Shakespeare and Co.

Books for sale plaster the walls of the most famous bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Co., a running maze of ceiling-high bookcases that tower to the ancient rafters in perpetual overflow in a two-storey, one-time monastery.

Upstairs is a reading room where the books are not for sale. Having been acquired as collections, often as estates, many are old and out of print.

In the corners are worn and cracked leather seats with collapsed cushions and shredded arms from the claws of the resident cat, and in one of them is me, reading passages from the out-of-print Selected Prose by Henry Miller amid the sparkling motes of morning light.

The sole window in the reading room is open to the fresh air and overlooks a small cobblestone path below that trickles out through a narrow garden and into the traffic of the Quai de Montebello. Beyond is the Seine, above it Notre Dame.

An old portable typewriter, maybe a Remington or a Royal, sits in front of the window atop a table where a young woman, consumed, captive to her notebook, scratches pencil scribbles into the morning quiet.

And suddenly a swarm of tourists who have heard of Shakespeare and Co. squall up the stairs and into the room, wheeling around us and clicking like chattering birds. They snap photos despite the signs requesting they not and pose in front of books they don't touch, spewing loud, vapid commentary and filling their iPhones with images of what their lives are not so they can be admired by those at home.

I am practically pushed aside by a vulgar American so she can pet the cat—"hey, kirty kirty!"—before she turns to her fat friends and yells "time-check! How are we doing for time? We need to make up ten minutes!" In waves they come, as they are drip-fed into the cramped aisles from their queue of uncouth on the cobblestones outside.

Then they clatter back down the narrow stairs and are gone. As the tempest clears and quiet returns, emerging at the foot of the bookcases across from me is a boy of nine or so sitting in an old wooden folding chair, unperturbed amidst the whirlwind, absorbed in a story.

There is hope for humanity yet.

The city of sorrows and living

Paris. It's one of the few places in the world I return to. This is my fourth time.

I love Paris. People ask me why, but it's for personal reasons that would be meaningless to anyone else. It was here where I had my heart, for the first time, truly broken. I was stood up on the Pont des Arts, the romantic pedestrian bridge which today is literally strained by that recent and tawdry phenomenon of love-locks. I sat in the Place des Vosges, sobbing a spectacle as I wrote a goodbye letter to the girl I loved.

Paris was cold. It was February and there was fog along the Seine. I was 26, I wore a second-hand woollen trench coat that the moths had started on, a narrow pin-stripe suit I found at the Salvation Army, and a new fedora I'd splashed out on.

My room was a crooked and peeling late night desperation at the top of five flights of dark, winding stairs. I was barked out of it in the morning in a language I commanded only in fragments, for using the shower, I think, without paying the extra francs.

I checked into the hostel on Rue des Bernardins under an assumed name instead and met a Dane who gave me ten francs on my last day there because I hadn't eaten in two days. I devoured bread and cheese gratefully, and cured it to something concrete with liquid yoghurt.

I played chess in the Jardins des Luxembourg. I eschewed the Eiffel Tower and wandered the lanes of the Quartier Latin. I shared strawberries with a stranger on a park bench and was invited to her house for coffee, where she practised her English discussing the recent election of a socialist parliament in France.

Today the thing I look forward to the most is tomorrow—breakfast of croissant, baguette, cafe au lait and jus d'orange at a table I shall own for hours.

It is the living here. The French live for now and eternity. They embrace artists, musicians and writers. What is the point of struggling every day like a rat treading water so you can one day enjoy your life? It is already here! And struggles will always come with it.

A warning on the Kettle Valley Railway

Wisdom on bears

About 7.30 in the morning I spot a bear fifty metres ahead of me. I must be downwind; it appears not to notice me as it emerges from the dense forest flanking the railway bed, saunters across my path, and slips back into the dark green shadows thick with deadfall. I halt immediately. Here's the thing with following a railway bed: there are two directions. You either go forward or you go back.

