Where in the world is John Henzell?

“Roll on Ramadan.”

That was the status update of my friend Geraldine here in the Dhabs.

“Um, why?” I asked.

“Ramadan = opportunity for civilised conversation in bars, visiting friends in their homes, cooking, dinner parties, house parties and more quality time with quality people,” she replied. “The glass doth overflow.”

When I arrived in the Dhabs last year on the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim month of daylight fasting was seen by those around me (at that time, almost exclusively the journos at work) as a burden to be endured.

Nearly a year later,* I’m far less convinced.

The few locals with whom I’m in contact seemed to be actively looking forward to it because the fasting is only one tiny part of what is a month focussed on spending time with family and loved ones. All over Abu Dhabi, tents to host iftar — the meal after sunset to break the fast — have been popping up outside houses.

One of my jobs this week was to track down Emiratis living overseas to see how they were observing Ramadan.

In the process of talking to people ranging from doctors to amassadors to students, and located in London, Brisbane, Montreal, Kentucky and elsewhere, the overwhelming feeling that having Ramadan away from the UAE was a little like us being away from family at Christmas.

And, as hinted at by Geraldine’s status update, the expat community celebrated and even looked forward in their own way to the month popularly known as Ramadamadingdong.

Usually the TAIT (the less-than-PC local equivalent of TGIF, based on Islam and the Fri-Sat weekends here) crowd depicted above needed to only loosely connect to work out which expat watering hole they’d be attending.

In Ramadan, it required greater planning because anything during the day had to held at someone’s home and there was jockeying to ensure that there would be an event (or two) on each weekend.

On the weekend before the projected start of Ramadan (determined by the actual sighting of the new moon, so everyone hopes there isn’t a shamal coming in from Iraq for a week) there was, of course, the Last Brunch Before Ramadan.

On the night before the expected announcement, I was drinking American beer with the Marines at the US embassy in the Dhabs.

At the exact moment the cleric spotted the crescent moon in the sky and declared the start of Ramadan, I was drinking beer at a table beside the water in Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai.

(Ironically enough, the day was deeply connected with Antarctica because after 10 years of correspondence and countless provision of information the United States Antarctic Program would rather have remained secret, I finally managed to meet with Nick Johnson, author of Big Dead Place, as he was on his way back to Afghanistan.)

As I drove back through Dubai towards the Dhabs, the road signs all said: “Ramadan mubarak”. A blessed Ramadan.

On the first day, I was at what my friends had dubbed a haramadan party, being a mix of haram (forbidden) and Ramadan because we were eating bacon sangers, drinking beer and watching a crucial rugby game between the Wallabies and the All Blacks in mid-afternoon.

Ahead there’s a school disco party at someone’s villa, a night of Abu Dhabi’s Got Talent at someone else’s house, and no doubt more haramadan afternoons as the rest of the Tri-nations is completed.

In a way, it hints at what life is like in Saudi, where the restrictions are far greater but the sense of community is proportionately stronger as a consequence. Then, after a month, it’ll be back to normal again.

* Ramadan occurs 10 days earlier each year because it operates on the lunar cycle rather than the solar one. My “abuversary” — as marking your first year in the Dhabs is known — isn’t till next week.

When I first arrived in the Dhabs, just under a year ago, I was amazed by the glut of expensive late-model cars that were abandoned on the streets.

All the BMWs, Mercedes, Range Rovers and a host of lesser marques coated in dust seemed to reinforce the wanton excess that everyone attributed to the richest city in the world.

After a summer in the Gulf, I now know better.

Part of it is discovering that it only takes one summertime shamal, the nor’west wind that redeposits the sand and dust of Iraq across the UAE, to make the cars look like they’d been sitting there since Miss Havisham’s wedding.

But more importantly it reflects that anyone who can escape the summer heat does so, and they leave their cars parked on the street until they return, sometime on the far side of ramadan.

And if I had more wasta, I’d be one of them.

“See this!” the English woman said, turning to show where the back of her shorts bore a muddy and obviously simian handprint. “We got attacked by the monkeys.”

