Peripatetic and easy mixing travellers such as yours truly, inevitably finish up with a pile of notes and business cards of interesting people met during a journey and with whom, somehow, contact should have been maintained.

Sadly, many of those friends-for-life-to-be have been reduced to only a faint memory.

Not so with some people I had the pleasure of meeting during Beijing's recent and rather balmy summer, who kept sending me SMS messages on my hand phone, extending numerous invitations to come and visit them.

Trouble was that they lived in a hamlet 200 kilometres north of Beijing and despite having received detailed travelling instructions, replete with bus station location, time was simply lacking every time Beijing was graced with my presence.

Last weekend threatened to become an encore of good intentions with no time to spare; however, a cancelled late afternoon appointment propelled the oft-postponed visit to the realm of possibilities and before I could say Kia Ora, I was on my way to that "must visit" hamlet north of Beijing.

And what a drab and dreary journey it turned out to be...

Nearly the entire 200 kilometre stretch of road was lined with the epitome of mediocrity; a mess of atrocious looking utility hovels, sheds, shops and repair facilities. Not forgetting the enormous heaps of rubbish, scraps of wood and discarded steel strewn around them. And nary a tree in sight.

Beautifying a utility building or simple house with a decorative Chinese style curved roof, an arched doorway, traditional Chinese style windows and a lick of paint, generally, adds less than 5 per cent to the overall building cost.

Plant a few trees here and there, a nice fence around it all plus a mowed lawn and some flowers and life suddenly becomes more colourful.

Similarly, a train-trip from Shanghai to Beijing is also painfully punctuated by endless messy backyards, mediocre buildings and desolate landscapes.

Chinese friends of mine, who have returned from overseas trips, usually comment in superlatives about the quaint cottages in England, Scandinavia and Germany, the picturesque cottages, roadside restaurants, the tree-lined highways and the general cleanliness.

Yet, few of those very same Chinese are prepared to voluntarily carry out the necessary improvements in their own backyard.

I have often wracked my brain about this unusual phenomenon and have come to a provisional conclusion that this "beggar thy neighbour" syndrome is most probably a genetic, an "inborn" problem.

In Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and, indeed, the Chinese mainland, I found that Chinese people are, generally, pre-occupied with food, entertainment, jewellery and clothing.

Spending money on housing and its attendant decoration and accoutrements takes a decidedly low second place.

Sure, the Chinese know what is appealing and beautiful, as evidenced by their favourable comments about well-cared-for European countryside destinations, yet, few are prepared to beautify their own backyard.

So, what is to be done?

Legislation, of course!

How nice it would be to see a 50 metre swathe of evergreen and/or flowering trees at either side of railway lines, giving the traveller the illusion of travelling through a dense forest and have all the backyards that, inevitably, remain open to the public gaze cleaned up and building beautification carried out up to a predetermined standard, made compulsory by new legislation, and, of course, with inspectors inspecting the enforcement of the laws and a public complaint hot-line with a mandatory reply service for the remedies to be taken and, a year later, a compulsory report on what has been done.

Ditto for the public road desecration schemozzle as described heretofore.

Any building or shop or restaurant facing a public roadway should be constructed or, retroactively renovated, with a grace period of five years, to a decent standard. Yards should be tree-lined and fenced off and be properly maintained. Public main roads should be attractively tree-lined and landscaped.

China led the world more than 1,000 years ago in landscaping, magnificent parks and gardens that were the envy of visiting dignitaries and, indeed, Marco Polo. Actually, in those days and earlier, every county seat and city had to conform to a certain building code and lay-out befitting (and indicating) its status and function.

If those rules could be enforced in 1005 in a time with communication only by horseback and river vessel, when the sky was high and the emperor far away, why cannot similar rules be enacted in 2005 in the age of the mobile phone, 24-hour Internet surveillance, geostationary satellite location plotters and enforceable legislation?