In a foreign country, native people will ignore you if your travelling companion speaks their language better than you do. Hamish and I managed to communicate in Chinese quite adequately whilst travelling together, but with the temporary addition of Tim, Beijing University student from England, every sentence we spoke to any Chinese person resulted in a glance towards him for confirmation. Tim has a tall, slender frame, and therefore towered above Hamish and I in height as well as linguistic ability; we followed him off the boat at Yichang like novices clutching our satchels stuffed with sweaty T-shirts and my enormous old digital camera. Tim, in his orange coat and brightly-coloured beanie, looked like a character straight out of Dr Seuss, gangly, hairy legs extending out from knee-length shorts, casually dropping phrases of fluent Chinese at gaping onlookers, perhaps to dispel the illusion of alienation endemic to Sino-foreign relations.

Yichang is a bright and well-developed city on the Yangtse. Colourful apartment blocks were a welcome substitute for the ugly, bathroom-tiled monoliths common to the area, and as we ascended the sloping paths up from the quay, we had the sense of entering a reserve of freshness not previously seen in our voyage down the river. We navigated a simple map in search of the long-distance bus station, given that our first priority in Yichang was to arrange to leave it, allowing as much time as possible to get to know the city before the necessity of departure.

At the roadside along the way, Tim spotted a merchant of a favourite spiked kebab snack and made an enthusiastic order, urging us to try them. The elderly lady in her jersey huffed at the river air, chuckling to herself at the curious experience of speaking to foreigners in Chinese. Instead of communicating in complete sentences, she elected to mutter short answers into the wind and then incant to herself, "very good Chinese, very good Chinese".

We parted with Tim at the bus station, deciding instead to try to find a train to ride out in the morning, which according to our information should have been faster than the bus. The train station was a little further through the city, nicely tree-lined broad streets leading to a commercial centre which, although a little grey in the half-light under the cloud, was spacious and busy. An enormous set of stairs led up the side of a steep hill on the top of which the train station sat like a temple. The task of climbing the stairs similarly demanded the persistence of a devotee. Any resemblance to a religious structure ended at the door, however; the interior was a mere dusty hall with booths and a destinations board. 

We were headed for Wuhan, and it took a while for us to figure out why we couldn't find it on the board. When your command of Chinese characters isn't very good, you have to remember basic forms and then constantly check back and forth to find a match - we were checking for the characters for Wuhan and it took us a full 20 minutes to confirm that it wasn't there. It was only when we rechecked our guidebook that we remembered that Wuhan city is composed of three separate city centres facing each other across the river, Hankou, Hanyang, and Wuchang, and that the rail stations are listed according to those names and not the all-encompassing 'Wuhan'. This was possibly the first time the guidebook would have been truly useful on the journey, except that once we had figured out when the trains would be leaving for Wuhan, we saw that there were none that would get us there in time. There was nothing for it but to fume on the stairs for a while and then head back to the bus station.

We walked the way back, passing an outdoor mall promotion, the stage erected in front of the great glass doors and several announcers and dancers overenthusiastically commanding the attention of an unreasonably large crowd. It was already past noon, and we were still completely unaware of what there was to see in Yichang, let alone what we stood to miss as our time there grew increasingly shorter. 

A long queue at the bus station later, we were faced with the only option - a bus to Wuhan that would be leaving in fifteen minutes and arrive at around ten that evening. Before we knew it we were standing in the parking lot taking our last glimpses of a city that had made a positive impression on us without trying. The mood of the moment, however, was beginning to revert back to the rattiness of being lost in Chengdu. It was at about this point on the journey that Hamish and I gave up trying to be explorers, gave up the romantic pretence of discovery-travel, and gave up trying to photograph anything more spectacular than beautiful women.

As the bus pulled away, we saw Tim wandering around the ticket booths, evidently as unsuccessful in securing good tickets as we had been. The bus hurtled through the inner city and past the only monument we were to get to see in Yichang, a simple three-pillared arch.
 