I've been waiting for this. I'm constantly seeing signs of animals, and indeed the animals themselves. There are deer prints all over the place, and a few days ago one strolled right through my camp, looking at me unperturbed from just metres away as I made my breakfast. On the trail I saw coyote scats, judging by all the undigested rabbit fur in it. There was a beautifully clear print of a mountain lion in the mud as I filled my water bladder at the river, and my uncertainty about other prints being cougar or bear was removed upon discovery of a big splat of bear poo fresh enough to still attract flies.

There is received wisdom on avoiding bears. One piece of advice is to wear a bear bell. This is simply a bell. You wear it like a cow. It goes "tinkle tinkle" and protects you from bears. You see, spooking a bear is something you don't want to do, because when they're spooked they can charge. It's usually a bluff because you've frightened them, but rather than putting your hands on your hips and saying, "oh, come on, now!" it's rather better to avoid the interaction to begin with. It's particularly easy to startle a bear in dense forest of thick green shadows. And sows with cubs aren't bluffing.

I do not have a bear bell.

Other advice, if you are on the receiving end of a charge, is to raise your arms above your head and bellow with all your bloody might to frighten it away. The frightened bear. You are trying to appear bigger than it. Than the bear. Bears stand on their hind legs at about eight feet.

This is why you have to hang your food so high in a tree when you make camp. (NEVER keep your food in your tent beside you, because when a bear comes inside in the middle of the night it will not make the distinction.) The dimensions for hanging your food are: ten feet in the air (so the bear doesn't simply pull it down) and six feet out from the trunk along the first branch, suspended by three feet of rope (so it doesn't simply climb the tree and pluck it like a sack of apples; black bears are exceptional climbers). So, the perfect tree has, as it's lowest branch, a stout projection at ninety degrees.

This perfect tree does not exist, by the way.

Grizzly bears can't climb trees but they are bigger (yes, bigger) so you have to hang it higher. And disregard that other stuff about bluffing, because grizzlies are territorial. The best thing to do is climb a tree.

This morning it's a black bear. With no choice but to press on, I pick up two stones to clack together and make a sharp sound that carries well ahead of me and walk cautiously forward. The bear is either disinterested in me or unaware and already gone.

I'm not in grizzly country. I don't think I would do this trek in grizzly country. This is what I tell the hunter I meet that evening who says to me, as I walk into a public campsite with a long branch I am using as a walking staff, "Is that all you carry with you? A stick?"

"You know, you're wrong," he says. "Last year my friends and I saw a grizzly with three cubs just on the other side of this lake. About two hundred metres from us. It stood up and looked at us, then behind it at her cubs, then at us again."

I wish he hadn't told me this story.

The perils of trespassing

In Rhone, a tiny hamlet where once stood a train station, I come across a cyclists' rest stop next to a restored caboose that has "Kettle Valley Railway" emblazoned on the side. There are picnic tables in the grounds, pit toilets, and a hammock suspended under a roof. This will be tonight's campsite.

I remember cabooses from my childhood. I grew up near a railway and was intrigued by the turreted and chimneyed living quarters that sailed by, tailing the train. Lamentably, they were decommissioned on all trains years ago, so it's a nostalgic treat to find one. Through its windows I can see it is clean and well-kept, and judging by the pamphlets and guest book on the benchtop it's being used as a tourist office of sorts. There is also a stove of cast iron and three bunks. I try the door handle but it's locked, so I can't fulfil my childhood dream of sleeping in a caboose, even one that isn't going anywhere. Instead I set up a makeshift tent over the hammock with my tent fly to keep the warmth in overnight. I go to look for water.

The railway bed follows the Kettle River. Through Rhone today, however, it runs through farming country with long stretches on private land. I find myself separated from the river by barbed wire fencing surrounding a no-man's-land studded with "No Trespassing" signs. I need water to cook, or it will be dry oatmeal and hard pasta. Walking half a mile up and down the road looking for some way of access, I finally spot a rickety cedar fencepost hidden by bushes below the level of the road. I attempt to scale the metre-high wire.

