At night we decide to go to the highly recommended light show in the nearby town of Yangshuo.

Perhaps because I’ve heard nothing but good about it and am looking forward to it very much, torrential rain floods the area the minute we try to set off. Our receptionist, a dwarf named Angel (seriously), assures us it’s seasonal and will stop at any minute, thrusting flimsy ponchos at us and ushering us out into the downpour. By this time the puddles are ankle deep already, and we wade about in the carpark miserably waiting for our taxi.

Sure enough, though, the rain stops as quickly as it started and we find ourselves strolling through a vast park, following behind many hundreds of Chinese who all seem to know where they’re going and are doing it at a rapid pace, invariably in directions that no-one else is going.

We pass a large rotunda with upturned cornices, an artificial lake and another rotunda that, looking back, may well have been the first one again. Eventually we find ourselves seated in row 18 of the most spectacular natural amphitheatre I’ve ever seen (granted, probably the only natural amphitheatre I’ve ever seen).

Despite the seats looking suspiciously like something that had been wrenched off a dunny, the atmosphere is electric. Spread before us is a very black, very still lake, periodically lit up by shots of lightning that reveal in spectacular fashion a ring of surrounding mountains.

The show, when it starts, is dazzling. In a nutshell, it consists of several thousand performers – including a couple of oxen – who dance about in reflective outfits and sail around the lake waving flaming torches in formation. Sounds dull, I admit, but done on such a grand scale you can’t help but feel a little awed.

There was a plot, I’m sure, but like last week’s Guangzhou ballet it passed us by; we did, however, discern something of a love triangle between the pretty soprano singer, a young flautist in black pyjamas and one of the bejewelled oxen. Things got a little racy when two topless fishermen appeared on the scene, but they were bundled off so quickly that it may well be they’d strayed on set by mistake.

We left well satisfied with the show and thrilled to bits that we’d bagged a couple of free ponchos to boot.

1. On account of Wilken packing like a girl, we were frantic that we’d miss our flight to Guilin but we needn’t have worried. We were flying with China Southern airlines and reliable sources have indicated that never in the history of flight has a CSA plane left on time.

Unfortunately, according to said reliable sources their other claim to fame is having the highest number of recorded crashes the world over for twelve years running, which must entail a level of consistent incompetence that is really quite remarkable.

Having boarded at last, we can’t help but notice that of the hundred or more passengers on board Wilken alone, having been seated next to the emergency exit, is handed a safety instructions pamphlet – printed neatly in Mandarin.

No-one comes to check that our seatbelts are fastened or to yell at me for incorrectly stowing my handbag or fiddling with the tray tables, as is customary on such flights. There are no mildly entertaining life jacket demonstrations and just about every passenger barring us continues to bellow into their mobile phones well into take-off.

Nevertheless, despite a rocky landing and a minor incident involving a drinks cart and the curiously malleable head of a newborn infant, we make it safely to Guilin airport, and, eventually, the hotel.

Set between the foot of a mountain and the Li river, it’s a big mudbrick number covered in climbing ivy. Our room, though spartan (by which I mean it has a bed), has a stunning view but on account of its being an eco-lodge you aren’t allowed to put used toilet paper down the loo. Instead, it has to go in the bin below the sink, where it festers audibly as you brush your teeth.

Today, after a nap and a lazy lap in the pool, I front up to the Chinese hairdresser who mans a tiny salon called the Happy Chinese Hair House. Or, at least, I bang on his street window till he wakes up from his nap under the hot dryer and ask if he would possibly have the time for a cut and colour today.

Oooh, he says. Vely busy. Vely busy today. Swiping a cockroach off his appointment book, he yells out back to where his assistant is liberally applying somnolent drool to a stack of Chinese magazines, and graciously invites me in.

I spend the next three hours being treated to such delights as having my hair washed in a bucket with what looked suspiciously like dishwashing detergent and foils applied using strips of yellowed newspaper that might have been current in the pre-Mao years.

Eventually, I am charged something that would have been considered inflated in Europe, and ushered out the door with a bracing “You, no swim. Pool. Turn hair green.”

I stand roadside trying to hail a taxi but for the most part they slow enough either to realise I’m unlikely to speak Cantonese or to admire the monstrosity that has recently been afflicted hair-wise, and then speed away.

Happily, though, on the long and dusty walk home I stumble across an odd building downtown which is set up like an old apartment block but has shops in every room. Western-style clothes for a quarter of the price, if that – heaven in communist housing. It seems that many such shops are tucked away in buildings like this because the bigger markets are being shut down by the government.

We are at the cloth market in downtown Guangzhou. In exchange for me putting on a thousand and one pashminas but not buying any because the patterns ‘aren’t quite right’, we stop off at the electronics market so Wilken can browse the, um, electronics. For ‘a minute or two’.

