bought in Harbin, he said, pointing across the river. Would I like to hear him play? He put it to his lips, and after a couple of false notes, filled the sunset air with a ravishing cascade of notes.

I stood there for a minute as he played, looking at the golden dome of the church blazing in the sun. Suddenly, a huge figure in a suit and dark glasses was standing beside us. He laid his hand on the trumpet as lightly as a butterfly and whispered in the player’s ear. My friend, his hands trembling, stuffed the instrument back into its case and started jamming the lid shut. He’d forgotten to remove the mouthpiece, and I only just stopped him from guillotining it. He ripped it off, threw it into the case, leaving a dribble of spit on the new velvet, and raced off without a word to me. I looked at the goon and followed his gaze towards what was coming down the road.

At the head of a long procession was a bearded priest in full regalia, walking ahead of a loudspeaker truck playing the sound of cathedral bells. Behind walked a long line of neatly-groomed young Russians in identical white T-shirts printed with the name of their movement: it was a “march against terror”. As the townspeople looked on impassively, the marchers filed slowly past the square and disappeared down the stairs leading to the river.

Vladivostok
Vladivostok, 29 August 2006

If you want a taxi in Russia, stand by the side of the road and put your hand out. Eventually a car, indistinguishable from all others, will stop. If you later arrive at your destination alive and with some of your money, you’ve probably been in a taxi.

I first got the chance to try this at 1 o’clock in the morning on a deserted road three kilometers outside Vladivostok, where the long-distance buses stop. I put out my hand and nothing happened. Two policemen, dressed like Ruritanian boy scouts, strolled by and disappeared into the dark, chuckling quietly. Another car materialized. I put out my hand and it rolled to a stop. Inside sat a heavily muscled criminal. I got in.

I said the name of a hotel, and the driver asked me a question in Russian, which I was later to realize meant “Where the hell is that?”. I launched my single sentence of Russian, memorized on the long, long trip from Harbin:

“I don’t speak Russian,” I said in Russian.

He shrugged, and we headed for town.

“Amerika?” he asked.

“Afstralya”.

He grinned, bouncing up and down on his seat. “Afstralya! Kanguru!”

“Kanguru,” I agreed.

I was clearly modest about my Russian, and he started a description of something about kanguru that he’d seen on TV. “I don’t speak Russian”, I repeated, and then, miming the passage of the sun-spirit across the heavens, managed to convey that this was my first day in Russia. He shook his head and banged the steering wheel. Never been to Russia, and he’s in my car! He thumped his chest, half-deafening me.

“Alex,” he said.

“John”.

He slowed down and tapped my arm. “Syupermyarkyet!” he explained, pointing to a large syupermyarkyet. Rubbing my arm, I made respectful noises and craned for a better look. “Gazeta!” said Alex outside the local newspaper office, now right into his role as guide.

Out of the gloom a sinister tower approached, looking like the KGB headquarters. Alex grabbed my thigh. “KGB!” I stared at him. “KGB!!” he repeated. With his forefinger and thumb, he fired a single bullet into the skull of a kneeling prisoner, in the eternal Russian gesture for national security.

I pointed at the road ahead, and improvised: “Nye stop!!”

Shut up, John. Alex thought this was a huge joke: he slammed the car into third and showed me his evasive driving skills, head under the dashboard, pedal to the metal.

After the smoggy chessboard of Beijing, the town was incredibly exhilarating. As we swooped down hills and round darkened hairpins, blazing stars cartwheeled overhead, while the breeze and the inky horizon promised the ocean. On the radio, a Russian Nick Cave growled and murmured.

We stopped at the docks in front of a white passenger ship. Alex pistoned his arms and gave a Thomas the Tank Engine whistle. From his long explanation I divined that this was where you caught the boat train to Moscow. Geographically unlikely, but, by the looks of it, way fun.

Now, rather reluctantly, Alex set about finding the hotel. He pulled up beside another driver, and while they were conferring, I dragged out my notebook and interrupted: “Posyetskaya”, I said, giving the name of the street. My cover as a non-Russian speaker was now completely blown, and all the way to the hotel Alex chattered away, brushing off my attempts to pretend that I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

On the dark footpath, I was at his mercy for the fare: he could have turned me upside down and shaken me. As it was, he asked for 200 roubles ($A10 ), which was mates’ rates if ever I saw it.

Into Russia
On the way out of Suifenhe we passed a little pavilion on a hillside, then not far out of town we pulled up at the gleaming Chinese border post, which swallowed our caravanserai without blinking. We sailed through passport control, and thirty minutes later, we were rolling through no-man’s land towards the Russian side.

At a layby in the middle of nowhere, we pulled over and did nothing for an hour, while I reveled in the soft green hills and birdsong of the early afternoon. Finally, we edged up to the little frontier post and dragged all our stuff onto the tarmac.

The bus drove onto an inspection pit, where guards with probes and flashlights fell on it as if it was a container load of bar fridges from Medellin. The passengers shuffled through a narrow doorway, around two right-angled turns, up a short staircase to chaos in the form of a tiny foyer where two border guards, crammed into glass booths the size of toilet stalls, were checking our documents. Traders with their bags, each big enough to hold a live Merino ram, were trying to shove through the crowd while group members, who had to be processed together, clambered over the top like sheepdogs to form up.

After an hour, I presented my hard-won visa. The booth was so small that I could see the data terminal, on which my photo spookily appeared from its nesting place on the Great Computer. Then I squeezed past into the next room to another booth in which were wedged, side by side, the world’s two best-looking immigration officers. Together they giggled quietly over my details, his fingers tangling with hers as they tapped keys and turned pages. Then she stamped my passport and handed it back with a heart-stopping smile. “Spasiba”, I said. “Pazhalasta!” they chorused, and I walked into Russia.

I stepped outside and waited in the sun. Five hours later we were still there. The problem: two passengers’ documents were not in order. They couldn’t go back to China, the Russians wouldn’t let them in, and we couldn’t leave without them. Finally, something gave, the two holdouts boarded, and we hit the road. But it was 9.00 pm with the last of the twilight fading, and Vladivostok was four hours away.

To the border
A bi-weekly train links Harbin and Vladivostok, but this takes two days to go little further than the distance between Paris and Brussels. I decided instead on the train to the border town of Suifenhe, where a bus connects to Vladivostok via Ussuryisk.

