CHINA: It is impossible to squash three weeks of being in China - Beijing, Xian, Chenghu, Emei Shan, Chongquin, the Yangtze River, Yichang, Yangshuo and Hong Kong - into one article.
Three weeks of appalling smog, of spitting and hocking, of menus with names like Braised Turtle with Eight Treasures and Fried Duck's Mouth with Soya, of the Great Wall like a bright wishbone across the Mongolian mountains, of pagodas and ubiquitous Mao pictures and noise and crowds and touts and the endless trains that clatter through the night, uniting the entire country.
The best experience I had in China and the day which I felt was perhaps the closest I got to peering under the surface was the day and night spent on the Yangtze river, going down river from Chongquin through the Three Gorges to where the colossal dam is nearing the first stage of completion.
We left in the early morning from Chongquin, the most polluted city in the world, where the air smells of metal and the buildings push uneasily out of the gloaming like some post-modern version of Dickens's London.
The Yangtze is a filthy and vital artery of China: a murky-coloured highway for the cargo boats, fishing boats, cruise ships and bamboo rafts which ply its hundreds of kilometres all the way to Shanghai.
Next year, the first stage of the controversial Three Gorges dam will be completed; the project is scheduled to end in 2009. By then, a large section of the river will have become a lake the size of Singapore and up to 2 million people will have been relocated.
Providing electricity is the main reason, although there is a certain element of the Chinese Grand Gesture to the project - its most ambitious engineering scheme since the building of the Great Wall and infused with messy politics from the start. Once the levels of the Yangtze rise, many towns, archaeological sites and the famous Three Gorges will sink under the water.
Thus, thousands of tourists, both Chinese and foreign, are taking to the river now to see the fabled landscape before the water rises.
Our boat was a crowded no-star cargo boat which peeled rust and stank; functional would be a little over-ambitious by way of description. The "our" referred to those on the no-frills-tour group I was on.
I had come to China thinking it was a hard place to travel alone, but things have changed a lot very recently. English signs are everywhere in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and Westerners were a familiar sight everywhere I went. It actually would have been very easy to travel solo in China.
I realised that early on in the tour, along with the fact that I was definitely not cut out to be a sheep and would rather in future always take my chances solo as I have been used to doing in the past.
On the Yangtze that day, people settled in their Chinese-style first-class cabins; basic grimy berths which smelt of engine fumes. But who cares, I thought, when you're only there for one night? My cabin was on the opposite side of the deck to the others, who were all in a row together on the starboard side. We threw our rucksacks in and met in the bow; the first-class sitting room whose cracked windows gave a fine view of the mighty river, brown under a brown sky.
For most of that day, I just stared out the window or looked through borrowed binoculars at the river traffic and at the villages and town through which we passed. It was utterly mesmeric, watching the details of a way of life about to vanish forever.
Fuling and Fengdu, towns not far down from Chongquin, have already built their shadow cities, high above the new waterline-to- be. The old cities lie beneath, mainly abandoned, their roofs open to the sky, all useful and recyclable materials already picked clean.
Washing hung on a balcony of a house which will soon no longer be there; a man drove goats up a ghost track; a painted sign on a rock, under which all will soon be water. Vignettes of lives soon to be relocated and redefined.
We the first gorge in the pre-dawn. The walls of rock rose like shoulders, eerily quiet for China, which seems most natural when noisy. Temples were poised like wooden butterflies on the gorge walls. The second gorge lay under the smog which had followed us from Beijing. The twisting hazy height of it, blocking out the faint light from a weak sky, too steep for any houses. We stood in the wind on deck, silent, watching.
It was then the others told me about the rats which had scuttled through their cabins all night, from one unsealed room to the next, snuffling, chewing, squeaking. They did not budge when the lights went on, just stared balefully and kept chewing. One was discovered on a pillow, eating soap. I was lucky. No rats troubled my cabin that night on the Yangtze. Perhaps, I thought, there is such a thing as the luck of the Irish after all.
Next stop: Japan