Are you fit enough for a punishing holiday abroad? NIGEL JARRETT has just spent two weeks in China, looking at everything from the Great Wall to the Terracotta Warriors.

A couple of us just couldn't face the long climb to the ghost city of Fengdu, reputed to be the abode of devils and offering a sight of the 700 temples of Mingshan Hill. It was day 12 of our Chinese tour and we'd already completed hundreds of miles by internal flight, coach and Yangtze cruise ship.

In September, China north and south is hot and humid, with pollution and sometimes dust from the Gobi Desert added for good bronchial measure.

Then there's the busy itinerary, with its early hotel alarm calls and banquet-style lunches and dinners, once or twice with stewed jellyfish and boiled chicken's feet - you suck the foot for its sliver of meat.

But if one or two of the party sometimes declined what was offered, no one complained about a trip that earned only superlatives.

China is big in terms of the number of people per hectare rather than the hectares themselves, though there are plenty of them. It's a country hurling itself into the 21st century with unbelievable convulsions.

One of these emanates from the Three Gorges dam site at Gezouba, where the Chinese are in the throes of holding back the inexorable Yangtze waters to create hydro-electric power and control flooding downstream in the direction of Shanghai.

By the time the dam is completed, electricity entering the grid will make much less of an impact that it was meant to, such is the demand of the nation's great leap forward.

All along our river journey were reminders of how much higher the water level will be when the dam is completed. Re-location of people below it is a billion-yuan project, its most disgruntled critics, not surprisingly, being the old.

As most of us were of a certain age, we needed our prejudices to be confirmed or undermined in a country that travel books still describe as a police state.

But it's one that is cautiously embracing a Western-style market economy, with all that means in terms of importing images and ideas from abroad. McDonald's and KFC franchises are legion in Shanghai, Beijing and other lesser-known cities, such as Chongqing.

In this last, we were shown the old town. It was like something out of Dickens, a smoke-filled labyrinth with at least one brothel. Someone spotted a rat.

Perhaps older travellers are squeamish, but it was worth the immersion for an experience of something that one might have expected to be out of bounds in a country everywhere proclaiming its rocket-like upward mobility.

In fact, leaving a posh restaurant in Shanghai, we were accosted by a blind beggar pushing a disabled child in a barrow. It was enough to make you revise your political opinions. Perhaps if the country were once universally that poor, it needed a Chairman Mao to unify it.

Knocked back in amazement was the reaction at the Great Wall at Mutianyu, the precipitous Yangtze gorges, the terracotta warriors site near Xian and the Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai, by which time our digestive systems were almost acclimatised to the most spectacular range of regional and celebratory food we are ever likely to be offered.

If you are over 50 and China-bound, don't forget the inoculations (one in each arm preventing polio, typhoid, hepatitis, diptheria and tetanus) and consider anti-malaria tablets. Reaction to the jabs is rare and short-lived.

Soon, one feels, they will be widely available to our wonderful hosts, occupants of this bastion of politeness, quietude and extraordinary social upheaval.

Holiday factfile:

Nigel Jarrett took the Through the Yangtze Gorges trip organised by CTS Horizons, the China Travel Service.

It involved visits to Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, Chongqing and Hong Kong, with four nights on the Yangtze

The company organises all airport and hotel luggage collections and airport check-ins except the departures from Heathrow and inward-bound from Hong Kong, and all site visits.

Optional visits to the Beijing Opera, acrobatic shows, and Tang music and dance are available

Breakfasts are either Chinese or Western; lunches and dinners are all Chinese.

Depending on the time of year, the cost of the trip starts at £1,595 per person on a twin share basis and touring with a group (2005 prices)

Book direct on 020 7836 9911 for group tours