At Harbin station I realized with sinking heart that sleepers for the trip were already full, and unless I could finagle something on the train I was going to have to spend the night sitting up. I couldn’t delay my departure because of my visa. One of the many ways in which the Russian authorities make your visit more enjoyable is by insisting that you nominate your date of entry. From one minute past midnight, the visa clock starts running, whether that suits you or not. This of course is a hangover from the days when travelers did the right thing and moved in groups shepherded by Intourist. Independent tourists, with their balky connections and illusions of free will can take their chances. So for 13 hours on the train I sat, slumped, dribbled and nodded away a night made more excruciating by my neighbours, three of the most xenophobic individuals in China.

At dawn as we crawled towards the border, we passed through rolling green hill country planted with sunflowers, a wonderful relief from the flat Manchurian plain.

In parts of Beijing I am sometimes taken for a Russian. In Suifenhe, nobody believed I was anything else. Chinese hawkers called out to me in Russian, which sounds like someone cracking walnuts on a piano. All the street signs were in Cyrillic and Chinese, and prices were in roubles and renminbi.

At the international bus station, I found that the first Vladivostok bus left at 1.30 pm, so I staggered to the flophouse across the street and slept for four hours. Back at the bus station at noon, the waiting room had filled up. Down one side were Chinese traders, their bags bulging with Chinese-made clothes. On the other were hulking Russian holidaymakers and their girlfriends, and Russian traders, their bags bulging with … Chinese-made clothes.

I hesitated, then, to stares from both sides, sat down with the Chinese. The woman beside me was a Chinese travel agent running cheap tours into Russia. “Where do they go?”, I asked. The typical loop was Harbin-Vladivostok-Khabarovsk, across the Amur River to Fuyuan and back to Harbin. What do they think of it? I wanted to know. She flicked a glance across the aisle and dropped her voice.

“They hate it”, she said. “The food is terrible, the buildings are old and the trains are slow. And the Russians drink too much. They drink alone – not like us.”

“And the Russian people? How do your clients get on with them?”

“The Russians don’t like us. Some of them speak Chinese, but they don’t like speaking it.”

“Before your clients go,” I asked, “what are they expecting?”

“They know Russia is no good,” she answered.

“So why do they go?”

Her answer – "chuguo luyou haowanr" – literally means “It’s nice to go abroad”, but I quietly registered it as “Because they can”.

Harbin Jews
“In history more than 20,000 Jews settled in Harbin in order to escape from the prosecution and prejudice. The fact that the Harbin people treated the Jews kindly as a result of the broad mind of the nation is a glorious record of the world humanitarianism”.

This quote, attributed to Henry Kissinger, bears the marks of its long journey from English into Chinese and back out again, finally coming to rest on a perspex plaque in the foyer of the permanent Harbin Jewish History and Cultural Exhibition.

The Exhibition is housed in what used to be the city’s main synagogue. The Harbin authorities recently refurbished the building, raising again the great dome that disappeared after the last of the city’s foreign Jews slipped out of China in the 1950s. The display has been installed as a focus for the journey that thousands of Harbin Jews and their descendants now make back to the city. It tells them an effusive version of their own story … with Chinese characteristics.

The story is part of a larger one that began in the late 19th Century with the completion by the Russians of the trans-Manchurian railway that linked Vladivostok to the rest of the trans-Siberian rail route. The line passed through Harbin, transforming the little river town into a thriving port. Jews fleeing Tsarist persecution settled there in large numbers, to be joined later by White Russian refugees from the Bolshevik revolution. Harbin became an émigré outpost in north China: by the 1920s, over 20,000 Jews had made their homes there. Russian and Jewish businesses, schools, synagogues, clubs and cemeteries made an indelible mark on the place, which can still be seen in the architecture, in the thousands of Russian tourists and traders who visit today, and in the city’s official charm offensive aimed at Jewish visitors and investors, of which the exhibition is the centerpiece.

I was there on a slow Monday, and the ticket seller hurried upstairs to return with a delighted guide who gave me a personal tour. The display, culled from the photo albums of Harbin veterans around the world, has only a loose chronological structure, which gives it room to pirouette around inconvenient bits in the narrative. It leans hard on sturdy themes like the Jewish contribution to the economic and cultural life of the city, fleshing out the pictorial material with the occasional document or household object, and including several examples of that staple of Chinese museums, the life-size diorama. Bolted on for extra horsepower is a section devoted to famous Jews, which includes a picture of every Jewish notable since King David, except for Meyer Lansky.

Two of the dioramas are intended to reflect the Jewish love of culture and the arts. At the first is a plaster statue of an imposing Mosaic figure, his fingers hovering over the keys of a (real) portable typewriter. At the second, a young girl in fin-de-siecle dress sits at what my guide assured me was the first piano ever imported to Harbin. When I asked who was being depicted in these displays, it was explained that these weren’t actual people, but “common Jews”. After a bit of linguistic haggling, we settled (rather uneasily on my part) for “typical Jews”. I moved on with the lingering impression that the statues had been switched at the last moment. The writer, beard flying, flails at the keyboard of the little Underwood as if searching for the Lost Chord, while the pianist, with her prim demeanor, could be raising an invoice.

Visas
Getting a Russian visa involves a dizzying administrative slalom between Old Russia and New Russia. If you want a visa, even for tourism, you have to have a “letter of invitation” from an accredited organization (welcome to Old Russia, O.R. for short ). This can be arranged for you on-line by visittorussia.com, a very cool, nicely-integrated travel website (NR). But unfortunately, this won’t work if you’re applying from China, as the Beijing Embassy won’t accept scanned or faxed letters of introduction (OR). The nice visittorussia.com people will Fedex the original to you (NR), but this is so expensive, I decided to queue for three hours in the scorching sun at the Embassy to see if there was another way. When I finally got to ask my question, the clerk wordlessly slid a business card under the bullet-proof glass. It turns out that Golden Bridge Travel in Beijing has the exclusive contract to manage the tourist visa application process for an offensive sum of money. It’s hard to know whether to classify this as OR or NR; in its obstructive pettifoggery, it talks like OR, but in its scope for creative entrepreneurship in the Russian public sector, it walks like NR. Whatever, it was go with Golden Bridge or not at all, so after many dollars and a 10-day wait, I had a measly two-week visa (OR!) and a letter of invitation signed by Vladimir Gemaitis of the Asia and Pacific Collaboration Centre in St Petersburg, certifying that during my golden fortnight, I would be a guest of the Hotel Metropole in Moscow – a place of which I have never heard, and, since I was not going to Moscow, will always remain one of life’s little might-have-beens.

