The T5 is the twice-weekly express train that goes all the way from Beijing (up north) through Guilin (where we hopped aboard) to Hanoi (where we'll get off and I'll have to learn how to say "yes", "no", "thank you", "beer", and "rice" all over again). Right now we're coasting along through fields of rice and sugar cane, heading towards Friendship Pass at the Vietnam border. I've got the sun on my face and REM on the headphones. This is a lovely way to bid China a heartfelt "Goodbye".

China, you surprised me.

Who'd have thought you could be both so modern and so ancient?

Who'd have thought you could be so friendly and so annoying?

Who'd have thought you could offer such wide open, beautiful landscape?

All around me, every day, were the exact snapshots I expected to see. Old men in blue shirts. Bicycles heaped with vegetables. Rice paddies. Crowded back alleys. Stinking toilets and filth. Towering displays of past empires. Chickens on buses.

Yet pan left from that old man and there's a young man on a cell phone. Next to that bicycle is a shiny black Mercedes.

I now realize just how big you are. We didn't even see the deserts of the west, the mountains of Tibet, or the gleaming future scape of Shanghai. We nibbled at a few morsels here and there -- the appetizer special -- and it left us wanting more.

You gave us everything we wanted out of our round the world trip. There was the stuff I didn't have time to write about, like Lijiang, the city so quaint and perfect I kept expecting to pull aside a curtain hiding a roomful of Disney engineers flipping switches. Or the time those teenage girls taught Sarah Chinese line dancing in the pagoda on top of the hill. The experiences we packed into these 5 weeks feel like a couple of years.

I kept expecting you to be big and bad and scary, to battle us every step of the way. You might be a little rough around the edges, but big, bad, and scary you are not. More often, it was my own biases and expectations that got in the way of seeing your true nature.

I keep thinking of an episode that happened at the end of our Tiger Leaping Gorge trek. Maybe it says something about China. Or maybe it says something about America, I'm not sure.

We were descending out of the gorge, dropping from the steep mountains into more populated hillside farmland. We came around a bend and there, on the hillside, was a young man sitting and smoking a pipe. His tattered shirt was unbuttoned, a gold tooth glinted in the sun, and next to him lay a bundle of rough rope and a metal sickle. No handle, just a sharp, curved blade.

We passed him with a nod, and he suddenly stood up and started to follow us, 15 feet back. We were nervous. It was just the three of us there, all alone, and our guidebook had warned of the occasional mugging.

To be on the safe side, Sarah and I faked a water break. We stopped, stretched, took our time unzipping the backpacks, took some long drinks, looked around. The man walked slowly past us, but then he stopped 20 feet away.

Now we were really nervous.

Since he was stopped, we thought we would just walk past him again, but as soon as we started he did to. No matter how fast or slow we walked, the man stayed 20-30 feet ahead, blade shining bright.

We came to a small village where the path forked. He took the left fork and we did too, assuming he knew the way down. This continued for about half and hour. Him just in front, occasionally glancing back over his shoulder.

Finally, we came to the end of the village. The path down was laid clearly in front of us. The stranger with the sickle ducked into a dirty farmyard on the side of the path and flashed us a smile and a wave as we walked by on the main path.