Luoyang

We're now in a city called Luoyang, western Henan province, the capital of China during the Northern Wei dynasty (AD 493), now a middle-sized city of change, building sites, torn-up pavements and KFC's. It's our stop-off point to get to the Shaolin Temple, home of gong fu, where we're headed tomorrow. Hua Fei didn't turn up at Xi'an station, and I wasn't sure if I felt relieved or disappointed. Perhaps both. The six-hour train journey proved to be similarly uneventful, apart from a hilarious conversation with an inquisitive old woman, conducted purely from badly pronounced sentences torn from our Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook and extreporous sign language.

We'd planned to stay at what our guidebook had described as a tall, white, clean hotel opposite the train station, but had found this place covered in green-canvassed scaffolding. We were persuaded to stay next door by a tall, scruffy, untrustworthy-looking guy in long green army jacket, eventually agreeing, just to get away from the crowd of people who had clustered around us, gawking as if at some kind of circus sideshow.

The hotel consisted of two dingy corridors with a wooden table at the entrance, which was both the reception desk and, later on, home to a noisy and degenerate card school that kept us awake until the early hours of the morning. It was but one annex of a rambunctious building also home to a hospital and post office. In our room, a layer of brown dust had settled onto a layer of grease, which had itself settled onto every available tabletop, skirting board and chair. If you touched anything your hand stuck to it, leaving a layer of skin as you ripped it off. The carpets were threadbare, the seventies-style pagoda wallpaper damp and rotten. But we did have hot water, and a big television, with remote control still encased in its polythene wrapping.

At one point during the evening, the tall scruffy guy knocked on our door and entered without waiting for an answer. His long green coat was now mysteriously emblazoned with shiny golden buttons. He produced a bunch of red paper tickets from a pocket and asked us if we wanted to go to the Shaolin Temple tomorrow. We eyed him suspiciously. Don' wahrree he reassured us in broken English, I is policeman. We declined politely. He stood there for about five minutes, a hurt expression on his face, fingering his shiny buttons, then left.

We walked into the city, looking for restaurants and Internet bars, and found a place where we were served what they claimed to be gong bao ji ding (spicy Sichuan chicken and peanuts), but looked more like white offal. As we ate, a young boy outside of maybe six years old stared at us, nose against the glass. We made faces at him and he looked at us with a mixture of wonder and incredulity. He then ran off, to return with a gang of urchins, holding a tiny girl up so she could get a better look at the weird foreign clowns performing tricks.