Shangri-La
After diligent scholarship, the Yunnan tourist authorities have located the land of Shangri-La, immortalised in the novel Lost Horizon. By a happy coincidence, it is in northwestern Yunnan, on the site of the modern town of Zhongdian, which has now been re-named Xiangelila in the interests of historical accuracy.

I know this may come as a surprise, since Shangri-La never existed in the first place, but the Chinese are as relentless on the subject as they are on their claim to the Spratly Islands. There's even a section in a local museum devoted to the evidence.

It may also have been a surprise for the Nakhi (Naxi) people, speakers of a language related to Tibetan who have lived in the region for 2000 years. Heirs to a rich cultural and musical heritage, they are users of one of the few hieroglyphic scripts to survive into the modern era.

The Chinese Shangri-La tourist phenomenon has had its most dramatic effect on Lijiang, a Nakhi town which has long been one of the country's most remote and fascinating cities. Not only has there been a volcanic increase in the local production and sale of leather cowboy hats, but the thousands of visitors who crowd Lijiang's streets can now see re-enactments of ancient customs such as the practice of sitting on top of a horse in the town square while wearing a wolfskin jerkin and fur cap, brandishing a rifle and being photographed by your friends.

Today the town has China's most expensive public toilet, the entry fee payable to a smiling girl in Nakhi costume. Inside, users have individual video screens, on which they can watch a clip of a soaring Mandarin hymn to Lijiang, sung in Whitney Houston style to a montage of scenes of mountain passes and family purchases of local souvenirs.

At the entry to the old town is a gigantic sandstone bas-relief pastiche of Nakhi art and culture, including a traditional house with Jiang Zemin's signature chiselled into the lintel. On a separate panel, a brass Unesco plaque beams down, signifying that Lijiang's lacquered doorways, planter boxes and manicured cobblestones are inscribed on the World Heritage register.

Chinese visitors are unfazed by these developments: "Tourism has ruined this town" is one of those sentences that it is impossible to translate into Mandarin. Other such utterances include: "This song is too sentimental"; "How about giving me the benefit of the doubt, officer?"; and "That's enough Kenny Gee for today."

The members of the Nakhi Ancient Music Orchestra have taken it in their stride as well. They are an ensemble of traditional musicians who have been playing for visitors for eighteen years. An irresistible sight with their traditional robes, silvery beards and air of venerable dignity, they are led by a softly-spoken MC whose stage manner is part scholar, part carnival barker. They perform a curious blend of Chinese traditional music and local folk songs, neither very ancient nor entirely Nakhi. But they have a winning formula, playing an impressive array of Chinese traditional instruments with solemn panache. My favourite: the old gentleman who during the percussion interludes sets aside his stringed erhu and takes up a small stick with which he strikes histrionically at a tiny gong, and, on the off-beat, smooths his long white moustache. Sturdy peasant girls make up the female chorus and do double duty on the Nakhi side of the program. One plays a dazzling tarantella on the mouth harp - an instrument, we are told, that young Nakhi lovers use to whisper clandestine come-hithers to each other. Another sings a capella in the Tibetan style, the voice just south of falsetto and pitched for Himalayan hilltops. On the way out, as you pass the photos of the MC shaking hands with famous personalities, you have the feeling that you have witnessed a clever, if musically delightful, piece of theatre.

Jianshui
The Confucius temple in Jianshui sits at the head of a lotus-filled lake, in which a graceful, triple-arched stone bridge leads to a water pavilion.

As I walked around the water in the late afternoon, dozens of middle school students strolled past in ones and twos, reading softly aloud to themselves, gesturing to drive home some vital point. At the head of the lake, her back to the temple, a girl stood on the retaining wall reading to herself, poised, it seemed, between scholarship and oblivion.

The temple, impeccably restored, had the sterile elegance of confucian monuments, and was full of features like the Dismounting Horse Arch-Gate. A large plaque drew attention to the wartime damage done by the Japanese: during an attack on Jianshui, it seems, a stray bomb fell inside the temple complex. After much searching, I found a small shrapnel scar on a foundation stone. Doubtless there were once other traces, but these would have disappeared when (Chinese) Red Guards tore the place to pieces 20 years after the last Japanese gun fell silent.

I crossed the bridge to the pavilion where, after much daring and double-daring, a group of students struck up a conversation. While they had daily English classes, they never spoke the language, which made their proficiency all the more impressive. We chatted about their studies and when they pulled out their history textbooks, black with annotations, I bluffed my way through a Q&A about history study in Australian schools. They explained the names of the different monuments in the park, and after group photos and an exchange of e-mails, I left the Love of Learning Pavilion, crossed the First in the Public Examination Bridge, and left the Lake of Scholarship behind me to return to town.

The next morning from the city gate and I saw a small pagoda in the back streets of the old town. I spent half an hour in the alleyways trying to reach it, and although I spotted it above tiled roofs, the maze defeated me. Suddenly an old man in a blue cap and jacket appeared at my elbow, took me through a few gateways and stopped proudly in front of the pagoda, which stood perhaps 30 feet high in a deserted courtyard. A modern plaque dated 1983 was fixed to the base of the monument, but this, it seemed, was the last time any attention had been paid to it. On the wall nearby was a spectral inscription from the Cultural Revolution. I told him I was thrilled to be shown the pagoda, whereupon he beamed and asked me if I had seen the Four Wells. I hadn't, and after a circuitous few minutes, arrived at a group of four little stone wells arranged in a square. The rims were fanned with grooves, and as I looked over the edge, saw my reflection in the water a few meters below.

After a few minutes I made to take my leave, but my guide insisted on leading me back to the main street where he shook my hand and disappeared back into his town.

Border 2
When you enter Vietnam you fill out a form and receive a flimsy carbon of the original to return when you leave. A few days into my stay I realised I had lost this precious official talisman. I asked around: bad, bad - expect a savage "fine" at the border, and no receipt. Gloomily I sliced a chunk out my budget and kept it for the frontier.

On the day I returned to China I arrived at the border on the back of a motorbike (Vietnam runs on two wheels) and wrangled with an amateur money changer. When we finally struck a price he presented me with a fistful of Chinese 50-cent notes that he counted as 5-yuan bills. I slipped them back into his pocket and we parted cheerfully: no harm in trying, we both agreed.

