Letter 14: Guangzhou, 13 December

Dear Puck,

As you can see, we arrived in Canton earlier than planned. In Hangzhou it kept raining harder and harder, and the mist got so thick that we could hardly see the beautiful surroundings any more. So we decided to cut our stay short, which meant extra administrative fees, but anything would be better than to waste our precious days in China moping around in a hotel. So we spent the last day (10 December) visiting monuments glistening with rain and packing.

At 11 o’clock in the evening (the dead of night, by Chinese standards), we boarded the train. Despite the draughtiness of the old carriage, the journey went well: 36 hours, thus roughly the journey from Amsterdam to Rome! The two of us usually have a compartment to ourselves, but this time the train was so full that we had company. Our fellow passenger was a railway engineer, a decent man who had previously studied in the US and Hamburg. We whiled away the time with conversation. Gradually the climate improved; after the second night, the landscape became practically tropical: palm trees, bougainvillaea, papayas, and above all, sun. In Canton it's between 15 and 30 degrees during the day, just on the nice side but certainly not hot. I had expected the temperature to be different! Hong Kong is three hours by train from here, so it won't be warmer there. When you go out in the evening, you definitely need a warm sweater. We are staying in a large hotel on the Pearl River, on the 10th floor with a lovely view out over the city. To my great joy, I got a letter from you right away, dated 26 November (the post takes so dreadfully long!). You write about how busy the town was for St Nicholas, while for me, St Nicholas (which we didn't celebrate, of course) is already a distant memory – let alone for you when you get this letter.