It’s not every day that a complete stranger shows me their rear end, but reaching the summit of Emei Shan in southern China meant we had all run the gauntlet of marauding monkeys and it seemed familiarity grew from experiencing this fellowship of primate aggression.

Note that the sign omits reference to interspecies niceness to people…

At least we could take consolation in the knowledge that in grappling with the monkeys (actually Tibetan macaques) we joined a fellowship with a long and impressive history.

Pilgrims had been coming to this steep and thickly-forested mountain ever since the first temple was built on the 3,077m main summit about 2,000 years ago. That first temple was Taoist, but the affiliation changed to Buddhist after a few hundred years.

And at some point, Emei Shan’s macaques had also changed affiliation, from gathering food in the forest to realising it was easier to get it by robbing the pilgrims.

The Chinese national park authority does its best to educate hikers. “If you come across some terrible monkeys in the way for food,” one of its signs advises, “don’t scream or run away. You are suggested to hold a rock in your hand and walk away from the monkeys with other travelling companies in a group calmly.”

The modern horror stories included people who had not only lost their lunches but sometimes also their cameras, wallets and passports. Despite all this, the English woman said that as she and her friends set off on the two-day hiking route to the summit, she could not help harbouring warm and fuzzily anthropomorphic views about monkeys.

That attitude lasted for about an hour, until the moment when her pack seemed to suddenly double in weight. “This monkey jumped on my back and tried to open my pack,” she said, her voice still thick with incredulity.

Her boyfriend managed to scare it off by wielding the bamboo walking stick which the hotels at the base of the mountain provide for that purpose.

By then other monkeys had attacked the third member of their group, who had his glasses snatched from his head but was fortunate that the monkey was on a relatively accessible piece of ground when it abandoned them. They then spent the rest of their two days in the forest in a heightened state of what we dubbed monkeynoia.

Listening to their tale, it slowly dawned on me that there might be rather less randomness behind Emei Shan also being one of the spiritual homes of the martial arts known in the West as kung fu, though the Chinese prefer the term wushu.

Some pilgrims abided by the Buddhist exortation to leave behind earthly suffering by hiring sedan chairs, a form of transport I thought only existed in history books.

Was it coincidence, I wondered, that close to the start of the hiking route was the famous Crouching Tiger monastery, one of the birthplaces of the martial arts in China?

Even without the marauding macaques, hiking up Emei Shan is a strenuous undertaking. This is the tallest of the four sacred Buddhist mountains and the longest route involves nearly 3,000m of ascent, which makes it roughly equal to walking Burj Dubai four times.

My own schedule was too short to walk up, which provided a face-saving excuse to cover lack of fitness from living in pancake-flat Abu Dhabi. So, like most of those who undertake the pilgrimage to the summit, I took the bus for 90 per cent of the way and pledged to salvage some hiking credibility by walking down.

I soon discovered that taking the bus did little to diminish the prospect of starring in a personal performance of Crouching Tiger, Thieving Monkey because macaques had worked out that the final part of the ascent after the end of the road provided the easiest source of food on the mountain.

They even seemed to know what time was the peak hour for pilgrims and tourists.

At first, my impressions were of the much cooler temperature than at the base of the mountain and of the atmospheric way the mist swirled through the lush green forests of pine and broadleaf trees.

But then as I walked along the wide stone pathway towards the summit, I encountered a crowd of people oohing and aahing at the sight of the first macaque, a young male. One woman threw it a peanut and immediately after the oohs and aahs turned to screams when the macaque that had been offered the desultory single nut suddenly charged her, prompting her to dump her bag of peanuts and flee.

Another shriek followed as a man who had been watching this spectacle suddenly had the water bottle ripped from his hand by a monkey who snuck up from behind. Within seconds, it had unscrewed the cap and downed the contents.

With the terrible monkeys two-nil up, I headed on towards the Golden Summit temple. This was actually a network of newly-renovated temples and monastery buildings built in the traditional Chinese style with sweeping rooflines and intricate ornamentation, centred around a massive all-seeing ten-faced golden Buddha.

Ideally I would have soaked up the two millennia of history here but as soon as I arrived, I encountered the Englishwoman.

