I walk the line between good and evil

Hello everybody. It's weird how since getting to Japan we've actually had much less net access than before. (In fact, the best net connection of the whole trip was in Mongolia!) We've been staying in old-fashioned inns and minshuku (which are basically B&Bs, only nicer, I think), and in Japan there aren't netcafes all over the place because everyone has a computer. The ones they have rock my socks off - they've got comfy sofas, DVD and manga libraries, free sweets and all manner of fun stuff - but they're correspondingly expensive. I am speaking to you now in another stolen wifi moment, in a coffee shop in Karatsu. Karatsu is a wee town near Fukuoka on the south island of Japan and isn't even mentioned in the Rough Guide. We're staying with Ivan's friend Leah, an English teacher who's been driving us around at breakneck speed in the little car she calls 'the hairdryer'. Tonight we go to the bathhouse and do karaoke. (Not simultaneously, though that would be... interesting.) Home next week. It's a very, very strange thought.

I'm way behind with this, but I'm going to carry on telling you about China, and the day we went to the Great Wall...

Though for a while that morning it looked like we mightn’t get to the Great Wall at all. The bus to Jinshanling coughed its way along the motorway for a few minutes at a time, then the coughing would turn into shuddering and the driver would pull over, and he and his friend would tinker with the engine. Once another tourist bus pulled in alongside us and its driver got out to help, while its passengers made puzzled faces at us and we did the same back. The driver would get back in with some huge soot-encrusted engine part and put it by his seat – a cylinder of many layers of wire mesh was first, then a bucket-shaped thing with hooks sticking out of it. He’d set off again and then the shuddering would start up and he’d cluck his tongue and pull over. There was a pile of engine parts in the front after a while. I wondered how there was any bus left. An Italian man with spectacularly bushy armpits was sitting beside me, tutting and making fun of the drivers’ accents. Finally they pulled into a garage, where mechanics were swarming over a rust-covered lorry chassis. The driver said it’d be twenty minutes. "'Clen-ee min-oo’ – that means an hour, you know,” said the Italian, unfunnily. Meanwhile Ivan was sitting with the Italian’s friend, who was reading inspirational Christian literature in between telling Ivan stories about his time as a professional card cheat and con man. I heard stories of scams from a Colombian – the “I’m a Chinese tourist, come for an exorbitant dinner so I can practice my English” one, the art student one (“come and see my exhibition for my final exams, it's free to look… oh, now that you're here, I forgot to mention that I’ll fail unless you buy something”). But it actually did take twenty minutes, and finally, five hours after we’d left Beijing, we were there.

( stomp, pant, stomp, pant )

The first few pictures - the ones I've managed to squeeze through the one-bar connection - are here.