I left Chengdu on a day even old timers would be impressed with by its greyness. The clouds came down to meet me and bade me a soggy embrace goodbye. I had met some amazing people, had some lovely experiences and had put on a vast amount of weight. I suspected it was blubber I would need on my cold journey north towards Gansu province.

Mushrooms that sang

My food education continued. Around the Bayi school, endless plastic barrels, filled with mushrooms. Short Chinese mothers sat all day staring down on to long tables, trimming and cleaning huge piles of these cream or black funghi, a career of true monotony, from what I could see. Poverty surely includes the kind of work one has to do, not just how high the wage is. But the hard, simple work of these women had no parallel to the exquisite dancing taste of their charges; these mushrooms sang. Chris took me to a local restaurant and chewing the slices of creamy mushroom floating in soup was like hearing the varied notes of some distant violin, afer years of eating dull supermarket simulcras.

After finishing at Bayi cooking school, I later spent two afternoons in a kitchen of a fancy restaurant, being taught by several of the chefs during the post lunch lull. The first day, I stood watching with my hostel's manager, who had organised this, as the cooks showed us their craft; the second day I came back and cooked the dishes they had demonstrated, although with an immense amount of help. Gung Bao Chicken, Twice Cooked Pork, Shredded Pork in Fish Style Sauce, Mapor Tofu and, at my keen request, that distinctive Chengdu staple: Dan Dan noodles.
This was far more controlled and precise than the sweet madness of my days at Bayi, I think the cooks were marginally terrified I would injure myself on the bubbling oil, boiling water, roaring hellfire, and/or the heavy cleaver. I like to think that I wasn't quite as bad as they were perhaps expecting, due to now possessing a small amount of training. At one point though, I tried the wok contents-flipping trick they had taught us in Bayi, but this wok was hugely heavy - as I pulled the wok sharpy to me, the food didn't move at all and the watching cooks chuckled, instantly perceiving what I had attempted. The instructing chef was very encouraging, remarking I was a fast learner - although it's easy to be a good cook when someone else is measuring the ingredients and cooking times. After we had cooked four dishes and they had taken numerous photos of me, the two teaching cooks and I sat down and ate the four dishes - they poured me almost half a rice bowl of bijou as a present, so my world was slipping as we ate. Each dish was delicious, the Mapor Tofu the best I'd tasted.

It is going to be a horror eating in cheap Chinese restaurants if I'm ever back in London: I can see myself storming into the kitchen, dish in hand, demanding, "I'm sorry, but what THE fuck is this meant to be"?
Am I now an expert Sichuan cook? No. I haven't made a single meal without supervision, would likely injure myself if I tried to operate the ferocious cooking fire and don't have any full recipes written down. I only spent in total six days taking these three different courses, so in the grand scheme of things, am perhaps still the parachuting in-and-out tourist. But the aim was to become a better cook in general, to get a sense of what was possible, and I think I achieved that, in spades. I also feel very proud that I was able to find methods of teaching that were a bit different, not just relying on the "traveller infrastructure" that Lonely Planet-type sources would have you believe you need to cling to. It did take an investment of time and investigation, but I had some incredible and unique experiences.

