Arriving in Chengdu on a morning flight from Guangzhou, I took the airport bus to the city. It ended up on a route different from the one I'd known, and when I got out I had the task of working out exactly where I was. While my city map was laid out on the footpath and my compass was in my hand, a young man asked if he could help. I asked the way to the Xinanmen Bus Station, and he insisted on taking me there in a taxi, refusing absolutely any payment from me. Typical of China - western China at any rate!

This time there was none of the nonsense about needing a People's Insurance Company of China insurance policy to get a bus ticket. The ticket bought at the bus station came stapled to a PICC insurance voucher, the premium of a trivial amount added to the ticket price.

So it was that I took the afternoon bus on an easy six-hour run over the mountains and through Luding to Kangding - in great contrast to the journey, sometimes of more than one day and invariably difficult, of only a few years ago, before the road was improved and a long tunnel constructed through the highest part.    Kangding :   the place of Peta's wondering introduction to Tibet, the place where she and I stayed twice, the second time to her delight in a hotel where she'd negotiated a deal that I'd told her was impossible;  a place of "more happier times", in a different world.

As a matter of ritual on arrival in Kangding I always ask for a bed at the bus station hotel, but am always refused. It must be a terrible dump inside. Nor was I surprised this time; but no matter: with ease I found an informal guesthouse of three or four rooms uphill on the other side of the street, accessed up a concrete ramp to an unmarked rear entrance, and cheap.

Wandering the streets, I asked a policeman for directions to a wangba, internet shop. He'd been going in the opposite direction, but turned about and took me there, a considerable distance. Afterwards some friendly kids begged me to come for a dance, though I'm sure my declining was expected.

A few minutes later I encountered a friendly Tibetan who told me he came from Litang. He was delighted to know that I knew the 6th Dalai Lama's poem about how he would return from Litang and how, as the 7th Dalai Lama, he did:

White crane,
Lend me your wings:
I shall not fly far.
From Litang I shall return.

It was a poem I'd recited to Peta as we left Litang in 2001.

On the bus out of Kangding for Jiulong the next morning I was lucky to meet Qian, a young Chinese computer programmer from Guangzhou, and we shared transport, accommodation and time for a few days. "A young Chinese computer programmer from Guangzhou" doesn't suggest anything very compatible, but, amazingly, we had very similar interests and values. She was on a tight time-budget, looking for wild parts of western Sichuan, and had already visited the Konkaling Mountains (which enchanted Joseph Rock in 1928 and, armed with Rock's maps, Peta and me 73 years later).

We travelled together for a couple of days at Wuxu Hai (lake) in Jiulong county, south-west of Chengdu, reached by mini-taxi on an extraordinarily rough road. We were amazed that we could (if only just) persuade the driver to take us. The fare up and back (the taxi returning to Jiulong in between) was a very modest 200 yuan.

At the lakeside we stayed at a charming Tibetan holiday village, in a basic but clean timber room reached via one of those logs where the steps are notches cut into them. We went for a few short walks along the lakeside and on the second day I hired a horse and guide to take me to a waterfall, the guide a young Tibetan woman who led the horse much as others had led the horses Peta and I rode on the Konkaling mountains journey four years before.

After that, Qian and I joined in a wonderful Sunday afternoon "social" with our hosts and their friends - an assortment of Tibetan, Hui, Yi and Han people in a room full of smoke and beer and wall nuts and apples, and animated conversation, laughter and simple kindness.

Then after a night back in Jiulong Qian had to return home. Lacking a companion to share the cost of a room I moved to a cheaper hotel.

The next morning I took a small taxi-van along a road north-east of Jiulong, towards Leita Hu. The road ends at a guesthouse complex, from which it was a slow three-hour walk to the lake. There were no signs, and I was uncertain which way to go. Besieged by people telling me I had no hope of getting to the lake without a 50-yuan guide, I charged off in some irritation, hoping against hope that the path I took would be the correct one. It led off around the right-hand-side of the main building, an old timber-cutting track up a mountain side stripped of its trees. After a couple of hundred metres a tee-junction was marked with Chinese characters, the left branch to a waterfall and the right branch, which I followed, marked as leading to a monster in a lake. I would never find the monster, but soon after passing the sign I was joined by two girls from the guesthouse, who accompanied me and even carried my day pack for much of the walk; on our return they would refuse to take any payment at all.

The path wound steeply up into the mountains, reaching eventually a pass beyond which it followed a brook gently downhill along a wide, treeless alpine valley before resuming its climb, this time even more steeply than before, with long flights of stone steps through the forest. The walk was turning out to be longer than I'd expected; without sleeping gear, I was beginning to worry that if I persevered and eventually reached the lake I might not be able to get back. At altitudes of up to 4350 metres, and unacclimatized, I was seriously weakened. So it was a relief indeed when suddenly we reached a lookout high above the lake - a very large and spectacular one, more than worth the journey.

