I spent about 12 hours on Chinese buses today. I'll take them over Greyhound any day.

I arrived in Yichang at 1:00 am this morning on the boat from the Three Gorges. Those passengers who were pushing on to Wuhan piled into buses, which immediately proceeded to wait for an hour and a half before leaving. Joe, whom I met on the boat, and I had front-row seats for the driver's antics, which included swerving wildly towards the guard rail to avoid a pothole and plunging headlong into others deep enough to be a lake in some countries. We tried to sleep, but the bus was freezing and the road bumpy, so we hardly got more than a few minutes. Joe even stretched out in the aisle to no avail. Slightly before six, we rolled into Wuhan. This was, I admit, not the best introduction to the Chinese bus system.

I left Joe in the internet cafe of a makeshift by-the-hour hostel in the train station in Wuhan, from which he was to head to Shanghai. Hoping to make it to Jingdezhen in neighboring Jiangxi province by afternoon, I pressed on to the bus station on the other side of the Yangzi in Wuhan. I found the bus going to my next stop, Jiujiang, bought my ticket and climbed aboard. The bus was relatively empty. I dozed a little, watched the Chinese Midwest roll by and took in a bit of a Chinese movie in which young James Bond-type characters kung fu their way through an army of bad guys with the marksmanship of Imperial Storm Troopers. The seats were comfortable, the road was good and all went smoothly.

Arriving in Jiujiang at about 11:45, I enlisted the aid of a young Chinese guy who was also waiting for the bus to Jingdezhen. He helped me buy a ticket and we hopped on as the bus, like the others before it, rolled out precisely on time. This bus even provided free bottled water.

I reached Jingdezhen, the long-time porcelain capital of China, at about 3:00 pm. I checked into a hotel and wandered out into the porcelain markets, which are filled with vases and teapots and everything else imaginable in sizes from miniature to monstrous. While very attractive at first glance, most of the artwork on the pieces disappointed.

Jingdezhen sees very few foreigners. People indiscreetly point me out to their friends as I pass. Children run to their parents shouting about the laowei walking down the street. I am greeted here with a guarded curiosity that is innocently charming in comparison to the rest of the country. Even this relatively modest city -- only 1.5 million -- clearly shows the burgeoning middle class of China: modern shopping centers full of consumer goods fill every stretch of street not occupied by porcelain.

I have a train at dawn. I'm not sure where it goes. I asked for a ticket to Tunxi, which is a 90-minute drive south of Huangshan. My ticket says Huangshan, which according to the often-fallible Lonely Planet, has no rail service. So I'll find out tomorrow. In the meantime, it's time to recover from a night of virtually no sleep before hitting the mountain tomorrow afternoon for a two-day hike through some of China's most famous scenery.

Also, my email service is still not responding, so I can't email anybody.