Inner Yichang

Arch in Yichang

Crowded and bumpy, the bus entered the broad stretch of countryside that lies between Yichang and Wuhan, part of the great expanse of farmlands that, I would assume, makes up the majority of Hubei province. Hamish and I were propped up in the back seat, surrounded by our own luggage and the baggage thrust into the back by fellow passengers. The view from the window was clear, the afternoon bright in spring sunshine, the crops on the fertile soil intensely green. We didn't speak, I took out some music and began to play, some quiet Chinese popular music, Andy Lau and Wang Fei.

Perhaps it was this soundtrack that seemed to put the whole setting in context. The songs I chose to listen to were perhaps too simple, easy tunes with a hint of traditional China, the odd melancholy phrase stretched out from a two-string violin. Many of the lines I was beginning to understand for the first time, they had that ring of classical Chinese preciseness that is impossible to relate in English. For me, whenever I read or hear a good sentence that is uniquely Chinese, I have a brief vision of the age of the language and of innumerable lifetimes spent toiling Chinese soil, incubating the world's most precious and profound cultural achievement in stone huts and remote villages. I grew up speaking a language that is greedy in its art, in that the history of English is one of a tongue that has pilfered thousands of words from other countries, until it has become the one language with more words than any other. English poetry works by selecting the most refreshingly accurate word from a mass of close alternatives. Chinese is far more neatly interwoven, its words call on each other for meaning rather than string together in clumps like they do in English. There is something essentially human about Chinese that appeals to me immensely, and on the back of the bus headed for Wuhan, I was suddenly reminded of that, and of why I was in the country in the first place.

The countryside of Hubei was lush and smartly decorated with bright, white farm houses on lime-green fields. China is unpolluted outside the cities, and therefore the image that many people have of China as being a decayed and dirty place are exaggerating the normal developmental problems of crowded cities. The countryside, 95% of China's surface, is old and pure, remote and clean. Occasionally I saw families outside, carrying out existences in inaccessible places, little different from the families living on the same land a thousand years before them; the dirt right under the fingernails, the shirts scrubbed in river water with soft rocks, the nightly gatherings around old tables, stories and vials of rice wine. Again I remembered that it was under these conditions that Chinese slowly aged, the very tongue I was trying so hard to acquire, a language that is entirely guttural and noble at the same time.

I was privileged, really, to witness all this in passing. There is no way to capture in the understanding even one lifetime passed across the windows of a vehicle. Just to touch on the reality of the thousand million lifespans knotted into Hubei, or even of the billionfold men and women simultaneously existing across the remotest parts of the supercontinent, this is to know for an instant the rich, sonorous note of human work in its impossible detail, and to realise how distant one will forever be from China. These medleys of farm after farm, nothing of interest for any tourist, are the evidence of that which China can never disclose. I felt it intensely that afternoon and wanted little else than to disembark, step up to the door of any one homestead, enter and be home.

The landscape began to alter considerably miles away from Wuhan, small towns like suburbs melted into the borders of the city proper. The familiar dusty, broken concrete outside grey storefronts decked in large, bright Chinese signage; women in thick, floral-print dresses and tan stockings, men in dark, open-collared suits. Countless restaurants were beginning to light their halls as the day faded into dirty, neon-lit smalltown luminescence. In the distance before the bus, Wuhan was barely visible as an amber arch of streetlamp-lit thick air on the horizon.

It was hours before we were in the metropolitan districts, and well past the promised arrival time of ten o'clock. We were beginning to wonder how to get off this bus, as it was clear that each passenger had pre-arranged with the driver at which suburb they wanted to get off. After some time, the inevitable happened: Hamish and I were the only two passengers left on the bus, and we were driving aimlessly through the suburbs of Wuhan while the bus-driver considered whether or not to ask us where we were going. The truth was, we had no idea ourselves. We didn't know where the station was in Wuhan, neither had we thought enough about accommodation, and when the driver finally did ask at around 1.30am where we were planning to go we were only able to answer, "Wuhan", and were therefore let off immediately.

It was past midnight on a side street in Wuhan - besides this information, we had no idea where we were. There were a few people clustered about a canvas tent on the corner of the closest intersection, where pots of steaming rice forced the scent of chillies and sesame oil out across the way. Neither of us had any idea how to find a hotel, being amateur travellers at best, and as far as we knew, a hotel could cost anything in the vicinity of $800US, making the prospect an unhappy one. Having already lost a night's sleep in Chongqing, we were not about to wander around awake for another several hours before sunrise.