Soon I had not only heard about her macaque encounter but had been shown the muddy simian handprint she proffered as evidence, leaving me suffering from a heightened state of contagious monkeynoia when I set off down the mountain.

As I retraced my steps past the scene of the peanut robbery, it was with constant vigilance for predatory primates instead of enjoying the beautiful mountainous terrain and dripping temperate forests. But as soon as I left the road behind and began the mood of the mountain seemed to change.

In reality, of course, it was the same mountain but without the static caused by the throngs of tourists. And because few people choose to walk up or down the mountain, there were correspondingly fewer monkeys around. Scaling back the level of caution allowed me to spend more time looking around at what was some of the finest mountain scenery had I seen in a long time.

The rainy season had left the dense forest a lush shade of green and the waterfalls were in full flow as the trail threaded a route along ridgelines, below lines of cliffs and along steep-sided mountain gorges.

The trail itself was one of the most impressive I’d seen, comprised of thousands of blocks of stone hauled into place to create a giant staircase. To anyone coming up the mountain, it must have been like being on the StairMaster of death, albeit one set amid impressive alpine scenery.

Even going down was arduous. Such thoughts, however, were put in proper context by the stoic locals who passed me by on their way up; the women often in heels and some seemingly of considerable age.

Every 10 or 15 minutes, a small shelter would appear where an enterprising local was selling anything the hiker might require, from cold water or a bowl of steaming noodles.

Every couple of hours, I’d encounter a serene moss-covered monastery in the mist, offering basic accommodation.

The only monkeys I encountered were around these little centres of population but they proved to be relatively easy to dissuade. A few times I would catch sight of one following me but they preferred to attack from behind without warning and if I turned around the stared them down, they would back off.

Seven hours after leaving the summit of Emei Shan, I emerged from the forest with my knees screaming in pain and my quads and calves having turned to jelly, but feeling strangely proud at not having been mugged by a macaque.

When it comes to charismatic megafauna, pandas are the undisputed rock stars of the endangered animal world.

So when I found out that there was a panda research and breeding station just outside the Sichuan town of Chengdu, I had to have a look.

Pandas, I quickly concluded after watching the yearlings play, seem to possess a collective IQ only slightly higher than the bamboo they eat.

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising since these are creatures that have not been blessed by evolution. The current theory is that they are former carnivores who have attempted to adapt to a vegetarian bamboo diet, with only moderate success.

Worse still is they live in a place where every dozen years or so the bamboo thickets die off and they have to find a new one or starve to death.

But what they lack in brains and adaptability, they make up for in cuteness, which in terms of both wildlife fundraising and diplomatic purposes is probably the most favourable adaptation of all.

A little to the left, a little more…. Yes! That’s exactly where the itch is!!

The young pandas showed a natural skill for dumbassery. (The older ones just slept all the time)

I swear if you ran up to these and cut off the head, you’d find an eight-year-old Jack Black inside.

Everyone needs a snuggle every now and then…

(That was the anthropomorphic caption. The reality is these two are actually fighting over being the highest one on the tower)

This would explain why I couldn’t get a pandaburger at my hotel in Chengdu…

A “Red Panda”. I’m sorry but that’s only a panda designated by the marketing department rather than on biological taxonomy.

The real question is whether ginga pandas get teased and pilloried the way their human equivalents do?

In Chengdu shops, there was no question about what was the main drawcard for tourists…

It was like being in Zermatt and trying to find a postcard that didn’t have the Matterhorn on it.

Chengdu was a nice town, notwithstanding the Epic Fail of whoever designed the backdrop to the (Dy)Nasty hotel as seen when approached on the road from the airport…

Red is the colour that represents good fortune in China, which explains its prevalence.

Every restaurant and bar would have a ton of red lanterns outside.

In Chengdu, they’d created an fake old street and lined it with restaurants and bars for people to wander along in the evenings. There was even — shudder — a Starbucks…

Anywhere picturesque in China becomes a backdrop for young men to take posed pictures of their girlfriends.

On a warm* summer’s evening, promenading was the thing to do.

(* That’s warm, but not Abu- Dhabi- warm, thankfully)

On the road out of Chengdu was Leshan, the home of the world’s biggest Buddha.