Six hours and twelve (Mandarin) magazines later I find him writing a list of the assorted pros and cons of the Xbox 360 over the newfangled Wii (a deliberation that is as yet ongoing). Then security boots us out for looking shifty.

Later, at the sunglasses market, I buy several thousand pairs of Ray Ban aviators for the bargain price of twelve cents. Though it’s illegal to both buy and sell such goods, there are uniformed cops relaxing on every corner sipping pineapple smoothies and polishing their own Gucci wrap-arounds, which is disconcerting enough even when you don’t have a suitcase full of booty that could land you a hefty sentence.

Chinese prisons didn’t bode well for Jack Bauer and they won’t for me, so we slip down a back alley, dole out some Armani reflectors to the child gangsters who try to hold us up and leg it back home to the safety of the German compound and diplomatic immunity. 

1. There are programmes waiting on our seats at the Guangzhou ballet hall when we get there, but they are all in Chinese. This is somewhat inconsiderate, we feel, because we have grown partial to comical Engrish translations that say things like “offer the seats to the sick, crippie and gravy.” In any event, we are on our own as far as plot goes.

From what I can decipher, the show goes a little like this: a very merry young Oriental man in a kilt (but with knickers on) is about to marry an equally merry girl with particularly strong calves, when the wedding ring is stolen by a winged fairy in a white dress, who ‘flies’ across the stage on wires a number of times before falling a few metres and letting out a pained yelp (this may or may not be part of the show).

Suddenly they are all in what looks to be a very forbidding forest, surrounded by the head witch and her minions, all of whom have either very good posture for witches and minions, or else very bad posture for ballet dancers.

And that is pretty much the crux of it. After that we go home and order BLTs from room service for fifty cents a pop.

The French delegation has hired out the ballroom in a swanky hotel for a swanky, invite-only soiree, and is making everyone who’s anyone in Guangzhou as well as assorted hangers-on (clearly the category I fall into) dress up, eats lots of free food and drink champagne.

Now, though the Germans traditionally have never been friendly with the French, this is not something I’m about to knock back. I figure since I’m just a German delegation hanger-on – an Australian one, at that – and we’re on the (relatively) neutral soil of the Chinese, we might just be able to get away with it.

So we all pile into the waiting car; and what I’m about to discover is that there’s nothing more corrupting than being chauffeur-driven in an armour-plated Mercedes with a national flag fixed to the front (and so what if it’s not your own?) – people step out of your way (something that doesn’t happen a lot here) and strain to see in the windows, and security guards wave you through without so much as lifting their machine guns. I could get used to this.

The reception is very pleasant in an uppity sort of way, though I couldn’t understand a word of the speeches. When we pull up James, the driver (whose name is actually Mr Quang, but it’s all part of the fantasy), opens my door and then we all shuffle up a red carpet to the hotel entrance where waiters are handing out glasses of coke and fanta, which I don’t take on account of wanting to keep both hands free for the champers.

There is a massive ice sculpture in the shape of the French statue of liberty, and the chandeliers in the ballroom would have literally taken up my entire apartment. I eat enough seafood to feed a small third world country, which I’m not proud of, but which I forget about entirely when we get back into the beflagged car to be escorted to the Guangzhou ballet…

1. Woke up this morning in a bed wide enough to sleep three Chinese families and assorted cattle, in a bedroom so big you have to shout across it.

A quick peep out the window – floor-to-ceiling, mind you – revealed a terrace above us and pool below surrounded by stone lions and lazy chairs. Wilken’s old man being, very conveniently for us as it turns out, the German general-consul in Guangzhou, China, we are staying in a monstrous, luxury compound complete with aforementioned stone lions, cavernous foyer, huge iron gates and flagpole with Germany’s black, red and yellow stripes big enough to use as curtains. For very big windows. There are water coolers in every room – I’ve yet to count all of them – and massive, ornate-looking carpets, though I’ve got a mind to point out that rugs usually live on the floor.

Breakfast (which is actually lunch, because we’ve slept in and will blame it on jet lag arrives by way of delivery man on bicycle from the nearby clubhouse, which is right by the gym, which is right by the pool – the other pool – which is right by the tennis court, so I’m told.

Afterwards, Wilken hauls out a folder thick with business cards, which will be our tokens to getting around for the next two weeks as few people can say more than “you buy, vely nie” in English. Taxis are so cheap (no more than a few bucks for five hundred laps of the city) that we don’t plan to try our hands at public transport. Unadventurous perhaps, but as I discovered last night, riding in a taxi here is electrifying enough.

About to head off Upover (if anyone has a better one-worder for leaving Downunder, please contact me urgently) so thought one last tribute to its (not so) world-famous landmarks is in order. Wait a second…are you telling me the Taj Mahal is NOT in Sydney? Melbourne’s NOT the City of Love? And it’s NOT called the Leaning Tower of Perth? Give over…