We found a hotel and relaxed for a while, during which time Steve updated me on news at home and presented me with a piece of Kiwiana – a warm, squashed chocolate moro bar, which I devoured promptly. The last thing to change with any traveller to another country is preference for food, and despite my eagerness for local Chinese cuisine, the consumption of one poisonously sweet bar of New Zealand chocolate was inestimably satisfying.

Another thing that is slow to change is personal habit, such as the time at which you shower. Westerners typically shower in the morning, whereas in China it is more common to shower at night. There are lores of logic constructed on the matter: for Westerners, it’s more sensible to face the day clean in the presence of others, and pointless to scrub up for eight hours when you’re not even awake. Chinese people don’t want to dirty the sheets with a day’s dust, and don’t need to wash in the morning having stepped out of a clean bed. This time at the hotel, showering mid-morning ensured unbroken hot water, which is often used up quickly by other guests at night. In other hotels, however, the hot water isn’t even turned on in the morning, leaving us Westerners with strange habits out in the cold.

Two months before, Changsha had been cloudy and cold, a grim, blocky city that had a feverish quality, perhaps attributable to the chillies and intensely lush foliage spilt across the city in untamed patches. Now it was bright and sweltering, I felt overdressed in a T-shirt, and when Steve and I decided to bus out to Orange Island the air in the bus was intolerably warm. Despite Orange Island having been the only place I’d already visited in Changsha, I was still keen to get there again, partially because I’d not had the time to explore it properly before, but mainly because the island seemed so unique that I was compelled to get a better feeling for the place.

Steve and I descended an enormous concrete stairwell and crossed under the bridge over the Xiang river, great tributary of the Yangtse. The river floods regularly, and Orange Island is often partially submerged. The city bank opposite is an astonishing feat of architecture  in that the whole concrete mass of riverside roading and pavement is cautiously constructed on floating segments; massive, invisible blocks that keep a seemingly fixed stretch of cityscape level on the unstable waters.

I told Steve a little of the history of the island, this private enclave for foreigners where Chairman Mao himself used to keep in shape by swimming across the Xiang. The last time I'd visited the island I'd been reminded of the luxurious colonial mansions of South-East Asia; now in the feverish heat the comparison seemed even more accurate, massive yards teeming tropically against brightly-coloured brickwork. The colonialists would have sweltered in their opulence as they looked across the river at the 'mysterious Orient'. Now, as with the old Russian mansions in Dalian, the once-palatial homesteads were each coops for several squashed-in families.

Steve had noticed the same short row of pool tables I'd observed on my last visit and also observed the beauties watching the unkempt lads holding the cues. Steve had been the manager at a pool hall in West Auckland for a few years and is a fierce player; he is also not in the least bit shy. Before I'd noticed he was already halfway to the tables, and he proceeded to startle the players, wandering around the green velvet nodding cheekily. He pointed to a pool cue and shrugged his shoulders invitingly - the boys laughed and set up the pool balls. It was a short game and Steve was ruthless. They stared as he walked away, confidently cracking his knuckles: "and the game goes to New Zealand, one-nil".

As we walked back over the bridge to central Changsha, we watched over the frequently passing cargo boats and at the many new buildings under construction. As the evening came, we witnessed the opening of a new public fountain and courtyard where crowds of lightly dressed locals were waving glowing and flashing toys and watching the fireworks. Changsha is another rapidly developing city as the capital of Hunan province, and is already showing the effects of breakneck change. At the same time, it is said that Hunan is one of the most commitedly Socialist provinces around, given their pride at being the birthplace of Mao, who was also educated in Changsha.

Steve was keen to sample the nightlife, and so I approached a trendy looking young woman at a bus stop and asked where in Changsha one would go dancing. She invited us to get on the bus with her and directed us to the right stop. I'd visited some very average nightclubs in Shenyang and didn't have high expectations; I was taken aback by the club, however, when upon entry it turned out to be very smart, very exciting and very expensive. I asked a waitress how much a beer was and was stunned by the answer. She blushed when I told her that an entrance ticket to Beijing's Forbidden City was about the same price as one small bottle of her establishment's beer. After we'd begrudgingly bought one each she evidently felt guilty, and after a short while smuggled us each a second bottle free of charge, hidden in a plastic grocery bag.