We went ahead along the footpath for a full minute before the answer presented itself. An elderly gentleman called out to us in excited tones: we were going to ignore him until we distinctly heard the Chinese word for 'hotel' and stopped, too surprised at this fortuitous interruption to mentally prepare for an inevitably unfair bargaining session. The old man, it turned out, was desperate to fill a two-bedroom room at his hotel, which he said was complete with hot water shower, and which he was willing to let out at 30 yuan. If this was an opening offer, we were stunned, as the cheapest accommodation we had found yet was for 40 yuan each at Chengdu's Traffic Hotel; and when we realised that this price was for the both of us, making a bed for the night 15 yuan each, we had no reason at all for hesitation.

At that price, we expected filth: what we were presented with instead was a perfectly reasonable, warm and dry room with two single beds and a television. Every bit as comfortable in practical terms as would be a much more expensive hotel, we gladly handed over the money. Our host was the grandfather of a small family that ran, and lived in, the hotel - the Lulu Lüshe - which boasted three double rooms and a small squatter toilet above which hung a shower nozzle, as clean and hygienic as any private bathroom. Two children stood behind a glass servery, displaying cigarettes, soap and toothpaste, watching us move about the foyer with wide eyes. Their father stepped up from his poker game and asked if we were hungry, and accordingly asked Grandfather to assist us in finding a meal. He led us back to the canvas tent and helped us to order a good Southern-style eggplant dish, nodding and smiling as we finished two large, cheap and cold bottles of beer.

We slept happily, and well.

It took me some time to discover why we had been able to find accommodation so easily. Most travel guides list around ten hotels in any city, most of which will be upmarket and specifically designed to cater for foreign tourists or travelling businesspeople. Major hotels are fairly easy to recognise, and the prices hard to forget. Pick up a little Chinese, however, and you soon discover that Chinese cities are packed with little hotels - there is accommodation to be found on almost every street, the majority designed for travellers on a very tight budget, and the cost of a bed is only rarely above 25 yuan. Trouble is that it's forbidden for foreigners to stay in these places - which for the paranoid means that the government is keeping an eye on where you're sleeping, but which in reality serves to guarantee protection and (expensive) hospitality for foreigners who are the guests of the country. If you're prepared to take the risk, many of these hotels will take in a backpacker for the business, but they will be nervous about capture, so if the chances of getting caught are high, they'll be unlikely to let anyone in who doesn't look Chinese. The upside for travellers who have an Asian face, and are able to walk with the casual, unpretentious air of a local Chinese (Japanese tourists seem particularly unable to do this), Chinese prices for accommodation are almost guaranteed. Any budget traveller in China should put learning to recognise the characters for Zhaodai Suo, Lü she, Lüguan and the like high on their list of priorities.

In the morning, we consulted the brightly coloured map in the foyer of the Lulu to confirm that we were in Wuchang, the South-East district of Wuhan, and very close to both the long distance bus station and the famous Yellow Crane Tower, which would be a definite port of call once we had found the most convenient ticket out of the city.

We walked the short distance to the station and made our calculations. We were headed for Yueyang, a pretty lakeside town back in Hunan, and we were most disappointed to discover that the only bus that would get us there in time would be leaving in 20 minutes.

And so we sat beneath a striking, red overpass above the road past the station, barely having time to eat our breakfast of red bean bun, looking up and down the street at the passers-by. It would be our only impression of Wuhan, save the view from the bus we'd been lucky enough to see the night before, passing over the immense suspension bridge that spans the breadth of the Yangtse, lit up in a chain of starry lights. Wuhan is a massive city; we left with the ability to say we'd been there, but without having any meat to back up the claim. As we prepared to leave another city we'd not yet really seen, we reflected that the boat we'd disembarked from at Yichang the day before would have passed through Wuhan also. Had we made the calculations before we'd bought the ferry ticket, we'd have been able to come straight through and had plenty of time to do some real travelling. The moral of the story is, don't be in a rush to go to a place where you have no time to do anything else other than leave.