KEY POINTS:
On Thursday night, towards the end of another exhilarating week in China, I left the vast marble hall that was the site of the opening ceremony of the 2008 Shanghai Travel Mart across the river from Shanghai, in Pudong.
I walked in the cold night after the clear, blue day, and found myself right underneath the famed Shanghai television tower.
The Oriental Pearl Television Tower is an extraordinarily futuristic thing which, although it is more than 20 years old, still speaks of dreams to be realised and ages to come.
Its thick concrete stumps seem to hold the luminescent ball at the base of the giant tower so gently, as if supporting it while not being part of it. Looking back, I suppose, the tower was China's first big statement to the world that it was a nation to be taken seriously.
The banquet hall was all marble and huge, a vast room that could cope with having 2000 for dinner, I would think. There were many speeches and some brilliant, costumed entertainment. As we made ready to go early, someone cried, "She's en pointe." I turned around. On stage, a ballerina was standing on one leg, en pointe, on the shoulder of her dance partner.
The drinking, talking, laughing crowd, all 1400 of us, stopped to watch, amazed. A few more graceful moves, then the impossible.
This beautiful girl stands on the very top of her partner's head, rises en pointe on one leg, puts the other leg out before her at right angles and pirouettes slowly, on the top of his head. It is another of the unbelievable moments in the land of the unbelievable.
I flew up last Friday night, straight after the Sir Bob Geldof dinner at SkyCity. Bob had had a nightmare day stuck in an aircraft on the tarmac at Sydney and arrived shattered. When the chicken was brought to the table, he despaired. "This is the third time today I've had chicken. How many chickens are there in the world?"
I spent a night in Shanghai before flying to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in southwest China, just an average provincial city of, I don't know, say 10 million people, to join guests from 31 countries to attend an emergency conference. Sichuan felt the full, brutal force of an earthquake in the months before the Olympics this year and an estimated 60,000 people lost their lives. Tourism has suffered enormously. The Sichuan government has organised an "International Conference on Revitalisation of Tourism and Confronting Crisis".
I was told I could not attend the municipal farewell dinner for my soon-to-be companions, hosted by the mayor of Chengdu because it was in another hotel and had already started.
I sat in the dining room alone, went outside into a cold foggy night and regarded the hysterically illuminated Blade Runner cityscape. You have to see these Chinese cities at night to believe it. They are wondrous.
The next morning, I hop into the bus with my travelling companions for the next couple of days, to view the great sights of Sichuan - endless miles through the green mistiness of one of the most dramatic, romantic and ancient landscapes of China.
We are in eight buses, under police escort, no stops, no hold-ups, no nonsense. We pass thousands of little farms intensely worked, the terraced fields the vivid green of winter rice and young cabbage. We drive alongside wide rivers and into valleys where red and yellow rock-faces rear up dramatically from the valley floor.
I seem to have found myself on the naughty bus. By the end of the first of the two days of the bus, I have good, naughty friends. They like to laugh. They are all in the travel business in some way or another but I must not, apparently, call them travel agents. They are adventure specialists, I guess.
There is Mark, gentle, easygoing, about my age. Later that first night we will sit and share a drink together and speak about our family "stuff", quite intimately, in the way you can a long way from home with a stranger you can trust.
There is Wendy, a Chinese-born Australian, funny, a travel writer, from Sydney. There is Barbara, from China Travel Service in Auckland, organised, inquisitive, a born researcher and ideas person, full of laughter, misses nothing.
And there is Zoe, a young English woman, early 30s, runs an adventure tourism operation for the Australasian market out of Auckland. Zoe is funny and sharp. She is being driven mad by a book she is reading about a couple of English women who travel across Africa and call each other "Hon" and "Babe". Zoe says they whinge all the time.
Suddenly we are high above the confluence of the Three Rivers, on the banks of which is the city of Leshan, tall apartment buildings overlooking the dramatic junction, like Surfer's Paradise but on a river and under dull grey skies.
This may be one of the problems for Sichuan tourism. They have only 80 days of sunshine a year. We learn this from Honey, our beautiful guide, whose hair gets lower on her forehead as the day progresses. Later, Zoe tells me Honey wears a wig. Zoe knows this because she asked Honey about it. Honey tells her it keeps her warm in the winter. Zoe says that if we play up too much we will be made to travel on the German bus.
There, looking out over the great boiling, merging rivers, is the Big Buddha, the world's largest sitting Buddha, 100m high, carved into the soaring rock face above the river, perfectly proportioned and centuries old. In the wooded area surrounding his head are gorgeous, tranquil temple grounds.
I have a stroll around. There is a cave where, the sign says, a 14th-century regional finance minister sat for a long time studying the divination chart. Better there than in his office ramping the taxes, I guess.
We stop for lunch. Barbara and I sit next to a couple of Middle Eastern gents in suits, one grey, one pin-striped. I make conversation with Pin Stripe. He is a distinguished Afghan historian, he tells me, and with him, silver bushy eyebrows, moustached, a little food spilled on his right lapel, His Excellency the Vice-Minister of Tourism of Afghanistan.
I nod, smiling, my brain whirring. So, I ask, how is the tourism these days in Afghanistan? "Getting better," says Mr Pin Stripe. "But we need more." I imagine so.
Barbara says, helpfully, that they should apply for what the Chinese call approved destination status, which New Zealand has now.
Oh, says the distinguished historian, we already have the Chinese there. They just signed a big deal for a copper mine.
The Chinese are pouncing on mineral rights round the world to feed their unquenchable, historic, economic growth.
Later, I point the Vice-Minister out to the Austrian. "Well," says the Austrian, "He might as well be here. He has nothing to do at home. What does he sell, one-way tickets?"
Over the two days, the Afghan Minister and his distinguished historian, his permanent secretary (a title to tempt the fates in that country, surely) make an odd couple.
They walk together, the minister listening, the historian lecturing. They look like a dodgy but harmless sub-plot in a Tintin adventure.
Back on the bus, this time up a high mountain, Mt Emei, not far from Tibet, endless hairpin corners, higher and higher, then into a gondola up into blind thick mist, even higher. Then more steps, taken carefully, in the ice and the sleet, higher and higher, panting for breath at 3000m, right up to the summit and the gigantic gold statue at the peak, one of the holiest Buddhist shrines in China.
In the warm gold temple inside the statue I am amazed at how many Chinese know how to pray and do the business in the temple. There is stuff no regime can ever wipe out.
All through this journey I note how clean the roads and the city streets are. Even on the hard shoulder of the highways, every now and then you see a street sweeper with a straw broom, even on the lonely road up the mountain, every now and then a lonely soul sweeping.
Our bus takes increasing delight in the signs we see, especially in the lavatories. Above a urinal way up Mt Emei, I read: "It is so civilised to take one little step further when urinating".
Zoe says that in the ladies she saw: "Thinking of making things easy for others before urinating". Later I will see: "You can enjoy the fresh air after enjoying a civilised urinating".
At a beautiful old garden on the way to the Big Buddha the signs are deeply eccentric. "Beauty comes from the distance so please don't touch closely".
And, "If we make tree protection and no smoking, the civilisation will be just around you". Another says, "Only if the tree own greenness, the earth will have paradise."
We laugh, we naughty ones on the naughty bus. We can laugh all we like and make gentle fun of the mangled English. But at least, the Chinese are trying. At least they make the effort for their tourists.
Everywhere, we meet people proud of their country. And they are infinitely helpful to us, people from the vassal states, here to find opportunities and to pay homage to the new great power.
* Paul Holmes travelled courtesy of Singapore Airlines, on an itinerary arranged by the China Travel Service.