Back at the guesthouse I felt tired and cold, but the girls brought me cups of hot water and a portable charcoal fire in a bucket. This I hunched over in a communal video room. I hoped I had the correct understanding, that the van would return for me - as it did.

On arrival at Jiulong, the driver demanded a fare of 300 yuan - an outrageous try-on. Expecting an argument, I calmly gave him one hundred, got out and walked off. No argument; the correct fare.

I wanted to get to SanYanLong the next day, a remote town in the south-west of the county. For days I'd been enquiring about how to get there. Some said it was not possible, that the road was closed. Information that proved correct was that one or more jeeps left Jiulong's central square between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m. each day. So the next morning I perched there, on a seat placed for me by a shopkeeper, watching people using the collection of new exercise equipment installed recently beside the square. Eventually I left for SanYanLong in an ancient Beijing jeep driven by a Tibetan genius of a driver, a man as gentle and considerate as his appearance was wild.

The SanYanLong "road" is too rough for trucks and continually at the very limit of what is passable for a jeep. We encountered a convoy of five tractors on a two-day journey carrying coils of reinforcing rod for the SanYanLong school. In fact I found the road, squeezing into precipitous mountain sides, rather terrifying. This territory of south-west Jiulong county near the legendary hidden gorge of the mighty Yarlong Jiang, is extraordinarily scenic, but unknown to tourists.

The jeep broke down a few times. Once, after we stopped for a break, it wouldn't start. Flat battery; crank handle tried but unsuccessful; rolling back into a creek failed to start the engine. So all hands pushed the jeep up the hill, further than before, and then pushed it back downhill, fast, bringing the motor to life. Later, with two spring-leafs broken, there was a longer delay, though somehow or other the driver managed to make repairs.

At SanYanLong I moved into a rather primitive guesthouse, with my room opening onto the single street. Opposite, I visited the school, where some teachers showed me around. Heroes' portraits included not only Marx, Engels and the Great Helmsman, but Lenin and Stalin as well. With pride I was shown a single computer - though in this remote place, without internet connection.

The next morning I continued on foot, following what was left of the road beside the river which in places had eaten it away to nothing, the trail now just a foot path or a track for horses or motorbikes. Soon I was joined by the son of the guesthouse owner. Together we walked several (perhaps five) kilometres downstream past the aptly named hamlet of SanTian (Third Heaven), an idyllic scattering of farmhouses deep in the steep valley. From here it is possible to hire horses for the ride, four days return, to Meng Dong overlooking the mighty and wildly remote gorge of the Yarlong Jiang.

The road between SanYanLong and Jiulong, frightening enough on the way out, became terrifying on the return, since that journey was at night - every puddle looking the same as the abyss. The genius-driver handled the jeep like a projectile, bouncing it from side to side of the rutted and rocky track as though he knew what lay beneath every puddle or pool of mud.

After another night in Jiulong, I headed by a circuitous route to Xichang and then via Yanyuan to Muli county, to the west of Jiulong. Part of the route to Xichang followed the great Yarlong gorge; after a bit of shopping around, I took an excellent but cheap room at the Galaxy Hotel. The next morning I was on the bus for Muli county town.

Muli county is accessible only by a single road which enters the county from the south, reaches Muli county town and continues a couple of hundred kilometres north via Wachang to a dead end at Chabulang. For years the maps have shown a road continuing from Chabulang, westward into Daocheng county, but attentive readers will see the annotation (if they can read the Chinese characters), "Planned Road"; it's said to be possible to make the connection in a few days on horseback, but bandits can be troublesome and it's not unknown for foreigners to be killed and robbed.

When I visited five years ago I caught a bus from Muli town for Chabulang, but didn't quite get there because a big landslide blocked the road. This time I thought I'd succeed but instead found the road had deteriorated badly and was impassable beyond Wachang, rather more than half way to Chabulang.

In Muli town I had some bad problems with language, and decided I needed help from someone who could speak English. So I marched into the high school and asked to speak to the English teacher. Perhaps not quite as bold as it sounds, because last time the head English teacher, who found me in the street but whose name I forget, had asked me to look him up if ever I returned. Anyway, he was long gone, and the two female English teachers, though perfectly charming, didn't speak any English. So I concluded, reasonably so it seemed, that there were unlikely to be any English-speakers in the county. (But how delightful it is to visit one of those remote schools in China where you are surrounded immediately by beaming children begging recognition, for them the entertainment of the year!)

