We headed for the denser housing clusters in search of another old tower that we'd read of, reportedly over a hundred years old. Walking up off the soft sand and along the old avenues past tall leafy trees, the appeal of Yueyang began to hit home. Being alongside such a broad lake, the air and sky seemed open and huge, making it impossible to feel boxed up in the city - a complaint that might be made of many other cities in China. This sensation of space lends much to the tightly packed old quarter of Yueyang, clenched around a hundred jigsawing pathways, a greystone network of wearied, ornate buildings.

It was late afternoon already and the streets were busy, mostly bustling with merchants and patrons of the small restaurants that seemed to feature on every street in great numbers. The Ci Shi tower was easy enough to find, a tall, slender pagoda crumbling behind a row of houses, where it had stood since 713AD. The oldest structure in Hunan province, we had expected some kind of signage at least, if not a ticket booth or tourist building - instead, we had to get through to the tower via a back alleyway, and were surprised to find that the tower sits in a residential courtyard, a small, shady, circular public square into which opened the doorways of several brick homes. A few house dwellers were seated outside who regarded us with calm, unsurprised faces. From the walls of their houses stretched clotheslines tied on to the base of the tower. The irreverence was charming; it only seemed to validate the authenticity of the site. We took a few pictures and then departed, wondering if we seemed like trespassers to those who lived next to the monument, to whom a corner of Hunan's history was a convenient hook for the washing.
 

Ci Shi Tower

Hamish with Yueyang Kids

There are probably many other sightseeing attractions in Yueyang; however it was at this point that we decided to leave off with chasing artefacts of historical importance and explore instead the living streets. We followed small roads into major intersections; carts of fruit and vegetables were encircled by crowds of dark woolly jumpers, neckscarves and hand baskets. One shopkeeper standing at a corner sang out a surprised and boisterous "Lao Wai!" and seemed delighted when we reacted with smiles. In fact, we were grinned at tirelessly by the locals, young cleanshaven men carrying bottles of the local Yueyang brand beer between painted doorways set in light brick walls, seated girls chopping eggplant on thick wooden blocks outside the garage restaurants. We could smell the salty aroma of chillied fish and spicy vegetables, and soon wanted dinner ourselves, although it wasn't until we'd located the area opposite the Yueyang brewery that we decided to sit at a table.

Upon discovering that we had some ability in Chinese, but unable to speak good standard Mandarin herself, the restaurateur fetched her father from across the footpath who beamingly recommended to us several top dishes of Xiang Cai - Hunanese style cooking. He was so tickled at having a conversation with foreigners in Chinese that he introduced us to his whole family who one by one came over to watch us eat. The mood was good, and Hamish and I took a few pictures with our hosts, leaving our email addresses with the kids on the thin hope that they may one day be able to contact us and receive copies - whilst not many families in small town China own a computer, netbars are prolific, but the law restricts the age of patrons as they are seen as havens for louts. We figured with the rate that China is changing, it couldn't be too long before they too would be looking at the world through a web browser.

It was getting dark very fast in Yueyang, and it felt like we had walked almost every street in the city. Walking gives a very deep impression of a place, and I'll never understand how people can think they've done a city in taxis. We stopped in at a netbar ourselves for a while, which was full of louts, very stylishly dressed boys in the height of Korean fashions playing network shooter games next to their dollish girlfriends chatting to classmates in other cities on OICQ, the favourite Chinese chat client. Some enthusiastic students came to practice out their English on us, and encouraged us to go to a disco nearby, an invitation we accepted but which fell by the wayside when, upon returning to our hotel to change clothes, we fell straight to sleep.

An hour later we sat woozy and fighting with ourselves to win back some energy. Hamish turned on the television, and it was a good half an hour before we realised that we were sitting in the middle of Yueyang city watching Men In Black. It was a ridiculous thing to be spending travelling hours on, and we finally managed to pull ourselves out of the room.

We'd had dinner, but we were irresistibly attracted to the Xinjiangese restaurant on the corner of the main road, as the balcony seemed ideal for a combination of atmosphere and relaxation - any more marching through Yueyang streets was far from our thoughts. From the balcony we could see the lake waters, and we were reminded of our intention to sail out to Yueyang's most famous island the next day, on which grows a rare kind of tea, known as silver needle. The proprietor was a charismatic, portly gentleman who spoke with a thick accent and broad gesticulations; as with most Uighur Xinjiangese, he looked more European than Asian. Xinjiang, China's Westernmost province, is a huge area which would remind visitors more of Arabia than anywhere in the Far East, where Arabic peoples learn Mandarin Chinese in order to have access to state education. We were reminded of waiters in Mediterranean restaurants back in New Zealand with atrocious English and curly black hair; we shared a camaraderie in that Chinese was a second language for all three of us, and he spoke of the Han Chinese as if he too were a foreigner. He convinced us to buy a full meal and we were not in the least regretful for doing so. We feasted on Xinjiangese lava-hot meats.

