China Wrap-up

This story was posted under the categories: Big Asia Trip, China

We have spent one month backpacking through China in October 2007. It’s a huge country and one month is certainly not enough to see even the half of it. But still, i think we have a fairly good impression of China (except perhaps the Shanghai area).

Food

We all know the Chinese food that we order for take-away. Well, this is nothing like the food that the people eat in China. We haven’t eaten any Loempia’s (spring rolls), kroepoek, nasi goreng etc. Even the very typical sweet and sour sauce featured only on a small number of menus. So what do they eat? A lot! First of all, it seems that every other house is a food stall and that every Chinese who is not sleeping or playing, is eating. The dishes vary from very poor (tofu and eggs) to rich (beef and fish) over the vegetables and dumplings. All in all, it’s good food, but certainly no fine cuisine.

Our personal top 3 of what we ate:

1. Yangshuo Beer Fish
2. Kaili Fresh Noodles with mouton
3. Zongdian “Kevin’s Trekker Inn” Special House Pizza (with yak meat)

Sights

Tourism in China has become big business. Like in all things, the little people want to be big and tend to exagerate in everything they do. Ping’an village is the village with the people with the longest hair (guiness book of records), Zhaoxing has the most wind and rain bridges (again, guiness book of records), etc. This wouldn’t be so bad, if they weren’t faking famous sights. For instance, the ancient city of Lijiang, which surely in past times has been very beautiful, could very well be replaced by China Town from Disneyland. The buildings are fake, newly constructed and yampacked with souvenir shops and other tourist traps.

If you want to visit some of the authentic China, you have to try hard and get from the standard tour routes that the gouvernment has set up and to which they try to keep you as much as possible. We did so between Kaili and Longsheng and have discovered villages and people who had not seen tourists in years. Some were afraid of us and ran away as i approached them to ask the right direction. Others wanted to be on the picture with us. The houses were old and original, with the occasional new one being built with the help of every man (or should i say woman) in the village.

So our advise would be to skip the big attractions, they have been spoilt big time and discover China on your own.

Top 3 Sights

1. The Great Wall: stay overnight and get up before the touts and the mass tourists arrive
2. Yangshuo: rent a bike, skip the caves and moonhill and head out into the mountains on your own
3. Miao Villages: still very much untouched with tourism, but it’s changing rapidly

Impressions

First of all, there are too many Chinese! It’s obvious even in everyday life: 3 people to do the job of one (giving ticket, stamping ticket, checking ticket, giving ticket to next person, counting tickets, etc). But it also has its advantages: the streets and cities are clean, transportation runs efficiently and infrastructure can be built at lightning speeds (you see new roads growing before your eyes).

A Chinese is a helpfull bloke (if he wants to), but is very shy at first. After you have been able to make contact with one, a mob of 20 will immediately gather to check out what is happening. Unfortunately, their languages are extremely poor and almost nobody speaks English, despite a lot of effort on educational level for this. Chinese being a hard language in itself, all attempts to communicate become rapidly frustrating.

(by the way, no wonder that nobody speaks decent English, in our entire month we haven’t found one single English phrase that was written correctly. Not one!)

The Chinese language in itself is also very varied as they all read the same signs, but pronounce them differently. This means that all TV shows need to be subtitled, as one Chinese will not necessarely understand another from across the country.

Business wise, we were baffled by the lack of diversification. “My neighbour is selling socks, so i will also start a shop in socks.” That seems to be the reflection for any Chinese starting a shop, they sell the same thing as the guy next door. This goes to extremes, as we have seen in Guangzhou, were Electricity City are actually 8 street blocks full of stores selling electrical devices (we walked for 2 hours, just to get through it!). So this left us with the question: how do all of these people make a living? In fact, how does any Chinese make a living as it seems that they’re always sleeping, eating or playing games… And if you ever see a Chinese work, it’s more likely to be a woman than a man.

Conclusion

Should you visit China? Honestly, unless you have plenty of time and want to backpack through lesser travelled roads, don’t do it. There’s plenty of other Asia to discover.

Some remarkable quotes, copyrighted China:

• “You pay, i go home!”
  From a woman that was stalking us on the Great Wall.
• “You are come for baby?”
  A woman on Shamian island, appearantly selling a not-so endangered species (little chinese)

And for the results of our quiz

During one month in China we took, spent, ate:

• Number of busses: 34
• Numer of beds: 19
• Average meal budget: 9.6 EUR per day (for the two of us)

And the winner is… Inge! Congratulations, you can come and claim your price… next year