Song Feng Shan

The foreign teachers, including three new recruits, a pithy Brummie called Jim, and Sarah and Jane, two Liverpudlian girls of Cantonese Chinese ethnicity, and to whom taxi drivers continuously speak Mandarin, without realising they don't understand a word, piled onto the old school bus to find a store of boxes of cold chicken burgers, cartons of yoghurt and bottles of water. We had been invited (ordered?) to go on a school trip to the mountains of Song Feng Shan. This had never happened before in my time here, and I wondered if there was an ulterior motive. Perhaps Charles and Susan wanted us to see their human side. Perhaps they wanted to show the new teachers how jolly and fun working at the college can be. Perhaps they just wanted us hard-working teachers to relax. Depends what spin you put on it.

After an hour and a half's bus ride, we found ourselves in tiny country villages with tin-roofed concrete huts and dirty children, the huge bare mountains looming darkly in the distance under the clearest of blue skies. The driver kept getting us lost down dirt tracks while Tam, Anita and I bounced up and down painfully on the back seat. It got more painful on arrival, however: Charles, that nervous, ingratiating man put on an air of patronising patrician benevolence, expostulating over the area's history like a lord of the manor; Susan, his stick-thin wife, held his arm and simpered; Gina, frighteningly, morphed into a sixteen-stone cheerleader. Our bosses had a forced air of jollity that, quite frankly, made me queasy.

We walked to the four viewpoints on the mountain peaks, metal railings to stop us falling off the huge boulders stacked up like crumbling dry-stone dykes built long ago by giants. Tiny settlements lay like specks of gathered dust way below, dwarfed by the sheer blue canopy of sky above. The mountains sang a breezy siren's song. I left the group along with Ken and Jim to do some exploring. We spent the rest of the day discovering the alternative peaks, where there were no paths, no railings, just incredibly steep ascents you dragged yourself up, using tree roots and tufts of dried grass. A fresh, airy feeling of freedom and optimism blew around us all afternoon. At the top of our climbs, we sat on massive, smooth rock deposits, bigger than houses, and set the school, the country, the world to rights. White butterflies played intricate aerial patterns above our heads, blue woodpeckers scuttled up trunks and tapped and tapped, kestrels hovered above us in the cloudless sky; the school, China, the world, may be changing, but on Song Feng Shan time stood still.