September 10

Overnight, fall has come to Chengdu.

With the overcast skies a cool breeze blows around the city and it's just the knd that will be picking up brown leaves in a few weeks. Raindrops fall randomly and individually or in sets of three or four. The humidity is gone and last night in the dark street outside my friend's apartment I thrilled as i caught the scent of Barcelona as it rose from the pavement.

Maybe busy, happy cities rest at night when the roads are abandoned to dreams and the people stop walking and shouting. In the cool of autumn, in the quiet of the very early morning, maybe these festive, restive cities exhale the same fragrance which is half sickening and half sublime.

Chengdu is an unexpectedly enjoyable city that's kept us in her sway for 10 days; much longer than the quick stopover we'd planned. About 4 million people call Chengdu home.

If it's true that geography is destiny then Chengdu was fated to be a varied, relaxing and artistic city bursting with life. It's the last outpost before the steep Tibetan plateau takes over and the white sheet of the Himalayas tooth their silent way upwards, ensuring civilization must give up its relentless project at their gates.

Who can pass by that grand iciness without trembling? Everyone knows that land is where God says a mighty "No" to all but the hardiest, because She's busy there working; dreaming new continents, weaving her webs. The Himalayas are not to be disturbed.

At the extreme east of Sichuan lies one of the most fertile plains in all of China. Sichuan is home to 80 rivers, 7 minority groups, and countless mountains holding everything from Panda bears to rare azaleas and Tibetan macaques. It has cloud forest and semi-tropical gorges. It has rivers tamed 1300 years ago by monks who carved a huge red cliff face into the world's largest image of Buddha.

The countryside is green and healthy from the generosity of Sichuan's earth and sky. Here, even in the rush of city life, there's a certain serenity and content that's part of the tea house and mahjong culture, the cause or effect of trees and parks and rivers that define the space here. It's somehow wrapped up in the operahouses dotting the city where actors wear exquisite embroidered silk costumes and the most elaborate masks and headdresses, and they tell ancient stories to young and old as well as entertaining with comedy and amazing acrobatic and magic feats.

The Chinese say don't come to Sichuan when you're young, because you'll never want to leave. Maybe this was just an enticing rumor spread by a depopulated province, but more likely it's a proven, time-tested effect brought on by the gentle and lovely pace of life here.

Sichuan, more than any place we've been yet, has seemed like an opium dream. Things are just so nice here, why should we leave? It has trees wrapped with vines that grow moist roots out of their branches. We could easily stand here too, for a hundred years or so, by the river or at a mahjong table, in a gazebo in people's park, and i suspect we'd sprout some nubbly little roots too from our elbows and necks.

Sichuan is the size of France and it has food as spicy as Mexico. There's no end to its potholed roads through lost villages where people wear yak skin coats and blow strange horns. No end to the changes of its clouds over the mountains. It seems Sichuan has no end in time or space.

Maybe we stumbled into a hole somewhere and here we are at the bottom of the world- or was it the top of heaven? We'd love to stay in Sichuan because we're young and she's tempting. She has a lovely climate and fleets of bicycle rickshas to take you gently around the city. She's got her own wild monkeys. And wouldn't we like to know Tibetans? Meet the Quiang? See Moxi religious services, learn the Yi language and what it is they love?

Each bend in the river, each mountain valley is a new world.