Sophie enjoyed her trip to China. She went all over Beijing even though the traffic was scary. The road was full of cars and they all seemed to travel at full speed even though they had to push each other away. She didn’t know if she had the nerve to drive in this city but all the other people on the tour made her sit next to the driver because she was the only one who could do it without becoming hysterical.

She went through the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City. The colours were all rather faded but it was big except the private apartments they saw at the end. Tienanmen Square was enormous, rather like a city block. The Chinese liked to dress up and to walk in places only the emperors were allowed in the past. Beijing was full of people; they went four abreast and Westerners like her stuck out like a sore thumb.

She went climbing on the Great Wall which contrary to rumour can’t be seen from space. She found out the Chinese are sexist when they wouldn’t let her on the flying fox but they gave men just as fat the go ahead. Typical of everywhere, she thought.

Xian was quieter; there were mostly tourists there where she went to see the terracotta warriors, row after row of them and got the farmer of the day to sign her book. They said it was the original farmer who discovered the porcelain warriors but Sophie didn’t believe anything the Chinese said. They want to make money out of tourists, she thought. Everywhere she went she was followed by people trying to make money. They even followed her up the Great Wall, trying to sell her t-shirts.

They took a trip on the Yangtse and watched the scenery and the Chinese who liked to sing karaoke. Every evening they dressed up and went to the lounge where they sang as they followed the bouncing ball. Each song had its own movie and Sophie didn’t understand a word. She sat on the front deck of the boat and watched the towns along the river which were due to be drowned when they built the new dam. She wondered what the residents thought. No doubt they were proud of China but this was their home.

Then they took a plane to Shanghai where the man next to her insisted on using his phone even during take-off. He ignored her when she said to switch it off so she sat there worrying about the perversity of tall men with long moustaches and if the plane would fall out of the sky. It didn’t. They arrived in Shanghai as expected.

There were lots of restaurants and shops and they found the markets which were full of cheap trinkets that would make good presents. She brought a bracelet with amethysts and turquoise and an amethyst pendant shaped like a ball which someone stole from her when she came back to Australia. She heartily wished they would get cancer and die but she didn’t know if that happened or even who stole it. In Shanghai, they toured a Chinese garden with a dragon round the top of the wall  and then went to a tea house and had tea with flowers in the glass.

Shanghai was where the Europeans lived back in colonial days so it had an area of thick European buildings made of dark brick. They looked like apartment blocks in somewhere like London or a city in Germany, dull and foreboding. They were along the river which you could go under in a tunnel full of neon lights. There was nothing much on the other side except the TV tower which was known locally as “balls on a stick”. It described it exactly. At the top there was another old geezer signing books and Sophie wondered what they paid. Anything to take advantage of the tourists, she thought, but considerably less than they make from the books. It was cheap to live in China though they probably didn’t pay much. It would make a good retirement job.

Finally, she got to Kunming where she took a train to the petrified forest. This turned out to be a bunch of stones the Chinese thought looked like something. The Chinese always thought that, even the private apartments at the Forbidden City were full of stones from all over China which looked like something. They just looked like stones to Sophie. They took them on small boats to the Yangtse tributaries to look at stones. At the petrified gardens, she met an old Chinese man who invited her to tour with them. She said no because she sensed he wanted to practise his English and she wanted to get by without. No one spoke English in China despite the tourists. She regretted it later when, wandering round on her own looking at stones and trying to see what the Chinese saw, she almost fell into a big, wet hole. Fortunately, she didn’t.

In Kunming she met her roommate for the second half of the tour. She was from Switzerland and they seemed to get on well. They went all over Kunming together. They couldn’t find any markets but the city blocks were enormous and there was plenty to eat. The next day they boarded a bus for Dali, the marijuana capital of China (it grows everywhere!), and arrived in time for breakfast.