Another foreign face approached us and invited us outside for a chat away from the loud music. He was an Australian with one of those faces and lazy personalities that comes across as being permanently stoned. He was teaching English, but his passion was music, and he'd been working hard at influencing the local bands. "They all think that Heavy Metal is the most fringe Western music around", he told me. "I gave this one band a reggae dub tape and they were blown away - changed their whole sound". While we were talking a Chinese girl approached us and started dancing excitedly in front of us, in the car park. We were a little surprised, and I asked her what she was doing. "Nothing!" she exclaimed happily, "I'm just drunk!".

The morning after a late night dancing in Changsha, we set off for Wuhan. It's another city I'd passed through on my recent adventure with Hamish without really having had the opportunity to take a look. A mega-city which encompasses three separate loci on a bend in the Yangtse, Wuhan is a swelterhouse in the summer and home to another of China's most famous ancient pagodas, the Yellow Crane Tower.

The four hour train trip passed in a flash. The moody Hubei countryside which had so moved me not a fortnight before was brightly lit up under clear skies. Sky-blue trucks were connecting remote farms with modern China, with all its benefits and ills, and the dust on the slender roads was swept up at frequent intervals as they passed.

A Wuhan local with good English found us and sat down to chat. He was evidently a man who enjoyed wielding influence, as immediately upon hearing of our difficulties in finding passage to Shanghai, he was making calls on his cellphone to prepare a solution. He wouldn't hear of not inviting us to dinner, and upon arrival in Wuchang (at the same terminal near the Lulu hotel where Hamish & I had stayed - it was bizarre to be dropped at the precise same location twice in as many weeks, considering the distance covered) we were met by his attractive girlfriend, who'd not been informed we'd be arriving with her boyfriend but who seemed to take it in her stride - and escorted us to an expensive restaurant. Her English was equally fantastic, and she told us that she worked in television - smiling warmly at her boyfriend, she added, "he always does things like this". Within half an hour, a worried-looking young man arrived with two bed tickets for the next night's train to Shanghai. Aside from the cost of the tickets, we'd paid nothing at all for the service and hospitality, except perhaps for the very Chinese reward in 'face'.
 

Wuhan Friends

Treated to Dinner in Wuhan

I have to confess that Sophie and I had first become acquainted as messenger buddies online. During the two years that I'd spent working as an Internet consultant for a New Zealand provider, I had become more than familiar with tales of Internet liaisons and its associated merits and pitfalls. However, over long evenings on customer support trapped in front of a PC and dreaming of visiting China, the thought of developing virtual rapports with people already there made it difficult to ignore company policy and not chat with girls whilst taking customers' calls.

Sophie's ident details revealed that she was Chinese, with the same endearing first name as my favourite Chinese singer, Wang Fei. After some conversation, however, it turned out that she was in Europe alone on a long-term business trip, and had a similarly large amount of time to pass away on chat. At one point we were communicating daily, and we promised to meet for coffee one day in Beijing.

At the time, Internet chat was much lass common than it is today, but by the time I eventually arrived in China, its popularity there was beginning to explode, with cheap Internet cafes opening in every small town across the country and with the growing success of China's own chat client - Tencent OICQ, commonly known as QQ. For whatever reason, QQ is host to a far more flirtatious community than is even the most notorious of American-based clients, and the phenomenon of travelling to meet Internet sweethearts, sometimes with disastrous results, is less and less unusual there. In some major Chinese airports, signs decorated with the QQ mascot, a cartoon penguin, state boldly: BEWARE OF ONLINE LIARS.

I'd met a few online buddies already, and had by then grown accustomed to the fact that with everyone you do meet from the Internet, there's always at least one thing that is a sudden shock. With Sophie/Liu Fei, it was her height - when we'd met in Beijing I'd been startled by her being half-a-head taller than I am, a revelation that resulted in my being shyer than I must have seemed on the Internet. Fortunately, it had been a positive enough experience for us to want to remain good friends, and her warm invitation to put Steve and us up for the night saved what could have been a difficult stage of our journey North.

