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…

The Rocks stand as testament to Australia’s colonial heritage, minus the rats and general slumminess of the old days. Today, the suburb on the foreshore of Sydney Harbour is altogether swanky but with a still colonial flavour, preserved in the sandstone, slightly European-feel architecture that’s now thoughtfully potted with local trees.

Famous Aussie author Bryce Courtenay writes of the 18^th and 19^th century Rocks as swimming with rats, disease, hookers and drunkenness (well, that last bit hasn’t changed), and it makes me wonder whether the convicts and scoundrels that reputedly frequented the place had any idea how upscale and ritzy it would become.

Momentarily I give in to my self-destructive side and allow myself a torturous peek into a real estate agent to see how much a shoebox unit goes for in the Rocks these days. No less than $700,000 a pop, it seems.

For those of us not (yet) on this sort of payscale, there are other options. Like going to local restaurants with BYO grog and just ordering an entrée, which I’ll admit I’ve been know to do. Or throwing about a few spirited lines in favour of the fatherland amongst the German bar staff of the traditional Bavarian Löwenbräu, which often brings about a few free pints to chug back.

Alternatively, there’s the 24-hour Pancake Place that, well, operates 24 hours. This fact brings joy to many a late-night (or indeed, early-morning) reveler in the Rocks who can’t resist a chocolate stack as a sweet and swish alternative to the usual dirty 3am kebab.

During daylight hours, the Rocks is still well worth a visit for its spectacular views of Sydney harbour.

Today, there’s a mammoth cruise liner parked alongside the restaurant row, and the opera house is a stone’s throw (granted, a feat best reserved for someone with a good arm) across the water.

If you walk around the Park Hyatt (swallowing rivets of envy as you skirt a smug-looking pair having their wedding shots down there) there’s a trim little park where travelers sunbake and couples take picnics, and you can all but touch the harbour bridge. If you were freakishly tall. Like, fifty metres tall. Still, it’s beautiful.

Ok, so last post I was on about Darling Harbour. One thing I didn’t mention is that it was also a key location of the APEC summit in late 2007 – yes, that major world economics conference at which George Bush added to his collection of highly embarrassing and internationally televised gaffes, such as calling it the OPEC summit in front of, well, lots and lots of people.

But what you may not have caught on international telly – ok, unless you happen to watch CNN, in which case you would have seen reruns approximately every four minutes for a week – was this very special guest appearance by Osama bin Laden. Amidst “the tightest security this country’s ever seen…”

Darling Harbour is a vast watery precinct west of the city centre, named after Ralph Darling (a colonial Lieutenant-General who can’t have been too pleased about his girly name).

During the Great Depression the eastern promenade was known as the Hungry Mile on account of the dock workers wandering about looking for work on the wharves.

It’s this section that the pollies are now pushing to be called Barangaroo after a state-wide naming competition, in which contestants were evidently competing to come up with the silliest word that can feasibly be passed off as indigenous.

Keeping with the theme of second-rate fame, it’s also the location for MTV’s The Real World: Sydney, which I’m proud to say I’m no longer seventeen-year-old enough to have seen. And the interiors from Home and Away, which I do see constantly but only against my will since Dutch TV reveres it almost as much as McLeod’s Daughters, are done in the nearby Channel Seven studios.

Also, for the astute filmgoers amongst you, Darling Harbour also enjoys a fleeting flyover in the Power Rangers movie.

More importantly, it is a peachy spot to spend a sunny afternoon, as 20 million Aussies and half a billion tourists do day after day, including, naturally, today, and with a vengeance at that.

The eastern promenade is now packed with upmarket restaurants (these days, hungry dock workers would be hurriedly moved along by bouncers if not cops if they dared set foot here) and the western side is home to the oh-so-touristy opal gift stores. If you’re lucky, you can catch the odd open-air concert in the harbourside area to the south: Polish folk music or tambourinists from Burkhina Faso. Perhaps the occasional hungry dock worker in brown paint playing a didgeridoo.

This evening we head to Fox Studios, home of film sets and red carpet movie premieres in Sydney. We’ve booked tickets to the Comedy Club, though we’re not amused by the fact that they don’t do on-the-spot student discounts. Should have indicated so when you booked, they tell us, though their online form was conspicuously lacking in student options. Sneaky, that.

In any event, keeping with the theme of Sydney’s beachside suburbs, the first act is a suntanned blond from Bondi, though he’s quick to point out he’s down from Brisbane. His whole set, in fact, is based around bitching about the Bondi beach folk. He’s had a gutful of eco this and bio that, he tells us – “there’s nothing artifical there except for the people.”

Granted, though, he admits that an event like the race riots that rocked the southern suburb of Cronulla a few years ago could never happen in Bondi. “Can you imagine five guys from Lebanon – sorry, Lakemba – piling into their Skyline to brave the traffic to Bondi? ‘Aw man, what toime this riot start anyway, we gonna be late…Oh moi god, man, parking’s foive bucks an hour, how long’s this riot gonna last anyway?’” They’d have to park in Vaucluse, our comic says, three suburbs over, and by the time they got to the beach they wouldn’t be able to find any Aussies there to beat up anyway, on account of Bondi being the hub of the backpacker trail.

This guy’s a riot, so to speak, but sadly the next act is slightly more ordinary and so on progressively through the night until the aging headliner comes on and bores everyone to tears for 45 minutes with his lame attempts to show us how cool he is by cracking lots of weed jokes.