Rattiness is one of the most common symptoms of travel. It's unavoidable, most usually because the amount of attractions that the guidebooks tell you are unmissable won't possibly fit into the time schedule you have to see them; you're tired, dirty, and desperately want to pretend that you're having the time of your life. Travellers generally need to accept the fact that travelling is almost always only fantastic in retrospect.

Hamish and I wouldn't allow ourselves a full night's sleep, not wanting to waste our only full day in Chengdu. We were also intent on claiming our free breakfast before the cafeteria closed. Consequently we found ourselves staring at a menu four hours after having gotten to sleep, worried that we were already running out of precious sightseeing time. The menu, however, was for display only, as for some inexplicable reason, foreigners staying at the traffic almost invariably select the banana pancakes - this is a widely reported phenomenon by veteran backpackers who've stayed there, and we were loathe to break with any traditions. The pancakes were disappointing, however, and our general impressions of daytime Chengdu were beginning to be the same. Sitting sleepily chewing bland cakes, the only thing that seemed to be remotely cheerful was the animated chattering of the two Japanese girls sitting on the table behind us. It was something about the gutteral rogueishness of their language that pleasantly counteracted the coldly beautiful droplets of Mandarin we were used to.

Later, in the foyer of the Traffic, we sat with the map of Chengdu encircling the places we wanted to see, and found ourselves disheartened at the improbability of seeing more than three, unless we extensively used taxis, which we were too proud to do. Accordingly, we wandered out to the bus stop, which took a little too long to find, and then waited for the bus, which took a little too long to come. Hamish had already begun to glower, and I stood at the front of the overcrowded bus trying to distract myself with my occasionally functional MP3 discman - I started up an MP3 disc on random play and was cheered by the automatic selection of some Japanese Pop, which was exactly what I was in the mood for. Utudu Hikaru gurgled through my headphones and I swung happily from the straps.

Both Hamish and I have a strong interest in poetry, and this put the visit to famous historical poet Dufu's cottage at the top of the list. This belief was unfortunately a misguided one, as the cottage is a mere recreation of the bard's possible home which was probably close to Chengdu, and is far less impressive than made out to be. The bus, which was supposed to pass the gate, didn't, and left us with another walk of some distance until we found the entryway. We tried to be interested in the scenes of suburban Chengdu, and failed at this also.

We wandered miserably through the park around the cottage, which had cost more than we'd expected to get inside, and were frustrated by poor directions to the cottage itself - and when we finally did manage to locate it, were incensed to find that it required an additional charge to view. With the sense of having been cheated, we declined, as we could kind-of see the roof over the fence anyway and that seemed enough. More rewarding was the discovery of Dufu's writing, set on superb wooden slabs and hung around a gorgeous small garden - and we were happy to observe that they were being dutifully read by a great deal of national tourists. Sadly, Tang poetry was a little above the reading ability of six-month beginners in the language, and we felt pressed to move on.

The map told us a major Daoist temple was within walking distance of the park, but again this turned out to be a misinterpretation. We took a shortcut down an intricate series of mazelike alleyways and were lost within minutes.

Travelling is supposed to be most rewarding when you discover things you weren't planning on seeing, and this should have been one of those times. This was a miniature city of interconnected homes and stores, restaurants, all servicing a microcommunity that need never emerge from the labyrinth. It was well populated with tea-drinkers and chess players, sitting quietly outside the front doors of homes, staring at the improbably high walls. Fascinating, but in that we were held firmly within the mistaken duty to our arbitrary itinerary, the diversion was just irritating. It was half an hour before we found our way to the temple, and our mood ruined it for us. It would have probably been fascinating in higher spirits, but at that point it was mere red walls and smoky sticks. The only sight that really caught our attention was a lucky goat idol which had been fenced off by the city administration in order to dissuade superstitious rubbing, and which proved about as effective as our schedule. a queue had formed, and some girls were helping people to stretch out over the barricade.

The park next to the temple was far more relaxing, and it was here where we started to see the sight Chengdu is famous for in sufficiently great numbers to start believing it - scores of people sitting lazily drinking tea. I was wondering if what you've read about a city affects your own perception of it, as all accounts of Chengdu I'd swotted up on told that Chengdu is one of the slowest, laziest places in the country. In this case, the impressions I got were at odds with those I'd read - Chengdu reminded me very much of Beijing, the white air, the river coursing through the city, the long straight roads and the ringroads around the centre we could see on the map. I was too grumpy to wonder too much, however, and tried unsuccessfully to cheer myself up by looking at my Chinese dictionary in an attempt to learn some characters. Hamish and I decided that no matter how much one tried to convince oneself that an itinerary was just a guide to assist in attracting attention to points of significance to be used alongside a more general appreciation of a city, its mere existence brought about an unneccesary and self-defeating ultimatum, and we thus decided to forget it. Instead, we headed off to the city for a hotpot.

We arrived in the city centre, which, like Beijing, is a public square about which the rest of the city is arranged like a dartboard. The difference is that Chengdu's central square is an area of grass which noone is allowed to walk on. Standing over the square is one of the last giant statues of Mao Zedong, not unlike that in Zhongshan Square back in Shenyang. The streets around the square are packed with shoppers and parked bicycles, and the guidebook said that this was the place to go to try Sichuan's world-famous hotpot, the genuine article, a cauldron of swirling meats and spices, reputed to be the hottest in China.