The border post was a building of high purpose and almost total inactivity. There was a row of counters to process arrivals and another for departures, but I had no idea which was which. Locals roamed at will, selling newspapers, shooting the breeze and trying to change money. I picked an aisle and wandered along it unchallenged. As I reached the end, a woman arrived from the Chinese side dragging a huge plastic satchel. She pushed in front of me and collected a piece of paper from the official behind the counter. I sidled up and the man, without looking, handed me a blank entry form. I found a chair and carefully filled in the details, then walked around to the departure side and handed in the carbon. A minute later, an exit stamp in my passport, I stepped into the sunshine and crossed the Red River into the Middle Kingdom.

Too late for my onward bus, I staggered around Hekou in the blazing sun in search of a hotel. I passed a group of loungers who were sitting under a tree, trouser legs and shirts rolled up for the heat. One of them steered me fluently upstairs and convinced me (was it sunstroke?) that 60 yuan was OK for a dog box with a cold shower over the squat.

On the way out for a walk, I came down the stairs behind a young girl in a tight skirt and high heels. On the footpath, one of the sentinels remained. The girl wordlessly handed him something and kept walking. So did I, the man's flat stare following me down the street.

Hekou is a tiny concrete grid of streets built only for trade. The shopfronts are identical, stores crammed with goods and untroubled by customers. In each, the proprietor sits semi-conscious in the heat with a mobile phone and a TV for company.

For some reason, trucks are not permitted to cross the border. Outside the town, they unload their cargos onto enormous six-wheeled trailers which sweating teams of men manhandle across the bridge to Vietnam, where the goods (flat-screen TVs, kids' toys, onions) are then re-loaded onto lorries. In Hekou, queues of trailers snake through the streets, their custodians waiting their turn to squabble over paperwork at the boom gate.

Back in my room, I lay under the fan staring at an original oil painting of a dark-haired girl on a beach draped in a white sarong, one arm resting awkwardly on a book. Palm trees fringed the shore and a rowboat leaned on the sand at the water's edge. At the mouth of the bay was a little island on which stood a Russian church, onion domes gleaming in the tropic sun.

Sapa
The bell that woke me on Sunday was still tolling as I crossed the threshold of the town church and slipped into a seat on the men's side of the aisle. The vaulted ceiling and the walls were whitewashed and the windows were plain glass. The only colour came from the altar lamp and from the blue and white statue of the Virgin which, in the absence of a pulpit, dominated the sanctuary.

It was almost six, and the church was filling fast. Before kneeling, the women would pause to slip the wicker baskets off their backs and lean them against the side wall, the umbrella handles poking up like little bishops' crooks. All wore traditional Hmong dress: knee-length hemp skirts dyed with indigo and embroidered at the sleeves, belted aprons, black puttee-style leggings tied with embroidered garters, indigo pillbox hats and (it was raining) rubber gumboots. The man beside me on the bare wooden kneeler came up to my shoulder, his angular hands half-hidden by his shirt cuffs.

A simple screen behind the altar formed the sacristy, from which a Vietnamese man in a clerical collar emerged to place a gold monstrance on the altar before withdrawing. In the transept, an organ started up and the women sang together, the men humming and mumbling behind. There was silence after the hymn. Then one of the women, unaccompanied, began singing a slow, staccato, melody of perhaps 10 bars and only five notes, in which half the women joined her. Silence for a moment, then the rest of the women sang the reply.

This hill-tribe litany went on for twenty minutes while my knees burned and I willed my neighbour to sit up. A woman, sleeping baby strapped to her back, crossed the aisle and whispered angrily to two young boys. They knelt up straight and bent their heads, but she didn't move. The older boy met her eyes and guiltily shuffled along the kneeler to put some space between him and his brother.

The organ introduced the final hymn. As people filed out, I looked at the stations of the cross - sombre prints in which the Romans looked like foot-soldiers in the armies of Charlemagne. From the doorway I looked back at the altar, where the monstrance was still on display.

I tried to talk to the parishioners, but most veered shyly away. One girl with some English smiled in pained bafflement at every key word - mass, priest, sacrament.

Behind the church were two little tents of polished granite, the graves of priests - one French and one Vietnamese - who had died shortly after World War 2.

The Hmong people - known in China as the Miao - trace their origins (by some accounts) to a legendary land where for six months of the year the sun did not rise. They have been on a long southwards migration for many hundreds of years, and a large number of them left China for the highlands of Vietnam and Laos some time in the eighteenth century. Presumably, the people I saw were descendants of Hmong converted to Catholicism during the heyday of French missionary activity in Vietnam during the nineteenth century. Their religion would have been driven underground by the Viet Minh, whose military ascendancy in the north immediately after World War 2 culminated in the partition of Vietnam in 1954. Religious restrictions in Vietnam have seen some relaxation in the past 10 years.

Border crossing
I spent a day and a night in Pingxiang, a town in Guangxi a few miles from the border with Vietnam. In the afternoon, I went for a walk through the huge market, taking time to reflect on the world's apparently inexhaustible appetite for brightly coloured plastic kitchenware and kids' T-shirts. Vietnamese day-trippers were loading up their wheelie cases with goods to trade over the border.

The next day, to get to the border, I flagged a three-wheeled motor taxi. This was a mistake: these things are the front half of a motorbike chopped off and hitched to a plywood passenger cabin with no suspension. On the open road the noise and vibration were incredible, unlike our speed over the ground. The driver was friendly and talkative, so we shrieked at each other all the way to the frontier.

For most of the way the two-lane highway snaked through paddy-fields, bananas, corn and the occasional stand of sugar. Off to the left I could see the new four-lane expressway the Chinese are building, and we drove along a stretch of it for a mile or two.

The border post was a major Chinese invasion point during the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war, so it is called Friendship Pass. We reached a road barrier and I paid off the driver and humped my bag along the road as the sound of my ride faded and the cicadas took over. I drew level with a graceful deserted colonial-era building with an impressive portico and circular driveway. The only clue to its history was a sign fixed to the front which said, with typical Chinese command of the obvious, "French-style building".

Passing through a big stone archway, I followed the road down a slope and saw, jammed into a narrow defile between two hillsides, the new Chinese immigration building, all gleaming concrete and reflective glass, and about four times bigger than needed. Outside, an immaculate PLA border guard stood at attention among the builders' rubble and red earth. Inside, the place was empty: high up on a window, a huge forest butterfly flapped against the glass.

I filled in the paperwork and passed through the deserted quarantine barrier, where a sign warning against bird flu included a cartoon of a startled tourist shaking hands with a chicken wearing a surgical mask.

I reached a bank of about a dozen passport control stations, all empty except for one, staffed by a prim border control officer who ignored my smile. She examined every page of my passport, alert for Australian steganographic knavery, then stamped it and waved me through.