When I step on the lower wire of the fence, it squeals in the old wood like a pig having its teeth pulled. With one leg over, straddling the wire with a barb in my groin, I hear: "woof!" Through the obscuring roadside vegetation, at equal dog's eye level I see what appears to be a black and tan rottweiler, set on the road, fixed on my location in the bushes. Then another big black dog joins it, staring straight at me. "WOOF!" The trespass guards have arrived.

Dogs would be through the fence in a second, so I quickly opt to return to the side from which I came—"see? I am un-trespassing!"—even though this is the side the dogs are on. At least I would have an open avenue of escape for a few seconds before they run me down. I try to slow my panicked scrambling, while still moving like a greased bobcat being given a bath, and unfasten the accumulating barbs in the crotch of my pants lest the dogs set upon my legs before I unmount this fence. All this haste demonstrates the simple genius of barbed wire: it entangles the hasty.

Mercifully, the dogs remain on the road. As I disentangle my tackle packet and emerge from the sunken hedge onto the road myself, I see first that the black-and-tan is nothing but a scruffy mongrel and his mate a fat, grizzled old labrador. Following twenty metres behind is an elderly couple on bicycles. I thank the gods that today is not the day I die being mauled astride barbed wire by dogs.

"We thought you might have been a bear," they call out. "We were just out for our evening ride." I explain sheepishly that I'm camped at the rest stop and was looking for water. They kindly offer me the use of the garden hose at their house, right across the road from my campsite. As much as I need, they say. I feel foolish for not simply knocking on the door and asking in the first place.

That night, fed and snug in my sleeping bag, in the hammock strung up at the end of the caboose, I have everything for a comfortable sleep. And I survived my is-this-a-mauling? encounter with dogs. Those people were nice.

They thought I was... the owners were worried about... 

Oh!

"Bears."

Searching

I've long been fascinated with railways. Not trains, but railways. They're things that can spirit you away from where you are to places where you could be. 

Abandoned railways take you to times where you can't be. They are corridors back into history, connecting the present to places once relevant but since forgotten. To disappear down one of these isolated rights of way is to vanish into obscurity.

In my youth, when I backpacked around southern British Columbia and trekked the abandoned Kettle Valley Railway, hitch-hiking was my default mode of transport. On one trip I was picked up by a lady of about forty in a rented car. She was leaving her life behind, resiling from an interminable and rancorous custody battle for her 9-year-old daughter. Her character had been irremediably maligned in court, and she had lost her last appeal. I was shocked to think of what it must take to make a mother leave her child behind. She was philosophical but clearly broken by it.

I was just 23 and coming off the collapse of my own marriage. We were young and it was my first real relationship. We were together four years.

"So what are you looking for?" the mother asked. She was calm and kind. "Why are you out here on the road?"

I liked her. She was sincere and kind. I considered her question seriously but all I could come up with was a flimsy, "I really don't know." I was a bit unsettled, by both the impotence of my answer and at not having contemplated an answer at all. What unseen motive is moving me?

"I've come across a number of young men your age doing the same thing," she said. "Journeying, searching. And they're never really sure what they're searching for. It makes me wonder what it is." She paused reflectively. "I think maybe it becomes clear only later, after it's done." 

Now beyond her age then, I wonder if she was looking for her own answers. Looking back, had I been able to at the time I'd have answered her this: We have no idea what our lives mean. We just tell our stories and the meaning emerges, ethereally like consciousness emerging from our cerebral sweetbreads. That's why we tell our stories: we are compelled to find the meaning in our lives. 

I'm reminded of this conversation as I return to the abandoned Kettle Valley Railway, twenty years later, after the end of another significant relationship in my life. What am I doing? Am I looking for something? As young adults we are still weaving our tales; as old adults do we review them? Is this a manifestation of mid-life crisis? In our forties do we regress to our twenties to see where we went wrong?

