Notes from a trip to China

I traveled to China in the summer of 2006 with a friend.  These are some notes that I took away from the trip, and that might be helpful if you're planning a trip there as well.  

1. China is huge.  This should be obvious looking on a map but we were there for 3 weeks and didn't come close to getting off the eastern section.   That meant we didn't see the majority of the country.  You should either plan on going for a looooong time, or on limiting yourself to a pretty specific itinerary.  We chose the following:  Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin/Yangshuo, Hong Kong.  If I could have done it over, I would have stayed longer and gotten out of the cities earlier... 

2.  The cities in China are huge.   Expect to be overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the cities if you visit them.  That said, I'd recommend not going on a tour.  We traveled independently, and it worked out well.  In many cases, the official sites aren't as rewarding as they could be (lots of official tours and very little room to poke around and discover things for yourself).  But GETTING to those sites is very interesting.  We found that getting places always took longer than we thought they would, and found ourselves getting into many unintended adventures while trying to find the official sites.  I'm not sure a tour would have been as rewarding.  

3.  The Great Wall is definitely worth the trip.  We went to one of the farther gates, which was a much longer car ride from Beijing, (think 3 hours instead of 1) but worth the trip.   We hiked from Jin Shang Ling  to Simitai, which too most of the day and provided great views.  We hired a driver for the day from Beijing to take us out there, wait for us, and drive us back when we were done. 

It was so hot the day we did our hike, and it's not an easy climb, so you should be in decent shape.  There are people who stay in every tower trying to sell you water, so you don't need to carry enough for the whole trip.  The wall felt deserted, but we never failed to find someone in each of those towers.  

4.  There's a lot of pollution.   The air isn't so good.  In the cities, it was more common than not to not be able to see the sky.  When we got out of the cities into Southern China, we saw the sky again..

As a side note, I couldn't help but wonder if cigarette companies have given some ground in advertising to children in the US since they seem to have the entire population of China hooked on their products.   

This aspect will take some getting used to, particularly if you are traveling during the summer.  I found it helpful to travel with a little spray bottle of water as well as hand sanitizer, which kept me feeling a little less grimy.    

5. Globalization is  for real.   The cities were packed with global brands, so much so that you might think the city of Shanghai is brought to you by Pepsi.  One very entertaining side effect of a global economy is  the signs in English.  Most Chinese people seemed to know a little English, a lot more than we knew of Mandarin.  We learned on a train ride that students in Shanghai are taught English by watching 'Friends'.  Scary, right?  Apparently an American English accent is more popular than other accents because American English is the language of pop culture.    A lot of the signs are in English, and understandably there are often errors in vocabulary or syntax which can be really entertaining, like the 'unrecycling' trash can to the right.  

6.   Ride the trains:  It's a cool experience.  We took the overnight sleeper from Beijing to Shanghai, and got a soft sleeper to ourselves (just 2 of us) which was very comfortable, and a good way to travel.    We also took a day trip out to Hangzhou on the train, which is about 2.5 hours from Shanghai.   It was an experience - there's an english line in the Shanghai train station, and trains leave pretty often, but nonetheless we had trouble getting tickets (just the communication was off, they were trying to sell us sleeper cars, which didn't make sense).  The trains are nice and fairly clean, but hot and crowded.  Our trip out to Hangzhou was not so pleasant (hot and didn't smell all that great), but the trip back was really cool - we met a bunch of students who wanted to practice their english on us.  You'll probably need to travel by plane at a certain point in time unless you've got all the time in the world.   Wait until you get into the country to book the in-country flights.  The fares are much better.   We used CYA and booked our flights a few days in advance.  We had no trouble getting the schedules we wanted.  We paid about $100 to fly from Shanghai to Guilin and $150 from Guilin to Hong Kong, if you want a sense of rates.  

7.  Take a break in Yangshuo.  If you're traveling in China for awhile, you'll probably happen by Yangshuo, which is in southeastern China.  It's a backpacker village that's totally out of place.  The scenery is beautiful, and there are lots of western tourists there.  That probably doesn't sound like a good thing, but it can be tiring traveling in china and this is a nice place to stay for a few days and take a breather.   We went on a few day trips biking and walking to see the scenery including a morning spent on the river taking the pictures like the one to the right.  

Hong Kong is really a Western city, given the heavy British influence.   We used Hong Kong at the end of our trip to 'reacclimate' before we returned home.  It's a beautiful, gracious city, with fantastic shopping, views, restaurants, etc. Definitely try the sunset cruise on the Star Ferry.  The buildings light up in sync with music on the boat.  It's pretty whacky, and the skyline is really impressive.  I'd also recommend the train ride up to Victoria Peak.  It's not too touristy and really pretty.  Once you're at the top you can escape everyone else by climbing further up and visiting parks that give you wraparound views of Hong Kong and the other islands.    We spent almost 10X on accomodations, food, etc. as we had been spending in Southern China...