In no-man's land, three Vietnamese women were dragging their huge cases towards the border post, which stood sagging in the mid-morning heat. Inside, two guards were slumped in a tiny office behind a counter. I filled in the paperwork, then discovered that the women whom I had taken to be Vietnamese were in fact Chinese: this close to the border, the local dialect has the lilt of Vietnamese, even though the two languages are quite different. They were having trouble with the form, and the guard waved my homework under their noses: why can't you be more like him, he wanted to know. He stamped my passport and went back to his magazine.

At the next counter was the foreign exchange desk. I handed over some Chinese renmimbi to a woman who stopped fanning herself and scratched at the ink on each note, then dolefully punched the exchange rate into a calculator and waved it under my nose. It was daylight robbery. I smiled and nodded, and out of a drawer she fished a wad of notes held together with a bulldog clip and peeled some off. I waited for my receipt, and when I realised none was forthcoming, stepped outside.

A soldier was walking along the road keeping the sun off his face with a magazine. He gave me a wide smile and said, "Welcome to Vietnam!"

Jingxi
Jingxi is a little town in western Guangxi province where I had no reason to be. I was trying to escape the crowds of Golden Week, the May vacation that is one of several times during the year in China when you should stay home and not go out of doors.

I've already forgotten what my hotel looked like, but the photo I took from my room shows a cluster of nondescript buildings with a range of hills a mile out of town with that extraordinary signature shape of this part of Asia: impossibly steep limstone formations like a child's drawing of camels' humps. Think Guilin in China, think Halong Bay in Vietnam ... and think the hills outside my room that day.

Late in the afternoon when the worst of the heat was over, I went for a walk and paid one yuan to enter Jingxi's little park. Years ago they had built a willow-shaded pavilion in the middle of a miniature lake. Now the lake was full of water weeds and the pavilion was crumbling. I sat on the bank near a tiny merry-go-round and chatted to an old man who came pedalling up on a kid's hi-riser bicycle. He was thrilled to have a foreigner in the town: he had been to Gabon in the 1960s on an agricultural aid project, but he never got to talk about it because nobody in the town cared.

I had dinner in the hotel dining room. In the adjacent banquet area, a noisy drinking game was going on. Two people try to guess how many fingers their opponent will hold out. It goes at top volume and trip-hammer pace, each round lasting about five seconds with the loser downing a glass of white spirits. I finished my meal, made some notes for the next day (the main light in my room was broken) and called for the bill. At this moment a man slumped into the chair beside me. I looked up: he was, I surmised, the loser of the drinking game - by a very wide margin. He stared at me, sweat dripping off his nose, then roared: "The Chinese people are the greatest!"

"Absolutely," I said, and went back to my notes. There was a long pause. I had nothing else to write, so just kept scribbling nonsense.

"Are you hot?" he demanded. He was unbelievably drunk: it's hard to think of an easier question to enunciate in Chinese, but he slaughtered it.

"Hot," I answered pleasantly, head down.

"China is the greatest!!" he yelled. I all but ignored him this time. He glared at me and then said: "You're not hot! You're not sweating! Look at me, I'm REALLY hot!" Looking up, I agreed, and at the same time noticed that we had an audience. The waiters were enjoying the show, and the remaining diners were craning round.

"Feel my sweat!" he demanded. "No need," I smiled, "I can see you're hot". He grabbed my hand and I pulled back, whereupon he bent my fingers back so hard that it hurt and slapped them against his forehead. The crowd, bigger now, laughed. I was furious. I longed for the company of my courtly companion in the park, but was stuck with this slobbering yahoo. Where oh where was my bill?

"China is the greatest!!"

More laughter. I snapped.

"Australia," I said quietly, "is much greater than China."

In the next province, a pin dropped.

I went on. "We have the duck-mouthed creature and the pocket rat. What animal does China have?"

There was a burst of relieved laughter, but not from him. He slowly processed the question, and someone prompted him sotto voce.

"PANDA!"

"Panda?" I echoed. "The panda isn't interesting. What does the panda do? It eats. It sleeps. And once every 20 years ... it makes love!"

The crowd went crazy. When things quieted down, I went on.

"The pocket rat jumps, eats, makes love! Jumps, eats, makes love! Much more interesting life!"

He had now completely lost the thread, and was at the stage where he was likely to do anything. But at this point, two of his friends came up and started jollying him, and I paid my bill and escaped.

Spring Festival
Saturday night was Chinese new year's eve, and we watched the annual Spring Festival Gala on CCTV. I doubt that any regular TV event (except perhaps the soccer World Cup) has a bigger audience. Our friend Carl, a Beijing-born nanotechnologist trained at MIT and perfectly bilingual in Mandarin and US West Coast English, told us how he and a friend would sit up until 3am in Sydney watching the Gala on satellite.

The clothes worn by the hosts (and frequently changed during the 4-hour marathon) lacked the magnificent, retina-searing originality of last year: the best offering was a sky-blue satin 5-button tuxedo that I actually quite liked. (I think I've been here too long.)

The songs were mainly hymns to Being Chinese (My name is Li! My name is Zhao!) or to building a harmonious society (Burn the sun to a disk and copy it to every heart! Let the sun CD play a warming melody!).

The two main themes of the show (developed through laboured sketch comedy and breathless SMS voting competitions) were (a) be nice to migrant workers and (b) please, Taiwan, take the pandas. "Migrant worker" is the accepted term for labourers who have come to the cities from the villages, and live a marginal existence with low pay, poor conditions and little access to social services. The pandas? China announced that it was giving 2 pandas to the compatriots in Taiwan. Huge publicity went into the selection of a suitably winsome and horny pair. Only when they were chosen did the Taiwan authorities point out that no-one had asked them whether they wanted any pandas. So about a quarter of last night's air time was devoted to raising the stakes through a national SMS competition to choose names for the pandas. The voting numbers were, of course, mind-boggling. The chosen names were ... I forget.

At midnight we went into the street to watch the firecrackers. This year a 12-year ban on crackers in the capital was lifted, as authorities finally admitted it was unenforceable. Crackers could be brought in from the country, and people would let them off without much danger of being caught. Last year the friendly watchman on our gate gave me one and showed me how to fire it. It hurled a starshell 50 feet into the air and set off every car alarm for 2 blocks. No-one turned a hair.