Abandoned

East of Vancouver is a city called Hope, beyond which there isn't much. A hundred years ago, in 1915, a new railway followed the valley of the Kettle River and ventured into the craggy granite mountains and deep ravines of Similkameen Country to serve the burgeoning silver mining communities.

Twenty years ago I backpacked seventy kilometres along the bed of the now extinct Kettle Valley Railway, from Brodie junction, where it breaks away from today's Coquihalla Highway, to Princeton. It was a formative moment in my life as a young man in his early twenties learning about his independence, and I have ever since wanted to return to hike the rest.

The terrain was treacherous for the railway, especially crossing the Coquihalla summit. The steep mountain challenged rail's two per cent grade limit to reach the 1200-metre summit, and the line was regularly blockaded in winter by avalanches and mud slides. By the 1960s, the number of incidents that closed the Kettle Valley Railway for weeks at a time was breaking the back of the line's finances and it was shut down.

The highway I'm now on obliterated the Coquihalla section when it was built over the top of the abandoned KVR in the 1980s. My ears are popping as the bus hauls itself up the mountain. Dense forests of white spruce concede the altitude to stands of black hemlock which disappear into an early June mist engulfing the rocky mountain tops.

I remember driving this road in winter in my youth when I had held a drivers licence for only a year or two. It was white-out conditions. I crawled up a hill of black ice at 10 k's an hour at night with a visibility of maybe ten metres, the headlights reflecting bright on a wall of falling snow, everything black beyond. Standard stuff for the Coquihalla.

I was once picked up hitch-hiking by an old bloke who used to jump the rails of the KVR in the 1920s, looking for work in towns along the line. That was common then. Young men would sneak aboard the box cars when the train was at a slow roll, evading the rail guards and their truncheons.

The railway seems to have a history of forming young men. But as a not-so-young man anymore, I am preparing to hike the line from the other direction—a one-hundred kilometre distance from Rock Creek to McCulloch—and then mountain-bike the spectacular mountainside section of tunnels and trestles through Myra Canyon, a thousand metres above Lake Okanagan.

I bet it still has the power to form, and perhaps reform, men.

The Vulture

I'm in Luang Prabang having dinner alone. That's the usual routine. People often think that's odd. I think it's odd that people think so.

It's dusk and I'm gazing across the colonnaded patio out the open timber shutter doors to the street from my small table in an old villa-cum-restaurant. The dark wooden furniture is lit with coloured-paper lampshades hanging from the ceiling and the steamy air is chilled with some downtempo electronica. Locals and tourists stroll up and down. A tuk-tuk has just pulled up.

Anyway, I'm just slowly eating my pesto linguine and I always use this quiet time for some writing, so let me tell you about some kayaking I did in Vang Vieng.

I was working my way up here, to Luang Prabang, which, by the way, is a charming town—French colonial buildings and Buddhist temples set between two rivers, the Mekong and the Nam Khan, in the lush inland of Laos. It's ten or twelve hours by road to get here from the capital, Vientiane.

I caught a minitruck—the snub-nosed local "chicken buses" of Laos, trays fitted out with roofed cages and side benches—as far as Vang Vieng. A frame at the rear of the truck's tray was crated high with boxes of fruits for transportation somewhere. It was the real local experience. A lady climbed aboard with bags of something bloody, perhaps fish or offal, and tucked them under the benches unrefrigerated in the thirty degree heat. A young boy, fascinated with me, tugged gently at my arm hair and pulled my board shorts back from my knee to see if the same pale-coloured skin continued up my leg.

After several hours of dusty roads, I.... Eventually, I...

Sorry... this guy leaning on his tuk-tuk parked across the road is staring at me. It's distracting.

