I mentioned that the bus-ride to Jiuzhaigou was hellish. I've also done everything possible to put off writing about it.

I delayed when we were there.

I delayed when we returned to Chengdu.

I delayed when we caught a 40 hour train to Shanghai.

I've now been cooling my heels in Shanghai and still not writing about that bus-trip.

The reason is that I feel conflicted. After all, this is long-haul budget travel. You know it's not all comfort and warm face-cloths and smiling attendants and in-flight movies. You know there aren't going to be mini toiletries packs with tiny luxury samples of face cream and lip balm given away as you embark on your journey.

So why complain?

Maybe you hear me whinge about that bus journey and just say to yourself, 'Girl, if you can't take the heat, get outta the freaking kitchen.'

Hell, in the abstract, I sympathise with that view.

But speaking now NOT IN THE ABSTRACT, allow me to confess that this ride was one of those moments when I did think, 'Get me the hell out of here!' On that bus I was the whiny, pampered, first-world girl who flaked.

The only thing I can anologise it to is the scene in Rain Man where Dustin Hoffman begins whimpering and rocking, wild-eyed with fear and outrage at the thought of having to fly any airline that isn't Qantas.

The seminal difference being that he was freaking out about getting on a plane, whereas I was pretty much devastated that we hadn't.

We boarded the minibus grasping our proper printed tickets with their nifty seat allocations clearly marked. I was confused - seat allocations had always been adhered to in China on the other journeys we'd done, so why in God's name was this bus pulling in already 60% full of passengers, two of whom clearly had our seats?

The ticket man laughed uproariously when I asked, "Seat seven and eight?', and just waved me on-board with an exasperated glance.

The company declined to use the luggage compartment under the bus, so our large packs quickly joined us in the bus aisle, along with everyone else's bags - the largest, sharpest-edged, heaviest content-ed, most ungainly wheelie suitcases I have ever witnessed.

(Be informed at this point the the Chinese have a MANIA for wheelie bags - it doesn't matter how frickin' big and heavy and awkward that bag is, if it has wheels it's a GEM.)

There were no proper seats left at this stage - everybody else had twigged earlier than us that it was going to be dog-eat-dog, so they'd dived in to get the last proper seats.

Some shuffling went on, and two seats emerged as a man stood on top of our bags with his shit-caked shoes, crushing their contents as he climbed into his spot.

I sat down feeling topsy-turvy. It was good to know we wouldn't be standing for 12 hours, but that was about the extent of it.

We had paid double the face-value of the tickets in buying them from our hostel, only to find we were on a crap minibus with no allocated seating, not sitting together, stuck up the back wedged next to everyone's luggage, and not even at the bus's originating Chengdu stop. In addition to ripping us off on the commission charge, the hostel had fucked up the times that the buses departed, and so had dropped us at the bus station 2.5 hours before the bus was to leave. We had already waited in a smoke-filled, draughty hall all that time, and now we were on this hell-bus. Things were sucking.*

All the bus occupants up the back had decided to calm their nerves and ease their boredom by smoking. The guy next to me (who was in turn wedged next to the emergency door, meaning we had no window to open) was a chain-smoking construction worker. He regarded me with a curious stare as he blew his high-octane smoke right into my eyes.

I cracked. One fat tear and then another slid down my cheeks. Stupid country! Stupid bus! Stupid smoking! I wanted to get off, but we stayed.

I hated myself for hating it, but it's true to say that at that moment I thought China was fucked. Just fucked.

My seat companion was undoubtedly the poorest passenger on the bus. And I am ashamed to tell you that I would rather have sat anywhere else on that vehicle.

He wore an all-leather suit (almost comically Irma Vep style) that was cracked and dirty - covered in every imaginable type of filth. His hands were literally blackened with dirt, his round-filed mid-length nails storing up layers and layers of ancient grime. When he peeled a hardboiled egg (the only thing he ate all day), its white part turned dark grey, smudged with globs of black filth from his fingers. He ate it stoically, not seeming to notice its state.

And then there was the little matter of phlegm.

Spitting in China doesn't normally concern me. It's different, and it's noticeable, but it's not a problem.

That day, it killed me. My companion spent most of the time he wasn't smoking or checking his tiny silver mobile phone picking his nose with those long black nails and then looking for places on his clothing to wipe the snot.

In between times, he'd lean over into the space between my legs and his, pinch one nostril closed with a dirty hand and then spray liquid mucousy nose-shit everywhere. That action was invariably followed by a hearty spit, beginning waaay back in his throat, and seeming almost to eject his tonsils onto my feet. My shoes and my legs got sticky with his mucous, and flaky with his ash. I wanted to be anywhere but there.

He smelled old and pungent, like unwashed person, cigarette smoke and poverty. Whenever he lit up - which was all the time - I tried to open the window in front of us a little. That just pissed him off royally, and the couple whose seats actually 'belonged to' that window weren't at all happy about the rush of cold air either. Time passed uncomfortably.

Even the hairaising, precipice-leaning curves of the road and the near-head-on collisions couldn't touch me in my torpor. (Same stretch of road on the way home, we saw four separate accidents that had likely killed the vehicles' occupants - including a minibus that had plunged off the road and ended up lying sideways in ice-cold river waters.)

I felt miserable. Miserable about sitting there, miserable about the twelve hour journey, miserable about China.

I felt miserable about me, too. Ludicrously, like a disconnected thought in a bad drug trip, I kept obsessing: 'if this were [the TV show] Dharma & Greg, I would so not be Dharma. I am Greg's mother.'

Travel can be hard. There are always these moments. I shouldn't - and don't - expect a medal for dealing with a situation that's just regular life for many people in this world.

But by God, I was glad to get off that bus.

*Yes, things were sucking, but at least we didn't yet know of the food poisoning Andrew would later experience courtesy of the mangy old steamed buns he ate while we waited in the cold, draughty station.