With the ban off, the scene was unbelievable. The ordnance being used was so powerful that kids were cowering behind walls, while wives and girlfriends watched from parked cars or 10th floor windows. The firing was all done by groups of chunky guys in leather jackets. Festoons of bangers that sounded like an Uzi being fired in a public toilet. Red boxes the size of a footstool that behaved like a Stalin's organ, hurling 49 phosphorus shells into the air in 30 seconds. Chinese versions of the little Volcanoes we used to let off on cracker night, except that these were the size of Vesuvius and spread a curtain of flame right across our local street. Madeleine and I only lasted 5 minutes at street level before staggering back to the flat for more champagne.

The next morning, my ears were still ringing, and that night the city still rang with explosions.

Wheels
Two weeks ago, after 11 months in Beijing, I bought my second bicycle. Having the first one stolen is an important rite of passage here: my Chinese friends welcomed me to the capital’s biggest club with wry grins and a dash of schadenfreude.

My new machine is not, unfortunately, a Flying Pigeon, one of the classics of the Beijing bicycle scene, with its coal-black frame, luxurious angles and the timeless unflappable air of a London taxi. There are still thousands of Flying Pigeons on the streets here, much favoured by old people for their regal riding position and the stately, mile-eating cadence of their single gear.

My bike has no class, but who cares? Beijing, for all its surging car ownership and traffic jams, is still bike heaven. The place is flat as a pancake, every street has a bike lane and, at every intersection, a special set of bike traffic lights to ignore. Every morning on the corner of our street, a bike mechanic sets up shop on the footpath, and works all day summer and winter out of the steel tool cabinet that he hauls around (how else?) by pedal power. Two blocks down, in waving distance, in fact, there’s another bike doctor, as there is on every second corner from the Summer Palace to the Temple of Heaven. Seat adjustment is free, self-service air is two mao (3 cents) and he will fix your puncture for two yuan (30 cents).

If business is quiet, our guy will chat with the shoe repair man on the stool across the street, or set up a game of Chinese chess with a local, which will pull at least half a dozen spectators.

For tens of thousands of Beijingers, their bikes are their workplace. Our local knife-sharpener pulls up every week or so outside our apartment block, with a padded stool, three whetstones and a water pail strapped to the back of his ancient Forever. In little parks all over the capital, outdoor barbers in white coats wait for trade, cutting hair for 80 cents, at the end of the day strapping their folding chair and work gear onto the back of their bikes. Paper recyclers, scrap metal men, flower sellers and fruit and vegetable dealers all rely on two (or three) wheels for a living.

My time without a bike (the bitter winter and early sand-blown spring) gave me time to get acquainted with other ways of getting around Beijing – like the buses. Beijing buses are a miracle, moving tens of millions of passengers around 300 routes to the furthest outskirts of the city, and even the farthest-flung route has a more regular service than George St Sydney at rush hour.

Much of the fleet is almost comically ancient: this, plus the awesome overcrowding, sends most foreigners to the taxi rank or the subway. But the buses are more fun, and at one yuan (17 cents) for unlimited travel, the cheapest ride in town short of a bicycle.

The seamless patter of the conductor (buy a ticket, next stop Wangfujing, move down the bus, close the back door) is much loved and imitated by Beijingers, and she wields her authority with all the cool dignity that a blue smock and a red armband confers on the wearer in China.

In heavy traffic, stopping a loaded Beijing bus has all the drama of mooring a cross-Channel ferry. Bus stops are a long way apart in Beijing, and arriving at one has much more of a sense of passage than it does in an Australian city. Each stop is like a train station, with its own name which the conductor shouts in an impenetrable Beijing accent as it approaches. As the bus heaves in sight, a kerbside monitor brandishes a red flag as a navigation aid, while the driver, wrestling a wheel nearly as wide as the span of her arms, nudges towards the kerb, and cyclists decide whether to scoot through the narrowing gap or lose momentum (and face) by tacking round the outside or, worst of all, stopping altogether. Above them, the conductor hangs out the window keeping up a stream of warnings for road users and reminders to alighting passengers, until, with a final pneumatic crescendo the bus pulls up, and passengers spill gratefully onto the street.

Like everything else in Beijing, the buses are changing. Sleek new climate-controlled models are coming in (for the Olympics, of course), syrupy electronic announcements announce the next stop, and the engines are quieter and cleaner. Beijingers’ lives will be better and easier for it, but maybe a few will remember, as I know I will, when the bus was an adventure, and getting there was a small win against the odds.

The cow's mouth
We drop down off the Tapovan plateau, go back across the moraine and rejoin the pilgrims' path to the river's source. In the distance ahead I can see a high wall of ice, with the Bhagirathi peaks behind it in the distance. We pick our way through the boulders beside the river. We are so close to the glacier now that the water is turbid: it needs a few miles for the gravel trapped in the ice to settle out, and the water to take on the opalescent colour of a glacial stream.

An old lady stands helplessly on the edge of a boulder, looking for the path. She is wearing embroidered slippers and holding the little plastic flask for Ganges water that she bought in Gangotri, two days' walk away. We stay with her for the last half mile of the journey, until finally we are standing at the mouth of the cow. The glacier's snout forms a curved grey-green wall as high as a 3-storey building. At the base is a deep ice grotto from which, in a steady stream, flows the water of the Ganges.

The old lady plumps down on a rock and stares at what she has come to find, as if it has kept her waiting. Amit takes off his shoes and steps into the stream, cups the water in his hands, touches it to his lips and pours it on his head.

I sit in the sun looking at the water. The glacier is slow to give up the struggle: every rock in the stream wears a shawl of ice, on the bank little bergs lie stranded among the boulders, and every now and then a rock, long imprisoned, melts free of the overhanging wall and crashes into the river.

A mother and her son arrive and sit beside the water to pray. Three European tourists clamber onto a boulder and sit in the lotus position. A group of Bengali trekkers turns up and photograph each other (and me for some reason) in every possible permutation. That done, they sit in prayer, still as statues, which is how we leave them.

I look back at the old lady. She is sitting on the same rock, but her flask is full beside her.

As recently as the 1960s, pilgrims to Gaumukh had to slog up from Uttarkashi for 8 gruelling days. Earlier than that, some pilgrim routes through the ranges were so perilous that no-one could say for sure that the crossings had ever been made: in the 1930s, legendary Himalayan explorers Shipton and Tillman nearly died following these ley lines of faith between the three sources of the Ganges. In the thirteenth century, a group of pilgrims froze to death on their journey; when the ice melts each Spring their bones can still be seen at the bottom of the sacred lake of Rup Kund.