Anyway, at Vang Vieng I was met by Meng, a guide I had arranged to take me kayaking on the Nam Lik river. Sadly, the once crystal river waters turned muddy brown three years ago when the single-party communist government built a new hydroelectric dam upstream to sell power to Thailand. Worse, we were to pass another dam under construction which will soon end completely all whitewater kayaking on this verdant and bouldered stretch of the river.

There were two sets of rapids ahead of us, classes two and one. Rapids are classed one through six, with one being tame and six impassable. I have rafted white water several times but have never taken a kayak through it... and this one... this kayak, I mean....

This tuk-tuk driver just waved at me. I just lifted my head and looked out the door absently, and he's right in my line of sight, staring at me fixedly. Now he has smiled and given me a half wave like I was looking up at him. Jeez. Maybe he's just being friendly.

Okay, I've smiled politely and have dropped my gaze. Back to my story.

We hit that first set of rapids, the class two, and capsized instantly. This was an ocean kayak. It was too narrow; it should be broader and sit lower for white water, and when we edged a whirlpool we tipped.

Meng kept a hold on the craft, but I was pulled into the rapids. "Feet up!" he called to me.

You have to keep your legs up when swept into white water to clear underwater hazards. Lean back into your life vest and go downriver feet first. I knew this and did so, but I have never been a strong swimmer and my breathing got panicky when a rapid dumped me. I inhaled water and came back up spluttering, heart racing, hyperventilating.

Control your breathing. It's the first rule of being in the water, and the first that went out the window, followed by the feet-up technique. On land I fancy myself a minor survivalist. In the water I am an embarrassing disaster and my own biggest threat. Flailing, I turned around and looked for Meng.

What the fuck? I have one line of sight out the door and this tuk-tuk driver is in it, watching me. Isn't staring impolite in Laos? Now I'm keenly aware of him, and every time I look up I have to avoid looking at him, which is to look at the wall or a pillar. This is giving me the shits.

Okay. On the other side of the rapids Meng pulled me panting and coughing back onto the kayak. "Relax, relax!" he counselled me. It's a funny thing with hyperventilation. You lose your common sense. I can so easily see how people drown.

We paddled on, and the second set of rapids, the class one, loomed. Class one is defined as requiring "little or no skill to navigate". I've rafted class four rapids fearlessly before but now I'm spooked like a cat about to have a bath. I'd never been thrown in the water before. Or kayaked rapids. On a sea kayak! As we were drawn in I looked wide-eyed for some calm water between the whirlpools to run. I couldn't see any. We hit the white water. I braced!

We drifted through, and the kayak rocked a little bit.

I'm losing it. Sorry, this tuk-tuk driver is ruining both my dinner and my concentration. I'm paying the bill and packing up.

I'm leaving the restaurant, and he's approaching me!

"Hello, sir. Do you want a...?" I can't distinguish what he says. I'm already pissed off at him. It's common for an idle driver to ask if you need a tuk-tuk, but not for one to stalk you.

"What?"

"Do you want a lady?"

"What?"

"Do you need a tuk-tuk or... maybe you want a lady?"

I shift from pissed off to furious. Now I know why he was watching me. I was sitting at dinner alone.

"Do you know what a vulture is?" I ask him.

He is taken aback. "What?"

"Do you know what a vulture is?"

"Yes? Uh...."

He is looking confused. In a clear and indiscreet voice in the street I say to him: "You sit here staring at me for half an hour while I have my dinner, and then you come over and ask me if I want a lady. Now, do you know what a vulture is?"

He's looking away flustered and laughing softly in embarrassment.

I just walked off.

Swindlers and the universal formula

I am a jaded traveller.

I have been approached by more touts, swindlers and con artists in countries around the world than I can recollect, sometimes avoiding treachery, sometimes being taken in, and I have learned to recognise them. They will try to steer the conversation, but if you pre-empt the answers they want then you control the encounter. After some practise, you can even have fun with it.

