We were back in Chengdu, and back to our old tricks: cards, tasty eatin' and lazing in the teahouse garden. It seemed like eleven months of travel had finally broken our will to move on to new places every other night of the week, and so we decided to allow ourselves to stay put and just enjoy.

And that's when it hit. The Thought. THE thought:

My hair is skanky, and must be cut off this instant, or I will else surely die.

I finished up the round of cards we were playing, shovelled them back into their box, and set off.

Leaving Andrew to his own devices, I walked round the corner to the nearest main road and began looking. There wasn't far to go - right there, just five minutes from the tea garden were several hairdressers.

I chose one at random and walked in. Sat in the big swivel chair, I exhausted my meagre Chinese by asking for a haircut, and then mimed that he should make it a bob just below my ears.

Water was sprayed, scissors were wielded, and the shoulder-length growth of the year's travel was removed. And removed. And removed.

It got shorter and shorter, but also rounder and rounder. I prayed for intervention, but none came.

Instead, I just had to watch my stricken face as it got haloed by a topiary-style disaster. My hair turned into a mushroom - all bouffy on top and hopelessly daggy. It was neither a bob, nor just below my ears.

I paid my two bucks and walked back to the hotel glowering and devastated. A bad haircut is one thing, but feeling like there's no one in the entire country who can help you is quite another.

In the sanctuary of our stinky room, I got teary and demanded to know how bad it exactly was.

Andrew tried denial at first - which just got him accusations of insincerity and 'not caring enough about me'. Oy, the melodrama ...

Finally, his upbeat facade crumbled: 'Darling, you've got Chairman Mao's hair! It's, well, not good ... '

Later, we decided it was, in fact, Chairman Mao's Lego Head. You know how Lego people come with removable, boxy hairstyles? That's what it looked like, and it made me cry.

Something had to be done.