LONELY IN SOUTHWEST CHINA BY BRADLEY MAYHEW Guidebook writer, like professional ice cream taster, surely ranks among the best jobs in the world. Imagine getting paid to travel, explore foreign cultures and then write about them. Where do you sign up?

THINK again. The reality is more like this; lying awake at 3am in 15th-century dirt on a dusty wooden chapel floor in Kathok monastery. A towering statue of a Buddhist protector god looms nightmarishly out of the darkness as a dozen rats scurry around my sleeping bag, bumping into my legs, forcing me to stifle a shriek. If that wasn’t bad enough, I haven’t washed for five days and the week’s calorie intake has been a stomach-churning mixture of instant noodles, MSG and cold Tibetan butter tea. I’ve already notched two new holes into my belt.

This is travel at the low end, where writing a guidebook to China seems more punishment than pleasure. Follow me into China travel’s heart of darkness, onto overnight sleeper buses, trapped in the back row bunk in a haze of other peoples’ cigarette smoke and the deafening sounds of a made-for-Asia kickboxing movie. Chew barbequed rat and cabbage (the only food in town) in a tiny, frozen village in wintry Guizhou, or try to map the unmappable in Kashgar’s old town in the blistering heat of summer.

Then there are the embarrasingly frequent struggle sessions with vindictively uncooperative ticket sellers. Remember the difficulties involved in finding out the time of the fastest train to Chengdu? Now imagine asking the times of all trains going anywhere! Or trying to write notes in the rain on soggy bits of paper and then, worse, trying to make sense of the blurred scrawl two months later in a rented flat in south London.

But just as you’re ready to throw in the towel and catch the next flight to Thailand, China invariably redeems itself. A random restaurant choice brings a fine three-course meal and a cold beer for less than two quid. The bus from hell drops you by chance at an enthralling weekly market, or takes you through unexpectedly sublime mountain scenery just as the sun begins to set. And the night dodging rats at Kathok? Daylight brought the famous Kathok festival, honouring the birth of the sage Guru Rinpoche with two days of the most spectacular masked dances and Tibetan opera I have ever seen.

Most regular travellers to China seem to enjoy the same weird sado-masochistic relationship with a country that brings alternate passions of love and hate. There are as many contradictions inherent in guidebooks as there are in travel, as Mao would surely have pointed out had he progressed into travel writing (Mao’s ‘Red Guides’ perhaps?). With a fixed page count and time budget, there is a hard-fought balance to be struck between coverage of the places most frequented by tourists versus the off-the-beaten-track destinations that many travelers thirst for (and that ego-driven writers love to boast about). Do you spend all your time in Kunming and Lijiang, where everybody goes and wants information on, but which are therefore easier to navigate oneself, or do you spend inefficient amounts of time schlepping out to remote villages that only 5% of the guides’ readership has time to explore?

Often the harder decisions are not what to include but what to leave out. Some of the best travel experiences spring from chance explorations coupled with the random kindness of strangers. By writing up these villages and their informal guesthouses are you encouraging travellers to visit a village that cannot (or doesn’t want to) sustain high visitor numbers. Or are you helping to boost a village economy where jobs and investment are scarce? Will villagers welcome a stream of travellers clutching their Lonely Planet guides? My mind is drawn to the family who occupy the former residence of Joseph Rock outside Lijiang, but whose lives face constant interruption from a stream of Rock-philes eager to tour their living room.

Resolving these issues is as difficult as deciphering a Chinese bus timetable chalked up on a board, or getting a response to all 37 questions asked through a glass-proofed, waist-high hole in a bus station ticket office, as every one of the 45 people behind you thrusts money under your arms, over your head and through your legs in an attempt to secure tickets for the next bus to Shanghai. These are the times when you’ll see guidebook writers screaming obscenities at random strangers or pacing around bus waiting rooms muttering darkly about a career change to accountancy.

Happily, travel tales of woe are the exceptions these days in China. A recent trip to Yunnan was a pleasantly surprising string of luxury buses, non-smoking halls, English menus and pleasant reception staff. There has been a tourist revolution in most parts of China. Long gone are the days when checking into a hotel in a closed town would result in the swift arrival of the Gonganju (public security bureau) and a possible self-criticism. Old China hands may reminisce together over a three-kuai beer about the good old days when you had to change FEC on the black market (remember?) and then fight for hours to get your cut-price RMB accepted by government officials (who would then charge you double the local price), but those days are now as familiar to modern backpackers as communes and collectivisation are to today’s Chinese teenagers.

On my most recent trip I had therefore assumed that returning to research Shanghai would present few problems, save perhaps for judging between martinis at M on the Bund or Bloody Marys at Park 97, or ranking the merits of one fusion cuisine over another. How hard can spring in Shanghai be after a winter in Guizhou? And then SARS hit the fan. In an escalating climate of fear and loathing airlines slashed their schedules, restaurants barricaded their doors, and hotels refused to show me any rooms for fear of infection. Suddenly it was Guizhou all over again. And all this to glean nuggets of information for travellers who aren’t even planning to travel to China right now. These are the times when travel writing gets metaphysical...

Still, Shanghai is easy. It’s remote Guizhou or Qinghai where the fun really starts. Where the buses are held together by tape, the stares are shameless enough to make an exhibitionist paranoid, and where the second biggest danger involved in bus travel (after careering off a cliff) is contracting lung cancer. It’s another country back there.
And I for one can’t wait to go back.

Bradley Mayhew studied Chinese at Oxford University; he has since written over a dozen guidebooks, including Lonely Planet guides to South-West China, Shanghai and Tibet.