There is a formula.

1: They approach you.

You're always a target, as there's no avoiding looking like a tourist.

In Beijing, I needed to get to the Canon service centre to fix a jammed zoom lens. The building happened to be located in a touristy area with numerous high-rise hotels. A tubby Pekingese man standing on the side of the footpath like a bird plucking insects around a light addressed me as I walked past him: "Hello!"

2: They engage you.

A typical opening involves complementing or commenting on something you're wearing.

For me, it is always my distinctive hat. In Mérida, Mexico, one guy immediately recognised it as Aussie. "Hey," he called, arresting himself mid-stride from crossing the street. "You are from Australia, sí? Sydney? Melbourne?"

I took off my hat in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. One merchant pointed at my hiking runners, which are hopelessly stained from years of wilderness trekking, and called out in sudden eye-bulging admiration, "Nice shoes!"

My Pekingese friend's opening was: "You look like a cowboy."

3: They always ask you where you are from.

And be it Australia, Brazil or Singapore, the good ones will find something common to talk about.

Once, three months after a certain unpopular Australian prime minister was ousted by party machinations, an Ethiopian taxi driver asked me: "Is Julia still in power?" I laughed so loud at his adroit grasp of foreign domestic politics that I didn't mind him charging me double the usual rate.

The stupid and unimaginative ones, like my new Chinese friend, will say: "Ah, Australia! Kangaroos! Koalas!" attempting to conjure a camaraderie of trust by reciting a charm of the bleeding familiar.

"Earthworms! Ants!" I said to him.

He looked perplexed.

4: They are inordinately friendly.

Anybody might be friendly, but swindlers will offer help when you haven't asked for it.

A gypsy man standing near the entrance to the alcázar, the Moorish palace in Seville, approached me when I was loitering, looking for camera angles. To him I looked uncertain, which, to a swindler, is like blood in the water to a shark.

"That is the alcázar," he said, gesturing with a sweeping hand. "This is the entrance. Come, I will tell you a bit about it." It's a common ploy; they give you some generic history as they walk with you and then ask to be paid for their services as a tour guide.

In Beijing I had a piece of paper with the address of the Canon repair building written on it in Chinese by the hotel receptionist. He told me to ask someone on the street which building it is. I showed it to my new Pekingese friend. "Why, it's this one right here!" he said, pointing to the next building. "But why? There's nothing in there." I told him I needed to repair my camera. He almost jumped with glee. "I will come with you and help you!"

5: They will try to latch onto you.

In Istanbul, the carpet sellers always ask: "What are you looking for?" with an immediately ready response of: "Oh, I will take you there! Come on!" and stepping away quickly so you are instinctively compelled to keep up with them. The Turks are particularly good at this business and are hard to repel without some eventual element of arsehole-ness coming into it, either on your part or theirs.

I told the tubby Pekingese that it wasn't necessary for him to accompany me.

"But they don't speak English!" he protested (an untruth, but he was desperate not to lose a fish he thought he had caught).

"Maybe not, but they understand a broken camera."

6: They reveal their agenda.

If, like Bruce Lee fighting back Han's men, you manage to deflect all of these advances, you are ready for the reveal.

In Istanbul: "In Turkey it is our tradition to offer a cup of tea. I have a shop just over here, very close. I invite you for some tea." (It is a carpet shop. Prepare for some pressure selling trapped in the spider's lair.)

In Havana: "I know the best place to eat! I take you there!" (Havana has an extraordinary number of "best" places. These guys get a kickback for soliciting customers. On arrival they'll often ask you, if you'll buy them a drink for taking you there: "One mojito for me?")

In Beijing: "I am an art student. We have an exhibition at a gallery over here, and today is the last day. Come have a look. Just a few minutes."

I was blunt with my tubby Pekingese friend. "I'm not interested in art. I am here to get my camera fixed. Thanks for your help."