The fabulous Miss Li

I had a great time at the Ginko Garden Hostel. It was one of the very few places in China where I've felt like the guest of a hostel, rather than some miscreant wastrel they'd grudgingly agreed to take on - and are watching closely for the inevitable moment when he tries to filch the silverware. The boss, Mr Tian, was extremely helpful in my quests for massages and cooking classes and the young woman running the reception desk was wonderful. Miss Li would say things like, "Have you paid for today yet Daniel?", and I would sigh with the pleasure of not being barked at with the more standard, "If you want to stay here, you must pay now"!
Miss Li took me to the post office and helped me shop for sunglasses. She told me to put socks on when it was cold and checked I was on time for my cooking classes - she was the only hostel person I have ever given a tip to. She also translated the funny banter of the students staying in the hostel, who spoke English to varying degrees. I got to know several of the girls staying at the hostel - like Hei Lung, who would say, "OH MY GOD"! dozens of times a day, eg whenever I stood up she'd say, "OH MY GOD, you're so tall - I'm so short"! She was indeed very small - when Chris heard her say this once, he simply instructed: "eat more". A crazy dancing girl, who while I was trying to use the hostel's internet, pulled me out of my chair to dance with. I sat down quickly as she started some incredible bopping routine to one of Blue's songs, "I rest my case" (?) - she danced for about three minutes straight, as everyone in the room watched. One lunchtime as a few of us ate together, she announced to me, "I don't like vegetables - so my hair is turning yellow"! It seems Chinese people's black hair starts lightening towards brown if they don't eat enough vitamins. I reminded her of "yellow hair" later, she moued winsomely, "Noo! I'm cuuute, I'm eighteen", she pointed at the vase of yellow flowers on the table between us, "I'm blossoming"!
One girl sat down next to me once and asked, "In England, do you like fat or thin girls" - she had been told by her teacher that in England, fat was beautiful. Hmmm. Chinese English language teachers have a few things to answer for, like teaching everyone in China that "How are you"? always merits the same response, "Fine, thank you, and you"? I've contributed to the slow process of explaining to a billion people that the "how are you" phrase is, on some level, a geniune question and so a variety of responses are ok. On the fat/thin question, I responded that while in England, thin was generally liked, our idea of thin is somewhat less thin than the Chinese one - Westerners are just bigger people. There was, as an example, this weight loss advert in Hong Kong that always made me laugh - the "before" photo shows a Chinese woman that in England frankly would be considered, at most, marginally overwight; in the "after" photo she is amazingly skinny, Bangkok poledancer slender. The same student in the hostel later asks me, "Daniel, can you tell the difference between beautiful and ugly Chinese girls"? She was surprised to hear I thought I could, because, "oh, for me, all English [Western] people look the same". I responded to her with, "Well, I imagine in England there are people who think all Chinese people look the same" - she greeted this with aghast disbelief. I also gave one student an an hour and a half English lesson at her request, a start at repaying China for the generosity Bayi school and others have shown me. The girls found my story that my last girlfriend had been Chinese (from the island of Mauritius) amazing, and that I had said goodbye to her when I went travelling little shameful on my part, I think.

Hei Lung once asked me, can I take a photo of us? Immediately, everyone in the room piled on to the sofa. I think I'm laughing because Hei Lung grabbed my hand and said, "OH MY GOD"!

On my last morning in the hostel, I was dozing in bed as the sounds of a woman singing opera whirled through my ground floor room with perfect clarity. I lay listening to it and the electronic keyboard accompanying, and decided I must surely be hearing a recording. Rising, I came into the main reception/tv room of the hostel and looked around sleepily. Just outside the french windows was a short young Chinese woman standing straight backed and bringing forth the most beautiful and almost unnervingly powerful notes. A man who I'd seen around the hostel was seated in front of her, playing on a keyboard and giving her instruction. I sat while they practiced and listened only a few feet away. It was another moment of feeling privileged to experience wonders.

Just before I move on, you may have formed the opinion that I am simply a lecherous old toad who enjoys chatting with eighteen year old girls. This would of course be accurate, but in fairness, none of the male students seemed interested in talking to me. On the one occasion that a male student wanted to practice his English with me, he was so pushy and demanding that I ended up telling him to go away and come back in 30 minutes once I'd had a rest. The male opera singer/keyboard player's only interaction with me was to grab my photos while they were being handed around so haughtily I had to tell him to calm down or he'd tear them - he didn't speak to me after that.

While I wasn't cooking or chatting with the students, I actually spent a lot of my time playing Starcraft in internet cafes. This might seem like a waste of my trip to Chengdu, but as a long term traveller, you've got to give yourself weekends. It was also probably the most Chinese thing I've yet done in China. Using the internet in Chengdu is amazingly cheap (sometimes one yuan an hour) and each cafe has rows and rows of young men shooting, slashing or conquering each other over the superhighway. As evening comes and the dozens and dozens of these internet places fill up, the air gets stifling hot due to the whirring of the PCs and sweated geeky testosterone. I'd seen so many people playing Starcraft over the last few weeks, I developed a powerful hankering for a reunion with the game. However, I didn't have the courage to throw myself into the multiplayer world and possibly get barked at in Mandarin, so refreshed myself with the one player game. I'm pleased to be able to announce that on my last evening in Chengdu, my Zerg armies completed their destruction of the Protoss homeworld.

