Halfway through my eight day allotment. Highlights so far: sunset on Taihu Lake, the chocolate massage and dinner with Tony Wang. Lowlights: the Fuqi restaurant next to Guangfu Temple which let me sit in their establishment for 15 minutes before informing me that they had “no more food” (yeah, right); the double decker peasant express train from Suzhou to Shanghai and the women who tried to charge me another menpiao to get into the East Sheshan Forest Park. Curses upon you all!

I’m now heading south, curling around of the Bay of Hangzhou, bound for Shaoxing, a place no one ever goes. My goal: to find out if anyone should.

Shaoxing is famous for two things: huangjiu (黄酒, yellow wine) and great literature. Booze and books, my friends (only one thing missing: babes). Shaoxing is the hometown of Lu Xun, universally acclaimed as the dude who created modern Chinese lit with his short story “A Madman’s Diary” (狂人日记). Perhaps more familiar to Westerners is Yu Hua, also from Shaoxing. I’ll be checking out the Lu Xun Memorial and also sampling the 老酒 at the Xianheng Jiudian (咸亨酒店). Apparently, 咸亨 is also a five star hotel, so I’ll also be checking that out to see how it stacks up.

After that, I’m off to the little village of Anchang (安昌). It’s a water town, which (according to my guidebook) has managed to evade the tourist hoopla. We’ll see. Criteria: no people wearing the same hats and absolutely no one shouting through a megaphone! Anchang is reputed to have really old flagstone corridors running the length of the canals. Visions of freshly steamed mantou and bitter green tea in the early light of dawn lead me on.

Notice that there are five people immediately adjacent to me who are cracking sunflower seeds. Two other chicks have been chirping at each other since boarding. Everyone speaks in this impenetrable Subeihua. Feel like I’m trapped in some strange aviary. I’ll never make a very good travel writer; I just don’t find the people around me that interesting anymore. What would I talk about with them? Tibet? The stock market? Yawn.