I was later approached by two art students in the same area who delivered all of the same lines. The following day in the Forbidden City I was helped by yet another art student. I subsequently saw a notice at a hostel that the "art student" scam is a common one, with warnings not to buy into it.

The Trans-Mongolian Express to Beijing

It takes more than 33 hours to get from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing on the Trans-Mongolian Express, and the food is lousy.

The set menu in the dining car—where the barman smokes beneath the non-smoking sign—costs US$25 for salad, soup, a main and dessert. The salad is shredded carrot in a radioactively garlicky sauce topped with a triangle of processed cheese. The soup is cream-of-something. And the main is a few small slices of beef in gravy with three sides: rice with corn in it, a kind of ratatouille (my polite interpretation of indistinguishable vegetables in an unknown sauce), and sauerkraut that tastes like feet. Dessert is a packaged chocolate roll-up cake, served to me as the last in the plastic tray of six. I don't care to eat it, so the waiter does.

I have a "hard-sleeper" berth, a second-class, four-bunk cabin, which I share with a pleasant young Norwegian couple. There are TVs in each bunk, but I dare not turn on the single channel of what will invariably be a looped screening of the Russian circus, replete with fat old women dressed in tutus performing tired magic tricks involving scarves and wands and pigeons. Mercifully, when curiosity gets the better of me and I turn it on, it doesn't work.

I chat to a fellow Aussie in the next cabin. He's been on the train since Moscow, doing the full Trans-Siberian. It had been three days so far. He's happy staring out the window at the endless plains of the Gobi desert because through Russia it had been endless silver birch.

At the border of Mongolia and China we spend four-and-a-half hours between Mongolian immigration, Chinese immigration, and changing the trucks on the Mongolian train to fit the Chinese rail gauge. Once we finally get under way again it is 1am. I kill a solid eight hours to the gentle rocking of the train. When I wake up I'm still here, so I kill off another two.

I love train travel, and I enjoy the overnight sleepers, but honestly, I don't understand the romance of the Trans-Mongolian (and less so the Trans-Siberian). It's long and boring. I can only recommend to bring several books, your own pot noodles, and consider a flight instead.

So it is a relief, in the mid-afternoon of the second day, to finally reach Beijing. The Norwegians' hotel is apparently close to mine so we agree to share a taxi, but we first need to withdraw some Chinese yuan as we have only Mongolian tugrik. After twenty minutes of hunting for ATMs and failing to find any that will accept our Visa cards, we finally turn to a tourism office for help (as did everyone else on the train, it turns out) and are directed to the Construction Bank.

Yuan in pocket, we look for a taxi. There is no shortage, but not one will take us. They are parked at the taxi rank or pull up without fares but wave us away when we approach. We can't figure it. Just one driver is willing, but only through extortion: "Three people, three luggage... one hundred yuan." We scoff and walk away. My new friends have been advised by their hotel that it shouldn't cost more than twenty.

A fellow traveller from the train who speaks fluent Mandarin is having the same difficulty. "It's impossible," she says to us. "No one will take you!"

Such is the strange situation with Beijing taxis. Yet pedicabs and tuk-tuks will hound you. But they can't take luggage, so we opt for the subway (which, as it turns out, is excellent—easy, efficient and cheap) and part ways at Andingmen station to our respective digs in the hútòng district north of the Forbidden City.

The young lady at my hotel reception is pleasant and welcoming, as most Pekingese are, but difficult to understand with that heavy Beijing accent of R's and "sh" sounds.

"Your room has Black Forest," she says.

"Pardon me?"

"Your room has Black Forest."

It does? Will I be sharing it with wolves and sleeping in a gingerbread bed? Or do I get midnight snacks of cake?

"My room has what?" I ask.

"Black Forest. Black Forest. Morning dinner."

"Oh, breakfast!" I laugh as the penny drops. "That will be lovely."

As long as there's no Trans-Mongolian sauerkraut.