Despite our determination to rise early the next morning and take the trip out to the island, the morning alarm clock sound was all-too ignorable, and we felt no shame in missing out on tourism, given that our impressions of Yueyang the day before had been so positive. Hamish managed to bring himself to in enough of a state to leave and go hunting for silver needle tea in the markets - we were headed for Xiangtan in the evening, where Bonnie awaited with her parents, and he wanted to pick up a packet for his father-in-law to be. I must have fallen asleep again after he left, as before I knew it he was back and pressing me at the lateness of the hour - the train out of Yueyang was due to leave soon and I'd not yet packed or showered.

A quarter of an hour later we taxied to the station in just enough time to get through the gates. The train, however, wasn't waiting for us, and we managed to decipher an announcement apologising for a delay which could take half the morning. We'd heard that train delays were not all that uncommon in China (in fact, they're common everywhere) but Hamish was immediately fretting: not keen to make a bad impression on Bonnie's parents, the prospect of being late to Xiangtan was most disconcerting, and furthermore we needed to get the late train back out from Xiangtan to get home to Jishou before his first class the next morning - still half a province away.

It was a few hours before we finally pulled out from Yueyang, and despite our pressing schedule we were reluctant to leave. Yueyang had to be the most pleasant city we'd seen in Hunan, and we'd not have been unwilling to spend days at the edge of the lake there. We'd spent the morning chatting with a few students of English returning to Changsha after the break, and they stayed with us on the train. The train would take a few hours to get to Changsha, and from there we planned to bus the last hour to the city of Xiangtan.

I'd hoped to take Hamish down to Orange Island in Changsha upon our arrival that morning, and was dismayed that we'd be losing the opportunity; however Hamish already had the frightened look on his face of a man who was about to get in trouble with his girlfriend, and it was clear that the illusion of a traveller's freedom was over for this trip at last. The students who'd accompanied us on the train took a bus with us to the station, which happened to be very close to their school, and we took the next available minivan to Xiangtan.

It was early evening by the time we arrived in Xiangtan, the largest city in the region of Hunan where the famous Chairman Mao Zedong was born. Hamish had lived here for several weeks during a university holiday earlier in the year, and was clearly fond of this unassuming Hunanese city. Although Xiangtan hasn't the grace of Yueyang or the small, country-town feel of Jishou, Xiangtan has a charm of its own, a quiet city in which a particularly musical dialect of Hunan Chinese is spoken. Being well used to the city, Hamish led me through the back streets under stone apartment blocks to Bonnie's home.

Bonnie and her parents greeted us warmly, our laundry was confiscated and we were issued with fresh T-shirts. Dinner was already being prepared, and I was asked what Chinese dish was my favourite. I half-jokingly named a little-known sweet sour chicken dish a restaurant in Shenyang near the Lanting hotel had used to make to order for my colleague Peter and I - this caused a surprising flurry as Bonnie's family tried to guess at what the ingredients might be. half an hour later, we were seated on short stools around a large, circular dining table, eating chillied pig's ears (like chewy bacon), chillied tofu, and to my delight, a good approximation of the sweet sour chicken dish, amongst other delicacies.

Later, around the lounge table, Bonnie's father offered me a dried vegetable to chew on, which he said was a stimulant not unlike tobacco. It turned out to be betel, a nut chewed commonly in India and several South-East Asian countries, and also in Hunan. I've never smoked a cigarette in my life, and apart from the occasional drink am totally unused to anything more stimulating than coffee, and my sudden flushed and dizzy reaction to the very, very mild drug saw me lying down on a bed feeling carsick for an hour.

Before our train left, we took a short walk through the main streets of Xiangtan and stopped in for bread and coffee at their Wanlilong cafe, apparently the original and first outlet of this homegrown franchise. It was a good chance to recover and let Bonnie in on the events of the last frantic week travelling through South-Central China.

Despite having been instructed otherwise, Bonnie's genetic affinity for low-price buying had resulted in her purchase of hard-seat tickets back for Jishou. An overnight hard-seat trip in China is quite simply a nightmare. Crammed in sweaty rooms with noisy sunflower-seed munching smokers, the experience is one that should be avoided at all costs. I remembered a backpacker in the Jinghua hotel in Beijing telling of how he had crawled up on the bagrails in the ceiling of one of the carriages in order to stretch out and get some sleep; I looked up longingly at the stuffed bagrails after having been on board just a few hours and calculated wistfully how many were remaining, wondering how to pass the time. Hamish and Bonnie each had already taken on that long face of one who is resigned not to sleep yet still holds out some hope.

It was a very slow night, made entertaining only momentarily when two elderly women were discovered to be without tickets - the conductor argued with them for some time before shrugging and commenting, "what can I do? They're old women!" and leaving them alone to enjoy their ride, even though they were taking seats which standing passengers were eyeing longingly.

Just after dawn, we decelerated the last few kilometres to Jishou, passing now-familiar hills, temples, and fields, houses alongside the rail tracks, and glimpses of the university from a distance. Jishou is a dense town which has a habit of commanding all of one's emotion, and the feeling of returning was one of fulfilment. Hamish and I had independently travelled across three provinces with a bag each and a smattering of Mandarin. The striking impressions we had received from China over those several days made Jishou feel just a little more like home.