me & the missus are excitedly planning our holiday to china at the moment. we fly into beijing in about 3 weeks time and have 3 weeks to backpack about the place.

fairly rough itinerary is a few days in and around beijing to start with (including day trip to the wall etc) then loop around anti-clockwise through shanxi, shaanxi, sichuan, hunan and try to get to the coast before flying back from beijing again.

it’s going to be a bit of a whistle-stop tour & i know full well from previous travels that we’d be better choosing and area and exploring that fully, but she’s never really been travelling like this before and wants the full-on experience of a few long-distance train journeys and mixture of scenery. i’m happy with that too!

we’ve picked out a few places of interest including yungang grottoes, chuandixia, pingyao & zhangjiajie national park, but are looking for a few other places of recommendation. any mountains that are fairly easy to conquer or treks that were amazing?

anything really? we’re not tied down at all and could feasibly get to anywhere!

cheers!

been to Shanghai many times but never Beijing.

be prepared for the shits!

don’t be offended with horrible habits – long little finger nails for picking ears – gobbing on the floor – clearing throats in restaurants – being prodded in the back whiles chequing – shitting in holes in the ground (take loo roll with you everywhere) – butchering animals on the street – garlic breath etc etc

I did a train from hongkong to somewhere and the toilet was a hole onto the track controlled by a trapdoor type mechanism! (no lie there was shit all over the floor it was horrible!

its a real eye opener you’ll love it

I lived in HK in the late 80’s and went to China a few times. I found it both disgusting and intersting at the same time.

I didnt really like it, eye opener, but I would not pay to go again.

Balance it out a bit by stopping off somewhere different on the way there/back.

i’ve spent a month travelling around india so all that kind of stuff doesn’t really bother me too much & got all the ‘essentials’ to cope with our ‘differences’ in culture.

Mrs Scamper travelled around China on her own, must be 8 years ago. She reckons it was the most difficult place she’s travelled in part to the obvious language difficulty and the the lack of tourist infrastructure outside the main areas. Her diet seemed to consist sometimes of dumplings, and maggott and penis soup, and she had to colour her blonde hair black as she herself became a tourist attraction. She felt safe though, and was amazed how people would go out of their way to help.

yeah i’ve heard that about people going out of their way to help, especially if they can speak some english they want to talk with everyone.

i’ve also heard that things are massively different now compared to just a few years ago, so imagine that looking going back 8 years would see huge changes.

cock soup?! hmmm i might try and avoid that.

the mrs has bright red hair…reckon she’ll be a bit of a talking point for the locals.

ilovemygears has been, he loved it.

I’ve been.

The ‘horrible habits’ bit is very true. I also saw some amazing things that I will always treasure and I didn’t get the shits either!

I spent two days in Beijing and went to: Great wall, Summer Palace, Tianamen Square etc…

Then 10 days in rural China around Chonqing. Rural China was amazing; beautiful terraced paddy fields, massive tea plantations, 6″ diameter Bamboo plants along the road side and the very recent signs of scary Communist behaviour 😆

I saw a guy taking 40 live ducks to a local market in 6 wicker baskets attached to a motorbike, 3 on each side! I saw, literally, a pile of live Chickens being sold in a market. They were all tied together by one leg – buy one and slaughter, pluck and butcher it yourself when you get home. In a small village we saw a local woman kill a goat and cook it outside her house while we sat drinking Tea and playing Marjong in a Tea shop opposite.

The only touristy thing we did was to visit Dazu Caves, which is a valley with some amazing carvings created by Buddhist monks hundreds of years ago. It was intersting but the surrounding ‘normal’ life was the most amazing bit.

cheers JAG! would you recommend having a look around the province then? it would lead well into this proposed route we have been thinking about. did you just end up in a village and stay there or were you moving around between villages?

i met some chap on a bus in india once and we got talking about the place, i remember him talking about how much he loved india and had been a lot of times, but he said that no-one could love everything about the place; the filth and the disgusting habits, the poverty, the way women are often treated, the abundant disrespect of nature. i suppose china and india are very much on a par with each other in many respects. but i like the fact that these places are so different to what most of us know.