Who could wander the main streets of hotpot capital and fail to find a hotpot restaurant? It seemed impossible - hotpot is the thing above any other that the region is known for within the country. McDonald's was easy to spot - I suppose one of the reasons that it's always easy to find is the extent to which they go to place those big yellow 'M's in locations visible for blocks - but passers-by all seemed to point in different directions when it came to hotpot restaurants, and this, alongside a sinking feeling that the day wasn't about to go any better, lay behind our sad wandering in the direction of the M.

Chengdu is a remote city, geographically speaking, situated right in the middle of the country, kilometres of land stretching out in every direction, and it is for this reason that Chengdu culture has enjoyed a relative independence from what was going on elsewhere. In keeping with the traditional organisational system of the old Han empire, it has always been in the loop, just a little bit far away to bother doing anything about anything that might be at odds with the discipline imposed on the other areas under Han control. The Japanese invasion of China passed Chengdu by, one of the only major cities that remained under Chinese control right throughout the occupation.

Historically, Chengdu has always been a town of comparative wealth and freedom; underground intellectual movements have thrived here over gigantic pots of tea; Hamish and I had hoped to see some evidence of them, but given the limitations on our time and the fact that they were, after all, underground, we didn't. Chengdu, in fact, seemed nothing like we'd been led to believe. A modern city of the gregarious, overpopulated kind China has recently given rise to, Chengdu is busy and international. Having just emerged from smalltown Hunan, we might have had some sympathies with the kind of farmers who are scared to get on escalators on their first city excursion, but for the fact that we were taken as Americans everywhere we went and subjected to more accusatory hellos than anywhere else we'd visited. Wandering down a side street later on in search of a cash machine, a greasy-looking fellow perched across from a bikerack smoked menacingly at us. He began to sing: there go the lao wai, shooting down our aeroplanes... I glared at him, 'we're not Americans' and he looked elsewhere.

A need for some real coffee beans to restock Hamish's diminishing supplies in Jishou required a trip to an international supermarket, and a Carrefour sign promised just this - although turned out not to be as good an indicator as the McDonald's sign. An hour later of circling roadways that were unyielding of Carrefours, we gave up and concentrated instead on getting back to the hotel room where we planned to sit on our bunks unhappily and gibber. 

We were foreigners, and given that the hotel was supposed to be within walking distance of a number of foreigner nightspots, and that it was getting on in the evening, we supposed that a beer might cap off the day nicely. This time we swallowed our pride and only walked halfway to the bar street, taxiing the remaining distance - but having been dropped off, we were still unable to find a spot that suited. Sometimes one wants to go somewhere for a quiet drink, and most foreigner bars are full of noisy music (usually the Carpenters or My Heart Will Go On) and girls in miniskirts who only get paid when you buy drinks for them. We found a Chinese bar where we enjoyed the karaoke for a while, if only to point out to each other the characters we recognised whilst other drunken patrons were singing them, and then finally found a dance bar without any business for the evening, which resulted in our sitting at the bar and practicing our Mandarin with the bartenders. It was to be only only feeling of success for the day, along with the only chilli dish we'd been able to score in Sichuan yet - a one kuai kebab fried on the street as we wandered back to the hotel. It was as hot as molten lava.

Our next day in Chengdu was a shadow of the first - a lot of mucking around engaged in the processes of actually getting places, although this time we were a little more successful with busses and even with taxis - which didn't seem to take anything away from the time it took to get anywhere. Carrefour turned out to be a sickening thirty paces from the point we'd given up on yesterday, and from there we took a bus to the central long-distance bus station (having waited half the morning at the terminal near our hotel only to find that nothing would take us back to Chongqing from there) where we booked a bus that would get us back late at night - our plan was to wait until sunrise and then set off on the boat towards the Three Gorges.

It was here where the cheap shoes I'd bought with Faith, the ones with the enormous soles that made me look slightly taller, turned out to have been cheap because the soles were capable of falling off at any moment. This they did, or at least one of them did, which necessitated a return to Carrefour where I'd seen another pair - I'd absentmindedly picked them up and thought, 'this is one of the only pairs of shoes I've seen in South China yet that are actually big enough to fit me and don't look ridiculous, and which actually have laces'. Had I bought them at the time, I'd probably have seen more of Chengdu that day than one other temple, a beautiful and quiet little place where we had a chance to chat for a few moments with some tourists and pose for photographs - instead, the hour and a half that it took to get through the heavy traffic back were one of the lowest points of all of my travels in China. From the windows of the bus, I watched crowds of dusty people waiting under enormous overpasses of thick concrete, I saw a gigantic oriental tower obscured by domino-block apartment buildings, I saw swarms of cyclists and bantering pedestrians, and wondered how anyone might have ever written that Chengdu was a relaxing place. If you want to know the truth about Chengdu, don't read accounts of backpackers who've sipped tea in the middle of a park - you'll probably find a more accurate portrayal in a pamphlet about Tokyo.