After breakfast the guide arranged for donkeys and carts to take them to the lake and they nearly lost breakfast. Already feeling woozy, they boarded a boat for some island where there was a market and they saw drying tobacco leaves and pigs split open. There was a layer of fat between the pig skin and its meat and Sophie thought that was probably what was melted down to make crackling. Sophie was glad she hated crackling and then she remembered her mother loved it. Thank goodness it wasn’t what killed her.

She took a chairlift with Enlong who despite the Chinese name, was from Melbourne. Halfway to the mountaintop the chairlift stopped and she discovered Enlong was as scared of heights as she was. They sang songs for a while and then Sophie looked down to see the Chinese girls in their high heels climbing the mountain to visit the tombs of the ancestors. Sophie was glad she was on the chairlift which chose that moment to start back up again, jerking her backwards as it advanced higher up the mountain. She hung on and only let go when they reached the top. Even then, the attendants had to beg.

They toured the temple at the top, then Sophie elected to walk down the mountain which wasn’t a good idea because she put her foot into a hole and sprained her ankle. She had to walk with a walking stick for the rest of the tour. For now, Kieran, also from Melbourne, tied her shoelace very tightly and she walked slowly.

At dinner that night, some of the group weren’t very friendly. Sophie wondered what was wrong with them but didn’t worry too much. The next day everyone on the tour took a bicycle trip except Sophie who tended to fall off bicycles. They were in Lijiang by then so she wandered round the market and found a pharmaceutical store that reminded her of a department store she visited when she was a teenager. It had two aisles which crossed over at the back and all the wares were laid out as she walked around the aisles. They had some strange things: bones and pieces of mushroom and all sorts of herbs. She liked the store and visited it again and again. It was at the end of a walkway.

That night at dinner some of the people in the tour group weren’t very friendly. One girl made faces at everything she said. Sophie didn’t know what to make of it because some of the people were as friendly as usual. She began to feel uncomfortable.

The next day they started climbing. They went up to the Tibetan plateau part of China which was the reason Sophie had joined this trip. She had been fascinated with Tibet ever since she could remember and this was as close as she could get for now. They ate yak’s meat before they started to climb and Sophie hoped she wouldn’t get a headache from the altitude. But she started to feel an ice cream headache as they climbed and turned in her seat so she was resting her head on the seatback. She felt like people were staring and wondered what the others thought of her.

She felt better when they reached the Tibetan monastery in Zhongdian. She toured the monastery, then drank milky tea and watched the Tibetan show with the others. Then they came down the mountains again and walked along a road high up above the Yangtse. It was full of cars and Sophie had to hobble on a walking stick since she’d sprained her ankle coming down the mountain at Dali. Someone arranged for her to ride in a car but that was even more scary. Sometimes she looked out the back of the car straight down the mountain. There were occasional booms as rocks fell down the cliffs but Sophie counted herself lucky she didn’t see any.

The next morning, the tour guide took them down the mountain from the inn to the banks of the Yangtse. Sophie didn’t go, she was hobbling already but Maureen went, her roommate from Switzerland and she fell over and sprained her ankle. She came back in a foul mood and Sophie avoided her the two days at the inn while they waited for the rest of the group to come back from climbing the nearby mountains. Sophie was glad to get out of there. She loved looking at the mountains but climbing them scared her, especially looking down.

Back in Kunming, she and Maureen  were planning to go a flower garden because Chinese gardens in Australia were beautiful but Maureen cancelled at the last minute. She wanted to see the Stone Garden, she said, the place with all the funny-shaped rocks. “I’ve heard you’ve already seen it,” Maureen said.

“Sure,” Sophie said. She wondered if Maureen thought it was Sophie’s fault they weren’t going there.

That was the last she saw of any of them. She went to the garden and saw some beautiful flowers, camellias, gardenias and carnations. Open the way they never were in her garden. Then she boarded the plane and went back to Australia. She had seen China and was glad to be back home.

Her friends from Melbourne sent her a photo a few weeks later and that was the last she heard of them.