Sophie had given me instructions to relate to our taxi driver so that we could be driven to her parent's apartment where she was spending the afternoon alone. We arrived to catch her strolling out from the apartment drive, tall and slender with shimmering long hair, cool and warm in the hot sunshine. She casually took us up to her apartment where we chatted and waited for her family to arrive - we were to be invited out for dinner (again) to celebrate with her her mother's birthday, and also the news of her accepted application for residence in Canada. Within an hour we were both flattered and embarrassed to be received as friends on such an intimate family occasion, and I was personally delighted to see Sophie as a relaxed, charismatic member of this group of welcoming and warmhearted people.

Steve was to be accommodated at Sophie's brother's apartment, so he was taken elsewhere, leaving Sophie and I alone. She showed me to my bedroom and we sat on the bed chatting as I looked at some of her childhood photographs. As she got up, I reminded her teasingly of a few of the bolder lines she'd used whilst chatting with me online. She smiled, threw me a wink and slowly closed the door behind her as she left.

East Lake in Wuchang

Li Bai Releases the Eagle

Standing above Wuchang's great East Lake stands a huge statue of China's most famous poet, Tang Dynasty writer Li Bai, throwing an eagle into the air (although as I later discovered, locals have often complained that the rendering of the eagle looks rather more like a pigeon). It is said that on this site, after Li Bai had discovered a trapped eagle and set it free, he was so moved that his heart was released from the trappings of his studies and he went on to discover true freedom of the soul. As I stood beneath the enormous statue and looked out over the lake waters, I preferred to believe that the depiction of Li Bai represented the essence of the poetry inherent in the Chinese language, and that it is this power that has the ability to release the Chinese people to a destiny as the world's most advanced literary culture. It is to this that Chinese people refer to when they speak of 'the glory of our heritage'.

Sophie had taken Steve and I out early so that we had enough time to see as much of Wuhan as possible before having to leave in the late afternoon for Shanghai. Wuhan is an enormous city, and we were lucky to have the chance to see the lake district, where Sophie had spent much of her childhood, and I sensed from her a cautious delight as she revealed a side of herself that seemed deeply connected with the areas she was proudly showing to us; in a small way, she was letting down her guard.

We passed a couple of other minor sights - including an interesting governmental office once used by Dr Sun Yat Sen, who led the first revolution to liberate China from the Qing Dynasty overlords - before moving on to what is regarded as the symbol of Wuhan - the Yellow Crane Tower.

It's not the original, and although there has been a Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan for about 1800 years, it has been razed and destroyed many times. This latest tower was reconstructed only 20 years ago - it is a faithful recreation, although it is wider than the last tower that burnt to the ground a century ago, and as a result is more stable. The tower is said to be built in memory of a magical priest who brought a picture of a crane he'd drawn to life and flew on its back to heaven.

Wandering through the tower and inspecting its grounds and artworks was nothing short of a magnificent experience. From the upper stories I was able to see far across Wuhan, a view obscured only by the thick smog that accompanies all provincial capitals.

Sophie took us across to the city opposite Wuchang, Hankou, for yellow soybean soup, a dish I'd not had since taking shelter after arriving in Harbin at 4am in -40°C cold. That had been hot and invigorating, this summer variant was cold and thin - a flavour that was initially unappealing in comparison with my moro chocolate bar, but one which is so distinctively Chinese that I will always miss China when remembering the taste from overseas.

Hankou is the site of the former European colony in the region, and once again I was faced with the same kind of familiar, beautiful but sinister architecture of the European continent I'd seen in Dalian and Tianjin. Foreigners have always brought trouble to China, but as I observed these old colonial strongholds, pillars and marble pasted over in big Chinese shop signs and advertisements, ornately sculpted windows stacked with vegetables for sale, I couldn't help but smile at the ability of China to steadily and slowly, decade passing decade, reoccupy everything that has come to invade. Add to that China's capacity for recovering things once lost, like the Yellow Crane Tower, and it becomes easier to understand why the country has persisted in spite of it all.