After being in the UAE, home of the world’s biggest building/ mall/ aquarium/ pile of sand etc etc, the thrall of big stuff was a little muted but I figured it was worth having a look.

So, how big was it? Well, this was the Buddha’s toe…

And the “ants” just on the far side of the forehead are people.

It was a really, seriously big-ass Buddha.

Although the local name for it was Dofa . “Do” means big, and “fa” means Buddha — the Chinese are a bunch of experimental poets — so I guess that meant it was really a do-ass-fa.

Ozymandias could have learned some lessons from the 7th Century Chinese, who created this over the space of 115 years to calm the waters of the river at its foot and make it safer for the local boatmen.

One theory is that the waters were calmed by the presence of the B.A.B, or D.A.F. A mythbusting rival theory is that all the rubble dug away to create it was responsible.

This is the access path, which they call the “Cliff Road”.

The people who carved the BAB would have had to negotiate these steps, except there would not have ben any railings or safety considerations.

Only a little way to the north of Beijing were the Rampaging Mongol Hordes, which was why a succession of Chinese emperors starting in the fifth century decided to build what would become the Great Wall of China.

It eventually spanned 6400km from the sea far into the deserts of central Asia, but what was once a barrier of the rampaging hordes has now become a destination, although in this case the hordes are tourists rather than Rampaging Mongols.

And, even though a year in the Dhabs had left me with a physique suitable only for tackling the Great Mall of China, I booked a trip to hike along 10km from Jinshanling to Simatai north of Beijing.

This was on the side of our bus as we headed from Beijing to the Great Wall.

Presumably it out-trumps a Lonely Planet recommendation but I found it difficult to take much comfort from it.

Our progress was stymied when a truck broke an axle while driving on — of course — the wrong side of the road.

There’s no Chinese equivalent of the AA so the guys on board just headed off, found a new axle then fixed it in situ. It was very impressive to watch.

In the Chinese way, traffic coming towards us responded to the situation by taking up both lanes and creating total gridlock.

A group of Belgians on board decided to become traffic directors in a Western bid to impose order, often by standing in the path of the vehicle and yelling.

I think it’s fair to say that middle aged Chinese truck drivers didn’t seem to much enjoy being directed by young Belgian women…

But it all worth it when we got to Jinshanling and then began the 10km route along one of the more rollercoasterish bits of the wall.

There are other restored bits of the wall that were closer to Beijing so that this bit was nice but not overrun with people.

Our hike followed the crest of the ridge to the valley just in front of that furthest hill.

Mongol hordes on the right, civilised Chinese on the left.

I wasn’t joking about the Great Mall of China physiological suitability that comes from living 90 minutes drive from the nearest hill. This kicked my ass!

But there were enterprising Chinese every 10 minutes offering cold water, Coca Cola, beer, books, T-shirts and even, in this case, Moet for Y500 (about NZ$120/US$80).

I’d stagger into one of the watchtowers then sit and regain my breath to a chorus of “Waaaater, Coka, beeeeeeeeeeer?”

Most of the wall in this area was in pretty good shape. Other parts had been plundered for the stone by the locals.

And, as the pic on the left shows, it became seriously steep in parts.

Or, as an American I was near at the time put it: “You have GOT to be freaking kiddin’ me!” Fortunately they’d repaired the stairs to make it safe.

Overall verdict: Not just a good wall, a great wall.

Ramadan — and with it my first anniversary of landing in the Dhabs — was looming, so I booked 10 days off, chatted to the travel editor about where to go and ended up going to China.

The wonderfulness that is Etihad put me in business class, which is always an enjoyable experience.

I wonder, though, if the cattle class people know that the business class folks are given travel details that actually include reference to the former as “common”?

And the following morning, I woke up in China.

I was staying in a Hutong, one of the old alleyway communities created in inner Beijing from the ruins after Genghis Khan sacked and burned the city. The location put me walking distance from the Forbidden City.

I wandered down to one of the public parts of the Forbidden City and found the Chinese troops practising their drills with a scary precision.

Not sure why but once again, I found my holiday was accompanied by Kalashnikovs, or AK47 assault rifles.