I went with my wife on an Exodus holiday in 2007. Landed in Beijing and transported to Chengde ~ 200 miles NW of the capital and then spent 2 weeks cycling back towards Beijing.

We were cycling through villages that had never seen a westerner before, it was fantastic. Yes I ate some strange things, (dog, donkey, thousand year egg….), and got the runs one day, but overall it was an amazing experiencen that you have to jump into. If you can learn some basic chinese it will go a long way, even just saying ‘hello’ (pronounced ‘nihow’) will bring massive smiles to their faces.

We walked along 3 sections of the wall, the most spectacular being the Jingshanling to Simatai section. It’s a steep treck at times but it’s the classic wall section that literally follows the ridge of the mountains.

Other highlights were the Qing tombs, NW of Jixian, real ‘Raiders of the Lost Arch’ kind of stuff.

Within Beijing, there’s the normal well known stuff, but also search out the series of underground tunnel tours that were once the nuclear fall out shelters during the cold war, really interesting.

Also get tickets for the Chinese acrobats/Circus, it’s a permanent show in a theatre in the east of the city, (sorry can’t remember the exact location or theatre name). It’s ferkin amazing, you wouldn’t believe a human being could do things like that!!

The Olympic birds nest stadium is also worth a visit plus the chinese markets near the circus theatre.

You will get constantly hassled in Beijing by street sellers, but there are bargains to be had if you do want a bootleg Rolex, Brietling watch etc etc 😉 I got two for £20 and they are top quality, with full automatic movements and have kept time for ~4 years now 8)

As mentioned above, going to the toilet is a social event, especially in public places. It will literally be a line of holes in a concrete slab and the chinese men are not shy at checking your equipment out 8O. However, you will be relieved to know they are not too well ‘blessed’ in that department so even an ‘average’ westerner can swing it about a bit with pride – ha!! Try to save any ‘big jobs’ for the hotels which generally have normal type cubicles and you will be ok.

My wife is tall and blonde so she obviously was the centre of attention wherever we went from both men and women, although my ginger hair did cause some ammusement and I was once called an orangutang – ha!

Also, not sure who you are flying with, but we went with Air China and their in-flight entertainment was pretty dire, so take your own if you can.

I worked in Beijing 6 years ago, amazing place, never ever quiet, became a tourist attraction along with the 2 yanks I was working with (3 giants strolling at Tianamen square) people stopping us to take photographs of us !

Apart from the obvious/usual downsides as mentioned above I witnessed the worst case of unbridled racism I’ve ever seen there, was with an Indian colleague walking around the wall, people were spitting at him !!! and shouting what we assumed were obscenities, it was properly upsetting and nearly got us into trouble as we started to retaliate, luckily our guide calmed the situation down

However despite this I’d go back like a shot, proper culture shock 🙂

Hi, I stayed in a smart hotel in the middle of Chonqing and took a car out into the villages and areas nearby. I had a guide most of the time to show me around as I was visiting a local business with a view to setting up a joint-venture with the company I worked for. I’m blonde and blue eyed so got my photograph taken with lots of the locals. Especially the one day when I wore a bright red fleece!

It really is very different culturally – much like India. I’ve been there a couple of times as well. Throw yourself into it, never say ‘No’ to any experience and you can’t go wrong. Just avoid the big cities as they are becoming very Westernised – it’s all these companies setting up joint-ventures doncha know! 😛

Spend time in Shanghai. You’ll be seeing the future.

The Chinese don’t have ‘horrible’ things, they’re just different. Try to cope with change, huh?

The one thing that did upset/anger me was the ‘have’ and ‘have nots’. For a supposedly communist country where every one is supposed to be equal there are a lot of people with nothing and then there is the ‘elite’ that have everything.

Also try and get the average man talking about politics and Mao Tse Tung, it’s very interesting how they have been tought/brought up with a restricted concept of the world as a whole.

Oh and never tell a chinese person they are wrong, they are always respectfully ‘less’ right than you 😉