Is there any way to equate the merit of a pilgrimage made today with the epics of the past? In the little book I bought in Gangotri, Swami Shiva Nand says: "The answer must spring from the heart of pilgrim himself. Spiritual benefit always depends on the heart and its faith ... If a pilgrim heartily believes and is convinced and certain that all his sins will be washed away ... there is absolutely no reason why it should not prove to be so. [...] But, it is to be remembered that test of this faith is on return from such a pilgrimage. If, after the pilgrimage, it is proved that there has been a thorough purge of all sins ... that the pilgrim is filled with the spiritual vibrations of the sublime atmosphere he has sojourned in and that he can live a pure life of righteousness, devotion, truth, love and purity, then he has certainly been liberated and the pilgrimage has served its supreme purpose. Some pilgrims - though their number may be small - do rise to such spritiual heights".

This, it seems, is the fine print on all religious indulgences - down the ages, across all faiths.

Tapovan
In the morning, Amit (my guide) and I skip breakfast and start early from Gangotri, but the trail is busy already. Strapping Indian trekkers from the city and the occasional foreigner are outnumbered by pilgrims. Some go swaying past on mules or horses, but most walk. An old lady in a sari sets out, one hand on her stave, the other resting lightly on her daughter's arm.

The trail leads through stands of birch and wonderful cedar trees. After an hour we stop for breakfast at a tiny dhaba, built from a couple of low drystone walls with a tarpaulin roof. In a few weeks the snow will come, and the owner will take the tarpaulin and his gear and head down to Uttarkashi for the winter. As I sip my tea, I can see the massive snowclad bulk of the Bhagirathi peaks in the distance.

As we climb, the trees thin out, and at Bhojbasa, where we camp, only a few shrubs cling to the southwest slopes of the valley. At sunset I go for a walk and watch the last rays of the sun linger on the highest mountain. As they disappear, the moon rises, and the snow on the peaks glows pink and cobalt.

I wander from the camp as far as the first river crossing, and perch on a boulder watching the stars come out. A family of pilgrims on their way to the camp arrives at the river. In the gloom, they can't see where to cross, and they call out to me in Hindi for help. I pad down to the bank and guide them silently into the camp, then vanish into the night, the last of my tribe.

In the morning, the first part of the trail is well-made and although the climb is steady, the going is easy. Not for long. The route to Tapovan leads through a glacial moraine, which is the chaos that a glacier pushes ahead of itself and leaves behind when it retreats. We pick our way through massive piles of granite boulders, some as small as coconuts and some, big as Volkswagens, which can lurch with a noise like a kettledrum when you tread on them. Amit chooses his route to avoid the ice itself, which lurks under the rubble, here and there showing itself in grimy, knife-edged slabs half as high as a house.

Tapovan is high above us, and we have to scale the steep shoulder of the moraine, and then an even steeper ridge - a 400m climb to 4450m that has me gasping. Tapovan is an alpine meadow in a mountain amphitheatre dominated by the great spire of Shivling peak (6540m).

We call on Bengali Baba, the saddhu who lives up there in a tiny rock shelter. He is sitting on a boulder wrapped in a blanket, his black beard resting on his knees. Amit reverently touches the Baba's bare feet and they chat for a while. "What part of Australia do you come from?" the Baba asks me. I tell him. "Sydney!" he says, eyes gleaming. "Ahh, Cathy Freeman's 400 meters - that was a great moment!"

I walk along the edge of the plateau, with Shivling peak to the south-west and the three Bhagirathi peaks to the south-east. I can see the glacier stretching for miles up the valley. At the lower end, it is all but buried in rocks and gravel. Further up the valley, sunlight glints off its giant white ribs.

As the sun sets, we take off our boots and sit cross-legged on the stone floor of the Baba's shelter. Beside me sits Yoshi, a Japanese traveller with a feather in his hair who has spent the last two months meditating at Tapovan in a stone hut half the size of Bengali Baba's.

From behind a curtain, Jagath, the Baba's assistant, rings a tiny bell. We fall silent, and Jagath's voice winds through a long litany. Yoshi knows it well and is loudest in response. Silence and meditation follow. Through the glassless window, the cold creeps down my back and finds my feet, which soon transcend the realm of the senses. Jagath starts again, and Yoshi's enthusiasm infects the others. They toy with the responses, cutting in early, batting them back and forth. Silence again, long and profound, then suddenly Jagath emerges with steaming plates of rice and vegetables.

Yoshi wants to live in India: he has found his "mountain gods" here. I ask him if they are not to be found in Japan. He thinks about this. "Everything is too fast in Japan", he says. He has been to Australia, which he loved - the west more than the east, for its slower pace.

He has also travelled through Tibet. His odyssey started in Kobe, where with some difficulty he found a ship that would take him to China (planes are too fast). From Shanghai he hitched southwest through Yunnan and north into Tibet, and made his way as far as the Everest base camp. There he got a ride on a donkey cart and sat on the back, facing the road behind. There was another donkey hitched to the rear of the cart. "The sun was going down," he told me in the candlelight, "and when I look that way, I can watch donkey, you know how they look so gentle and tired? And when I look other way ... Everest! Very beautiful!"

In the morning, frost cakes the inside of the tent. While we wait for it to dry, Yoshi and I talk about films. "Japanese films", he says, "in the past very beautiful. Now, just idea. Clever. Just idea. American films, I watch many, I don't know why. Like a drug," - here he pours an imaginary dose down his throat - "three hours feel good, then ... nothing!" "Too fast," I suggest. He laughs and pats my knee: "Very too fast!"

At his request, I photograph him against the backdrop of Shivling, and promise to send the picture to his Hotmail account.

Gangotri
Gangotri is revered as the place where the Ganges descended to earth from the hair of Shiva. The village clings to the sides of a narrow valley through which tumbles the Bhagirthi, one of the three source rivers that meet to form the Ganges above Rishikesh.

The sources of the other two lie in a maze of rivulets and springs high up in the hills. But at the head of the Bhagirthi lies the snout of the Gangotri glacier. That great ice wall - the "cow's mouth" - is the most visited of the three sources of the Ganges, and thousands journey to it every year. The village of Gangotri is the roadhead for the pilgimage.

Stall holders in the tiny main street sell pilgrims' items: little plastic flasks for Ganges water, warm hats, gloves, walking staves, pilgrims' literature. I buy a scarf and a little book called Call of Uttrakhand. Sample contents: "The urge of pilgrimage"; "Himalaya, the abode of seers and sages", by Swami Shiva Nand; "Motor bus services"; "Distance tables".