It wasn’t like this when I was in cadets…

But they’d clearly been practising for a while and the drill sergeant (or whatever the People’s Liberation Army equivalent is) constantly checked for straight lines and correct positions.

The light was flat and the atmosphere was hazy in summertime Beijing, making photography difficult.

But all that changed when dusk came around and those conditions provided an almost luminescent quality to the light when I wandered down to the Tiananmen Square entrance to the Imperial Palace.

Beijing was full of non-Beijing Chinese on their summer holidays to the capital.

The thing to do was to get your photo taken in front of the Tiananmen Gate of the Imperial City, which is the outer bit of the Forbidden City.

I’m pretty sure, all 1.3 billion Chinese were trying to do it while I was there.

The great helmsman still looks down onto the square 33 years after his death and just over 20 years since the student protests were brutally put down by the People’s Liberation Army.

I was there shortly after the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and security was tight, with everything having to be scanned before entering the square.

This was near the place where the iconic “Tank man” photo depicted an unknown Chinese man stopping a line of tanks by standing in front of them.

Then people would wander around on a warm* summer’s night.

(* Not Abu Dhabi warm but warm.)

And even just a few metres from the centre of Beijing, there were places of quiet and calm.

And it provided for more beautiful views of the Forbidden City.

It rained. (Making up for my Epic Fail the previous weekend at being a rain tourist in Salalah)

Of course, I immediately walked out into it to enjoy the only rain I’ll probably experience until next year.

Everyone thought I was nuts.

Beijing is as flat as a pancake but at the whim of one of the Ming rulers, they created this 45m artificial hill just to the north of the Forbidden City using the material dug out to create the Forbidden City’s moats.

Even on a wet weekday, the crowds were piling into the Forbidden City.

Once again the thing to do was to get your photo taken in front of the Forbidden City.

Some enterprising Chinese had created a costume hire system at the temple on top of the hill so people could dress up like their Ming and Qing ancestors for the occasion.

The last emperor.

I headed on again to the night market, a street set aside for food kiosks.

A friend in the Dhabs asked if I was going to be eating sweet and sour snake. No, Sue, just barbecued.

This was a fairly touristy market, with prices and clientele to match.

Any kind of preposterous insect or animal part — scorpions, as shown here, or centipedes, snakes and sheep penises — would be skewered and cooked.

I’d been told the scorpions are just for the tourists rather than a traditional Beijing snack, but nobody seemed to have given this kid the memo.

And really, how much meat is there on a seahorse?

I headed back to the Forbidden City with an aim to go inside this time.

I was dismayed to find that if you enter the Forbidden City through the Gate of Divine Prowess, bypass the Hall of Earthly Peace and then the Palace of Heavenly Beauty before veering left just before the Hall of Protective Harmony, you’ll find a Starbucks.

Really, a Starbucks!

Well, you would have. Popular dissent before the Olympics was loud enough that the company’s licence was not renewed. Now there’s a no-name coffee place there.

In a rare attack of common sense, I employed a guide to show me around.

This was Tina, one of the small army of industrious Chinese who spruik for guiding work to help make ends meet due to the fewer tourists caused by the global economic meltdown.

Over two hours, she helped flesh out a lot of the little details about the Forbidden City.

“Can you tell which dragon is male and which is female?” she asked me, prompting from me a furtive but unilluminating glance towards their nether regions.

“The male has the ball or the pearl, which represents power,” Tina explained.

“And the female has the child and is in charge of looking after it.”

The way this dragoness was looking after its child would get it arrested in New Zealand.

Like the Riviera or Yosemite valley, the Forbidden City is a victim of its own loveliness and there was a massive crowd of people — mostly domestic Chinese tourists — which eroded the pleasure of the experience.

Between New Zealand and the UAE, I’d forgotten the different attitude to personal space in Asia!

There were a series of throne rooms for varying occasions and favoured differently by the 24 emperors for whom the Forbidden City was home between 1420 and 1912.

There were supposedly 9,999 rooms in the city, intentionally one short of the 10,000 rooms said to be in the kingdom of heaven.

In reality, though, there are only about 8700 rooms in the Forbidden City.

The Ming and Qing dynasties had hundreds of huge urns installed around the Forbidden City and kept topped with water in case of fire.