I decided I'd spend two nights in Wachang, and walk 6 or 7 kilometres to the local monastery the day between. Arriving in Wachang by bus late in the afternoon, I thought I'd do a reccie to find the path to the monastery. When I asked the way, people pointed to a high pass in the hills just outside the town, and so I scrambled up there, thinking I might see the monastery in the distance, or at least a clear path through the forest. But no monastery was to be seen, and paths went off in several directions. So I was bushed. But now, just wait for it: Within a minute, I heard voices calling out to me from the forest, and of course I replied. Four characters emerged, two young blokes dressed unremarkably in tee-shirts and strides, a young bloke in a suit with tie, hopelessly drunk and falling over me, and a young girl carrying a typical peasant farmer's wicker basket on her back, and whom I assumed to be ... a peasant farmer. Within two minutes, the girl was telling me, in English, that she'd like nothing better than to spend the next day escorting me to the monastery. Can you imagine the odds against meeting an English-speaker at that moment in that particular spot in the scrub, and who wanted to come to the monastery with me the next day?

Anyway, the next day Wuga and I did spend the day visiting the monastery, together with a little Chinese girl named ChinChin but whom I called Mosquito, which is what she was like - bright and extraordinarily energetic. Stopping from time to time to talk to groups of monks or pilgrims, it was a journey like a mini Canterbury Tales.

Wuga is 23, a member of the Yi nationality, and was a week into her first job as English teacher at Wachang Middle School after four years at university in Xichang. She is bright and ambitious, but the school has no library, she had no radio or television and the town gets no newspapers and cannot get the internet. She reminded me of He LiYi (pictures) whom I'd met several times in Dali, the member of the Bai nationality who wrote the book "Mr China's Son", in English - likely to be in your local library as it is in mine. I told Wuga about him and about Gray's Elegy, and I gave her my shortwave radio; later I bought her a big English dictionary and posted it to her from Chengdu. Wuga's salary is equivalent to $2000 a year, which means I am much wealthier, and perhaps there will be some things I can do that will be useful for her. If you look at this link you'll find   four pages of pictures   (thumbnails that expand to bigger pictures when you click on them), including photos of Wachang, Wuga, Mosquito and the monastery; each photo has a caption, though you may have to look carefully to find it.

On the second night in Wachang Wuga and I visited a colleague of hers who was in hospital following surgery earlier that day. Behind the modern tiled concrete facade was the rabbit-warren of ancient, crumbling buildings that comprised the wards. The patient was semi-conscious in a room letting out onto a courtyard, no nursing staff in evidence, the only hospital equipment a basic drip which it was his friends' responsibility to monitor and replenish. I'd find out later by telephone from Australia that he made a full recovery.

So then it was a day's bus ride back to a night in Muli town, then another to the prefectural capital Xichang on the great Chengdu-Kunming railway (Xichang, where I always feel welcome, and where despite dire warnings by guidebooks to the contrary I always get train tickets from helpful ticket-sellers), and overnight train back to Chengdu.

It is easy to take the wonderful Chinese railway system for granted. The truth is, I've seldom failed to get the berth I wanted, even at short notice; and I've never known a train to leave late. The efficiency of the trains in taking huge numbers of passengers is astounding. When I saw a television program years ago that showed a train winding into Ge'ermo station in central Qinghai I was puzzled by a curiously warm and happy feeling; on thinking about it I realized it reflected the feeling of confidence and comfort that comes on boarding a Chinese train, often sharply different from the experience of other forms of transport, whether bus or hitched truck-ride. A train, comprising dozens of long carriages coming into a station, is in fact more like a great ocean liner than the piddling things we know as trains in Australia.

In Chengdu I had a couple of days for cleaning up and shopping, and one for a day trip to Dujiangyan, the site of ancient irrigation works now set in a well-maintained and large tourist park - a pleasant and interesting excursion. Photos of visits by Jimmy Carter, Bill Hayden and Phil the Greek, among many others, whether illustrious or notorious, showed the importance China put on the place. I'd passed through Dujiangyan many times before but never stopped for more than half an hour.

The next day there was a morning flight to Guangzhou and an afternoon there waiting for the night flight to Melbourne. The old Guangzhou airport, where Peta staged a protest at the lack of facilities by sitting cross-legged in the middle of the concourse had been replaced by one much further out. The huge new terminal is a place of confusion - innumerable but incoherent signs pointing in some cases to things that don't exist, levels that can only be reached by going via more distant levels. I'd relied on finding a Bank of China branch to change my Chinese currency, but the only bank at the airport was a tinpot company happy to sell Chinese money but not to buy it back. After much protesting airport staff advised me to take a bus to a Bank of China branch a couple of kilometres away. The staff there plied me with cups of hot water, but were unable to change currency.*

The plane's departure was delayed for an hour or more. As I was waiting, a smiling face emerged in front of me, a Chinese friend travelling to Melbourne in a seat three feet from mine.

Later I'd phone Wuga from home and find that she did receive the dictionary. How extraordinary to be able to telephone, at a rate amounting to almost nothing, a place as remote and, for me, as enchanting as Wachang.