As we approach the temple of the Ganges, all the stalls are given over to devotional items: figurines of Shiva, framed photos of mountains scenes with deities painted in, cassettes of holy music. The temple, like everything else in Gangotri, is very small. Visitors ring a bell as they enter the precincts, before slipping off their shoes and going in to worship.

Across the river, the way is studded with tiny shrines barely big enough for two people to sit in. Ashrams crowd the bank where the river roars into a gorge. On the gate of one is a faded sign: "Sanctity is the intrinsic value of pilgrimage. Gangotri is a place where Ganga [the Ganges] is serene and most immaculate. If you want to pass a modest night, Yoga Niketan is ready to give you a cordial reception with its purest and pacific environment."

Further on I come to a wooden gate with the message "Living here since 1946 - please enter!" Inside is a minute house built of driftwood and stones from the river. The garden is paved with pebbles and planted with trees that seem to have stopped growing out of respect for the lilliputian scale of the place. An apple tree has been braced with a fork of driftwood: the two have fused long ago.

Plus de Rishikesh
I was woken at dawn by an ear-splitting hymn to one of the deities. I got up and walked down into the town. On the way I saw a saddhu examining a bush with great attention. As I drew level, he selected a single berry and put it carefully into his mouth.
Beside the river a little cafe was just opening up. I ordered tea and sat down to wait for the sunrise. I savoured the smells of India: incense, diesel, cooking spices, and a grassy whiff I couldn't identify.
I sniffed the tea, then spilt most of it agonisingly down my arm when a cow chose that moment to run its great raspy tongue up the back of my neck.

Rishikesh
The bus from Manali to Dehra Dun leaves at 6.30pm, which presages a long night. It's a public bus: seats for the fortunate and agricultural suspension. I sleep sometimes, my bag jammed between my knees.

Dawn at Chandigarh, where waiting passengers sleep on the concrete floor. We're on the plains now, and it's hot in the early morning sun. At a tiny village we take on yet more passengers, including a young girl who loses her balance as the bus lurches off, falling into my neighbour's lap. We make room for her: my neighbour seems to think it's all my fault. The girl sits at an angle between us, perching chastely against my thigh, but slips off the seat. I haul the bag out from between my knees and indicate to my neighbour that he should put it in the aisle. He rolls his eyes and hurls the bag onto the floor.

Now we're climbing into the hills in long lurching turns. With a look of infinite sadness, the girl leans across and is sick out the window. The tableau lasts for minutes on end, she flirting with death as parked trucks flash past, me gazing impassively into the perfumed folds of her sari fluttering in my face. Finally she makes to sit down. I give her my seat next to the window. Bag-Flinger gives me an unreadable stare. I use all my yogic powers to stay in contact with the edge of the seat, but finally I have to shift position. As soon as I do, Bag-Flinger moves half way into the aisle, puts his hands around my waist and guides me in beside him, finishing off with a grin and a pat on the shoulder.

At 10.00 am, a long shriek comes from the motor just as we enter a tiny village. We stop outside a lean-to which turns out to be the local garage, run by a corpulent do-nothing who gives us the services of his boy mechanic. The women stay on the bus, serene in the heat. The men pile out, some to sit under a tree, the rest to watch the mechanic. In 20 minutes he has the offending part on the work bench. It's the generator: seized bearing. I watch from the shade of the bus. In ten minutes flat he has the bearing out and drops it with a hiss into a bucket of water. Another ten minutes and it's re-packed with grease and he's re-assembling the generator. At 11.00 am we're back on the road, taking our leave of the mechanic without, as far as I can make out, a single word of thanks.

At Dehra Dun I change buses, and at 2.00 pm we roll into Rishikesh, an ancient pilgrim town in the foothills of the Himalayas, famous in the west as the one-time hangout of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and in India as one of the four sites of the chardham, journeying to which will free the pilgrim from the cycle of rebirths.

After the prim hill town stonework of Manali, Rishikesh is a relief. These are Indian buildings, green-veined and weary from their old struggle with the earth. In Laksman Jhola the steps lead down through a bazaar. Indian tourists pose against hillside backdrops, and the stream of pilgrims is endless: excited kids, grave young couples, retired clerks who were in their prime when Gandhi lived, and who now pause to chat while they probe the next step with a stick.

Stalls, carts, shops and hawkers sell popcorn, puffed rice, sacred texts, beads, chick peas, horseshoes, old coins, sweets, ayurvedic remedies, incense, gems, spices, seashells. Bare ends of power cables are crimped into the grid for the green and gold juice machines, their flywheels turning slowly all day and half the night.

Further down the crowd is denser, every second doorway a temple. Saddhus stalk through the clouds of incense, or pose serenely for photos before proffering their begging bowls. A coloured canopy billows over a hundred pilgrims cross-legged on the ground, eating free dhal from banana leaf plates while a white-robed guru murmurs into a microphone. Used plates are piled outside, knee-deep to the cow that is foraging through them.

Now the crowd funnels past a huge statue of Lord Krishna, down a final flight of steps, to where monkeys are high-tailing along the suspension cables of a giant footbridge that leaps, in one marvellous span, across the Ganges.

The river is a few hundred miles from its birthplace, its headlong plunge out of the mountains almost over: just one flight of rapids remains downstream before its journey across the plains. Under the bridge, it surges past, still with a tinge of glacial green, writhing like a snake.

Somewhere, maybe here on the bridge, John and George stood all those years ago and felt the throb of pilgrims' feet, stared at the cockeyed pavilions of the great ashrams on the other side (Brahma comes to Blackpool!), and for one moment thought that something else was possible, before time swept them on.

Cricket
Did you know that Greg Chappell (India's cricket coach) said something rude about India's captain Sourav Ganguly in an e-mail to the Board? No? Where have you been?
Yesterday afternoon Indian TV broke into normal programming with the story, doing standups in front of Board HQ and leading the evening bulletin. They threw together a late night studio debate, with update crawls at the bottom of the screen ("Chappell: Indian cricket has a 'fine future'"). It was front page in The Times of India, with an editorial and three separate stories in the sports pages. One of them included this about Chappell when he was door-stopped at Mumbai airport: "As he warmed up after playing an array of half-volleys, Chappell then faced the 'e-bouncer.' But as in his playing days he was sure with his footwork and went back and just pulled it with ease. 'I think the media get a lot excited with such happenings'".
Sounds like Greg is fitting right in.

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