The Qing ones had the more ornate handles.

Another throne. Another battle through 100 other tourists to see a mostly empty and dusty room giving little evocation of previous glories.

Plenty of photogenic kids around, though.

Another throne. I’d lost count by this point and the crush of people continued even when an afternoon thunderstorm rolled through.

The imperial gardens, at the northern end of the Forbidden City, had four pavilions for the four seasons. This one below was the winter one.

While sheltering from the storm, these two university students started chatting with me.

That’s not especially uncommon here but usually it’s a prelude to an invitation to go for a tea house and end up paying hundreds of dollars in a scam involving overpriced tea. I must have been approached 10 times in my few days in Beijing, and always by women acting in pairs and claiming to be students on holiday who wanted to practice their English, as this pair did.

Travel is always a balance between Pollyanna-style optimism and wary cynicism. With one, you face getting ripped off occasionally and the other you risk missing out of genuine friendliness.

And just as I was beginning to wonder when I was going to be invited for a cup of tea, it became clear that these two were genuine.

I was staying about 30m from this lake, where people would fish 24/7.

Then I moved to a new hotel next to the Summer Palace, on the outskirts of Beijing.

The benevolent folks at the travel desk at The National were good enough to line me up a hotel review.

And not just any hotel but the Aman at Summer Palace, a seriously high-end hotel which had just opened. There is good and there is Oh My God good, and this hotel was the latter.

The bedroom kinda passed muster. And the bathroom was nearly the size of my whole flat in Abu Dhabi.

There was a few scant facilities to while away the hours.

Such as the spa, where I had a 90-minute Chinese massage by a young man with Thumbs Of Death.

The hotel was based on old soldiers and officers’ quarters attached to the Summer Palace.

But the real beauty was this gate in the wall of the Summer Palace, providing access at any time of the day or night.

(And yes, the sky really was green. This was just before one of Beijing’s afternoon thunderstorms)

The Summer Palace’s current level of luxury dates from the Dragon Woman, a concubine called Cixi who ended up having more power than the Emperor and is rumoured to have murdered most of her adversaries. She rebuilt the Summer Palace in the late 1800s, using money that was supposed to go to equiping the Chinese Navy.

As with the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace suffered from its overpopularity and thronged with people to the detriment of enjoying it. (Notwithstanding even more cute kids)

But with the hotel’s private gate, you could go in and out at any time, including after the park had closed so you could have it to yourself.

So in the morning, I arranged an early morning wake-up call, used the gate to enter the park before it opened and when there were the locals doing their calisthenics and tai chi.

I don’t know if this guy was 80 or maybe much younger but showing the toll of a difficult life. But he had more suppleness and litheness than I will ever have.

On my final morning, it was on to Panjiayuan Market, the former ghost market where dodgy stuff was sold by the populace of Beijing.

This is less than 10% of the space of the market.

It was remarkably untouristy and fewer than one in 20 or so faces were white.

But there were the occasional bits of Mao kitsch which seemed aimed as us Gwailo, or long noses.

But I was in search of a buddha.

The locals were very talented at creating fake antiques but the uniformity of the look gave it away.

This one caught my eye and stood about 40cm high.

As I’d wandered around earlier, I’d seen the vendor just sell another Buddha to a local, who I asked how much he’d paid for it. I was told Y350 — about US$50 — but the real value was that the vendor and I both then knew I knew the correct prices.

So we negotiated for about two hours in the Asian manner, which was to spend about 1% of the time actually talking price and 99% talking about other things.

But at the end he wouldn’t budge from his fairly extortionate price — about US$400 — and I had to walk away.

Then found another Buddha almost as nice nearby and bought that for a quarter of what he was charging.

Then it was on to the airport and the unique experience that is a Kenny Rogers themed restaurant.

And finally the exemplary Boeing 777 business class, with seats that recline flat, to take me back to the Dhabs.

I had a few more adventures in my 10 days in China, which I’ll drip feed over the next week or so.

You will be able (when I finally load it) to read about my Great Wall hike here, my Double Epic Fail as an eclipse tourist here, and my encounters with pandas here.