About a week ago now, Andrew and I travelled to Jiuzhaigou from Chengdu, and back again by bus.

The ride there was hideous. It was, in fact, the worst busride in recent memory on this RTW trip.

It was perhaps the worst busride I've ever undertaken in China - and that includes a nightmare 'sleeper' bus I boarded in Ruili, only to discover that my pillow was already besplattered with someone else's congealing vomit, and that we would spend most of the night moving over the churned-up asphalt of Chinese roadworks at high speed (until my head felt like it was in a washing machine). Later that evening, a guy attempted to rob me - and when foiled, he robbed a local Chinese woman instead.

The trip to Jiuzhaigou somehow eclipsed all this. I'm still not quite sure how.

At any rate, before I moan to you about what went on inside this particular tin-can-on-wheels, I first have to tell you about what went on outside it.

Journey to Jiuzhaigou:

We are passing towns made up of bombed-out buildings, just piles of rubble and some skeletal concrete beams. Rusted wires twist out of the remains like so many broken coat-hangers. The scene is nothing short of post-apocalyptic in these parts. Whole factories lie abandoned and discarded. Is it evidence of the end of State industry?

These factories' windows are flung wide open, but their guts are black and bare. Every surface is covered with a vast green-grey filth that's thick as Pompeiian ash. It looks like a nuclear winter has destroyed every lick of life on earth. China's ugliness, its sheer scale of desecration, can take the breath out of your lungs.

I see the biggest bridge I've EVER seen under constuction. Words fail to convey how large public works here can be. A towering edifice of concrete so immense that the pulsing, turbulent water rushing under it looks like an afterthought, even though it's wide and fast enough to be shot through with meanacing white water.

The mountains leer above us, unspeakably big next to our small stretch of bitumen. But as sheer as the inclines rise, and as rough and flinty as they are, the Chinese cut into this landscape like it's birthday cake.

We go straight through mountains cored like apples. We pass a massive hydro-electric plant that looks like a building taken straight from the Kremlin.

Everywhere is dove-grey rubble, and huge tracts of this road are no exception: we wobble and throb over scads and scads of rough-kibbled stone. Heads bouncing like pogo sticks, it's no exaggeration to say that every occupant of this bus looks like they're riding one of those mechanical 'buckin' broncos'.

(It feels that way, too: why oh why did I choose today to wear my only non-sports bra?!)

Strange China, strange, surreal China. Frequently, things here are fearsomely different or large: for the visitor, it's like having stumbled upon some weird, corrupted Lilliput-in-reverse.

*Disclaimer: Gulliver actually did travel to a land where all was large (I am informed by my much more literary partner), but it was fucking called 'Brobdingnag'. I can't very well put that hideous string of letters in the title and expect you all to know what I'm raving on about ... so 'Not-Lilliput' it is ...