Around Jinan

I left Beijing on an overnight "hard sleeper"; triple stacked open bunks in a dorm-like carriage, crammed with people and baggage. A woman on the bunk across from me inquired softly where I was from in perfect English - it transpired she taught English and business at a University in Beijing.

I arrived in Jinan in the pouring rain, and checked into a small hostel beside a pond, with delicate carved bridges over adjoining pools. The staff spoke no English (many hostels in China are primarily for Chinese people), and I was shown to a compact damp private room, smelling of mildew and with only a small fan to stave off the cloying heat.

Jinan was a depressing sodden sight, any character long ago obliterated by identikit corporate offices and municipal white-tile high-rise apartments. Down a side-street I found the crumbling remains of an old temple, roughly walled off to deter would be visitors. The fabled springs had been callously surrounded by overpriced touristy parks, with the exception of a a jewel-like temple, sat like an oasis in the centre of looming corporate offices. Inside through the incense smoke, a statue of the God of War guards menacingly over his domain.

The next day I woke early to find a hidden village 60 km outside Jinan, recommended in the LP. At the long distance bus station I bought a ticket from a brisk, glum-looking woman, and boarded a modern air conditioned bus which sped us along flooded dirt tracks, crashing and lurching through swollen brown puddles and growing streams, dodging through the thick traffic. The city disappeared behind, and the roadside turned to muddled checkerboard fields of corn and lilies, with steep sided mountains behind rising into grey-brown mist, and the occasional dark temple silhouetted on a peak.

I was dropped unceremoniously at a chaotic mid station, buzzing with criss-crossing buses taxis and tuk-tuks, and shouting traders and hawkers, huddled in shacks from the incessant thin drizzle. A group of gleeful taxis driver eagerly crowded round, offered to take me to the village for 10 times the bus fare. I waved them away, and eventually found my rickety onward bus. The local villagers in the bus eyed me warily.

Three hours after I set off, I was dropped in the outskirts of the sleepy village. The whole place seemed deserted, and I drifted along the path between dry-stone walled gardens, and solid stone and mud houses. The ramshackle village wound its way through a steep- sided valley. The occasional duck or goat wandered across the path, and middled aged women with lined faces, bent over carrying huge bundles of firewood passed with mildly suspicious grins. I had somehow traveled back in China's feudal past - the crashing modernism of the cities a distant dream. The calm was disconcerting. I climbed to the peak of a small hill overlooking the village, and surveyed the mist shrouded vista from the balcony of a narrow temple, as giant dragonflies drifted lazily around me.