The big buddha

Oh, and I also visited the biggest Buddha in the world. While there was something cool about seeing a 71m statue that had been carved out of a cliff face over a thousand years ago, it was possibly the most forgettable part of my adventures in China. I stood feeling vacant as borish business men tour groups pushed around me and could only excite myself enough to think, "Yep, it is indeed a very big buddha".
I guess I'm just finding that as I travel more, the "unique", "unmissable" sights among the way are getting less and less interesting. Sights which involves little more than craining my neck to get a better photo are starting to seem like not worth a detour... Perhaps there is only so much "amazing" one can see before it gets a little "unamazing"?
But what isn't getting boring in the slightest are the people I meet, and the places they have built to live in. If anything, these are getting more fascinating as I travel on, perhaps as I get a bit more skilled at perceiving and interacting with them and their uniqueness.

Shoving grannies

As I planned where to go next, I realised that the wonder of north and west Sichuan had thoroughly infected me. So many remote places there sound incredible and haunting.
Sichuan province is about the size of France and divides into two parts. The south and east of the state are incredibly densely populated lowlands, cut through by rivers rushing away from the mountains to the west. The north and west are the Tibetan marches, long ago a lower altitude part of Tibet: mountains and vast yak-roamed high grasslands. It is hard to imagine how remote this area must have been before the 19th century. Chinese people tell me an old saying, "The road to Sichuan is harder than than the road to heaven" - before railways, the only routes from the east were over wild mountains or a long journey dragging a boat upriver.

Near the Chengdu Dreams hostel there is a very Tibetan block of streets - as I get my photos developed, a young portly monk shows me his great pictures of himself and colleagues mock wrestling on a frozen lake near their west Sichuan monastery.
The neighbourhood incidentally also has some pretty pushy beggars, principally little boys and tiny grannies, who grab my sleeve and refuse to let go. I don't like being grabbed, and as the days go on, I've been losing my ingrained inhibitions about giving these people a hearty push on the shoulder away from me. I was eating in one of the Tibetan restaurants in the area as I wrote this section, and had just shoved a particularly unpleasant young boy off his feet. He got up, unperturbed, and wrapped his arms around one of my legs. I shouted, "NO!" in his face and that seemed to work.

In fact, that restaurant got increasingly devout as I sipped my tea. Even when I arrived, half the clientel were monks. I was given a menu in Tibetan script - I had to make my yak impersonation (my index fingers stuck over my ears like horns and saying "mooo!") in order to get a plate of Mo Mos, the only Tibetan dish I knew the name of. Then pop music videos were replaced by a dvd recording of a monk preaching to other monks, chanting in a small room, bells ringing, the set switched to high volume - though I couldn't see much as two young men in red and gold robes were crowding around the screen. I was feeling a little out of place, to put it mildly, quite happy to be in the corner. But I was sharing my table with two friendly monks and they clearly didn't have a problem with me being there. One started showing me a glossy photobook of where they were from, called Aba. LP China has next to nothing on the area, even an Australian who took groups across China looked at me blankly on hearing the name. The pictures showed endless hills, squat simple houses, strong harsh faces staring back at their photographer, bright sunlit green nature. I consulted a map, it was to the north, fairly near my planned destination of Songpan. I also try to decide whether the photos in the book of young boys waving assault rifles should be a concern.

There seem to be lots of places like Aba in Sichuan - back in my hostel Miss Li showed me photos of natural parks and remote villages in an area to the west, south of the major town of Kangding. It all sounds just as varied as Yunnan and speaks of a wildness more than I have ever been to before.
I feel like if I don't see something of these Tibetan marches, they will immediately become the biggest regret of the trip so far. Two questions turn this into a dilemma - how dangerous and how cold? As regards west Sichuan, the LP uses emotive language like: your bus will cross "the notoriously dangerous" somethingorother pass. The message is clear: don't call us if things go wrong. The north seems a much less precarious destination, but the time of year gives me pause. Many people have told me Songpan will be painfully cold - I ask when it will warm up and am told either June or to wait till September. The only disagreement is exactly how cold, some people think the worst chill has long passed. This is, however, the crucial matter. My decision is to go to Songpan and just see what it's like. I am planning to do the set thing there: go on a horse trek over several days around the beautiful scenery, camping and eating food our guides bring. There is, I am told, ample thick winter clothing at Songpan to help keep out the freeze. The idea of riding horses through snow filled valleys sounds beyond wonderful.

Daniel, March 12, from the bus to Songpan