The First Taste of China

In the spring of this year my wife and I went to China. Usually we are traveling on our own, but this time decided to join a guided tour by a Chinese company with a strange name “Travel China Guide”. We assumed that it would be too difficult to travel alone in such a huge, diverse and complicated country as China. This assumption was correct. China is not nice cute Europe where (almost) everybody speaks English (sometimes better than we) and (almost) everybody thinks and behaves more or less like we. You don’t agree that French or Italians or Poles or Swedes think and behave like us? Then go to China and see what the word “different” really means.

Recommendation 1: If you go to China for the first time, do not go on your own. And not because of safety concerns (the country is very safe), but because of a huge and deep cultural differences.

The second reason for taking that tour was that it was crazy cheap. No, it was even cheaper than that. It included 11 nights in 4-5 star hotels, three intra-country flights between different cities, all breakfasts and lunches, guided tours every day, admission to all sites, and several other goodies. And the price of all this was under $1250 per person.  My initial reaction was that you get what you pay for, and first of all I independently researched  all of our hotels. The reviews were definitely positive, and this essentially sealed the deal. After all, what can we lose? The hotels, breakfasts, all flights and transportation are guaranteed, but if we don’t like something else, we will simply leave the tour for a couple of hours and explore on our own. It turned out, however, that it was not so simple.

The paradox is that the tour company indeed delivered everything that they promised.  The hotels were indeed 4-5 stars. The breakfasts were fantastic. The tour bus was comfortable. The guides tried to do their best (not always successfully but they tried). All locations and sites in the itinerary were “covered”. And so on. But if somebody asks me to rate the tour on the scale from 1 to 10, I would give it at most 6. And here is why.

Why we love to travel in the first place? To stay in good hotels and eat great breakfasts? Of course not. The main goal is to see something new, interesting and exciting, enjoy yourself and have fun. For this a tour must have a well designed itinerary. But after this tour my impression was that Chinese people know how to work (maybe better than anybody else), but are still learning how to rest. The itinerary was not particularly clever. It did show us a number of interesting places, but a lot of time was wasted on boring and pointless stops. Sometimes we were leaving our hotel in the morning and coming back late in the evening dead tired, being unable to stretch our legs during the whole day. Forget about fun on those days! And our hope that we can always leave the tour for a few hours was rather naïve. A couple of times it was possible, but you can not do it when you are in the middle of nowhere about 50 miles from the city.

It does not mean that the tour was bad. It was OK, it gave us a first glimpse at a very unique and exciting world, and we still got more than we paid for!  🙂  But it could be better.

Our tour started in Beijing, and the first site, as one can guess, was Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City. I say “one can guess” because it seems that EVERY tour in China starts from this place (that’s how it is done in an authoritarian country!). The square is huge, surrounded by several monumental buildings linked to the Communist Party of China, but by itself is pretty boring. The adjacent Forbidden City is a vast complex of old Emperor’s palaces. It is interesting enough, but those who saw, say, the complex of King’s palaces in Bangkok, would not be very impressed. Plus most of the palaces are closed for the public and can be observed only from outside. But the worst thing was the crowds of tourists.

Entrance to Forbidden City

It seemed that all 1.5 billion of Chinese decided to visit the Forbidden City on that particular day, not even mentioning a few hundred thousands of foreigners! In this situation the main goal was not to enjoy the scenery but not to lose your group and not to get creamed by the crowd. At some moment I tripped, fell and broke my camera, so that all subsequent photos were made by my smartphone (sorry for the quality of these pictures).

Recommendation 2: If you miss Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City, don’t get upset too much.

Our next destination was the Great Chinese Wall. No question, it is extremely impressive. The closest to Beijing part of the wall is about 1 hour drive from the city and this is where we went. And not only we, as the next picture shows:

In my long and eventful life I saw tons of pictures of the wall in books, posters, TV and online, and somehow there was never a single person there ! It is a mystery how the photographers managed to accomplish this.

Recommendation 3: The Great Chinese Wall should not be missed, but try to go to a remote and least touristy section (if such still exists).

The next city on our itinerary was Xian. The first thing that our guide cheerfully told us was: “You know, Xian is not a very big city. It has only about 9 million people”.  (A nice small city with population of London and Paris combined??  Only in China…).  In fact, nobody knew about Xian until recently. But some years ago a local farmer was digging on his lot and hit some strange things with his shovel. He called archeologists and … Xian was put on the world tourist map. Now people come here in droves to see Terracotta Warriors, one of the main tourist attractions of China. It is not one, two, or a hundred sculptures, it is a complete army buried underground:

In addition to Terracotta Warriors, there are two more interesting things to do in Xian. The first is a bike ride on the City Wall. This wall surrounds the older part of the city and is about 9 miles long. You can rent a bike there and make the whole loop with stops and site seeing in under 2 hours. Great exercise, interesting experience, lots of fun.

The second attraction is the Muslim Quarter. Surprisingly, there is such thing in Xian!  And it is much more interesting than what most tourist guidebooks are recommending (and where your guides will probably take you).  It is hard to properly describe it here but trust me: it is something that must be experienced.

Recommendation 4: If you are in Xian, go to see Terracotta Warriors (a must), make a bike ride on the city wall, and spend an evening in the city center near Bell Tower and in the Muslim Quarter. Two nights and one full day in the city should be enough. Do NOT allow your guide to drag you to Xian Historic Museum or to various stores for stupid foreign tourists.

After Xian we flew to Guilin. This is an area of extreme natural beauty, particularly because of thousands of unique cone-shape hills.  Most of the tourists take  a boat tour on Li River from Guilin to Yangshuo. The views from the boat are great even when it is cloudy (as it was during our tour), but in good weather they are simply fantastic.  Alas, there are too many boats (we are in China after all !), but even this cannot spoil the impression.

Another must see attraction of Guilin is Red Flute Cave. It is located only about 3 mi from the city center and is extremely beautiful due to the skillful lighting.

Recommendation 5: Guilin area is gorgeous. It is a real tourist Mecca, which is never too good, but it is too beautiful to miss. Spend at least 3 night there (and at least one in Yangshuo), take a boat tour on Li river, do a bike ride along the river in Yangshuo, take a night stroll around the lake in Guilin center,  visit Red Flute Cave – it is hard to make a mistake there.

And finally Shanghai. It is the most westernized city in China and therefore the westerners feel themselves quite comfortable here. For example, Shanghai’s subway is the longest subway in the words (at least they claim so) and has a quite sophisticated system of fares between various stations,  but after a day we used it with less confusion than New York subway’s ticket machines. In addition, more people speak English here which makes yoor life easier. Taking this opportunity, we stayed an extra day after the tour and  explored the city independently, to our great benefit.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that East meets West in Shanghai. On the one hand, you see there traditional Chinese gardens and palaces:

On the other hand, the most modern skyscrapers are built here by the world famous archtectors. Especially impressive is  Shanghai’s Financial Center (=”the Wall Street of China”) in Pudong area, a real tour de force of modern architecture.

Recommendation 6. Shanghai is one of the capitals of the world and should be treated accordingly. Spend more time here – it has a lot to offer. There is a lot of tourist literature on Shanghai and everybody can find more than enough activities to his/her taste. And don’t hesitate to walk on your own – you can do it here.