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Previous installments in the blog entries about our China trip:
First days (18-20 April)
19-22 April: Guilin and surrounds
23-30 April: rural Guangxi province
Nothing stands out about our final day and a bit in China; mostly travel to get us to the airport for our final trip home, with a few brief stops shoehorned into the itinerary so we could feel we were getting in some tourism on our final day. Largest cultural disconnect: the deluxe 38-story Howard Johnson's hotel in Wuhan, where we slept for our last night in China. Swankest hotel I've ever been in, and definitely not your grandfather's HoJo. Since we were heading home on 1 May (international workers' day and an important Chinese holiday), our guides were worried the airports would be a madhouse. So they woke us up call at 4:30 AM, and out the door by 5 AM. In practice, the airports were calm, and an extra hour of sleep would have been nicer. Still, better safe than sorry.
On the whole, a great trip. Some parting thoughts:
Sinorama provides an excellent tour service, and particularly at the 50% discount on the tour price that let us go to China even though we’d committed to an expensive trip to Iceland this coming June, provided excellent value for the money. The guides and bus drivers are excellent (friendly, patient, knowledgeable, highly efficient and well-organized), the food is good (if overly Westerner-friendly; we would have preferred more exotic local dishes), and it’s awfully nice to have someone else handle all the details, including getting us to and from the airport, and dealing with idiosyncracies of hotels (such as photocopying our passport at each new hotel). They also schlepped our big bags around for us, so all we had to do was ensure they were packed the night before we were relocating, then push them out the door of our room by breakfast time the following morning. It’s a very comfortable experience if you want to focus 100% of your attention on enjoying the scenery and culture and 0% on the details of navigation and dealing with administrivia.
Good guides make all the difference in this case, since you get broad (and sometimes deep) information on a great many things you’d never get on your own without a ton of research. One of the things we learned in Japan a few years back is just how nice it is to have such expertise available. Of course, with a little research, you don’t need a tour company to organize your whole vacation. You can find and hire local guides on your own; guidebooks such as the excellent Lonely Planet series often provide contact information for such people, and local tourism offices also generally provide lists. I’m not sure how well the Chinese equivalents function, but there are definitely local tour organizers (I saw their desks in a couple of the hotels where we stayed or had lunch), and I’m confident they can hook you up with local guides. Possibly even with their friends, given the importance of guanxi (connections) and the tendency of the Chinese to refer you to people they know.
The downside of tours is twofold: First, you’re constrained by the choices of the tour planners for a given tour, and before you hand over your credit card, you should make very sure that you want to go primarily or exclusively to the places they’ve chosen for you. Often those choices are pretty good; you get a “highlights of X” tour that provides a really good taste of X. However, Milady and I much prefer to set our own pace; I have very fond memories of our time in Xi’an a few years ago, when we were able to explore the city completely on our own for several days. Other than things that are fixed in advance and non-negotiable or difficult to change, such as airplane and train tickets or prior reservations at a really cool B&B or other residence, we like the opportunity to revise our plans on the fly: to spend an extra hour somewhere if we decide we like it, or to leave early if we decide we don’t. That leads to the second drawback, namely that tours are exhausting. The organizers believe that those who take tours are highly value-conscious and want to pack in as much experience as possible into the minimum possible amount of time. They also start from the perspective that tourists don’t want too much free time on their own. So they run you most of the day. Combined with frequent relocation, this really is exhausting, even for relatively young pups like me and Madame.
The specific tour we chose inevitably involved a fair bit of travel because it was targeted at visiting rural areas, often separated by significant distances, and we knew that upfront. However, the result was that we rarely stayed anywhere for more than 1 night. If you’re going to be staying somewhere for several nights in a row, it’s easy to bow out of a day’s tour activities and just roam around the local area on your own. We did manage to escape and explore on our own a few times, but not nearly as often as we would have liked and only for short periods. Would we take another Sinorama tour in the future? If the price is right, unquestionably -- it’s hard to imagine visiting China as inexpensively as we did this time -- and doubly so if the particular tour stayed in only one or two places for several days each so we could explore more. But given the number of people I know in China, I think we’d have more fun visiting on our own and letting these friends and colleagues show us around. That’s also a great way to deepen relationships with these people.
Speaking of which, I remain a committed Sinophile after this trip. I still love China (wǒ ài nǐ zhōng guó) and the Chinese people (zhōng guó rén). I’m sure China has its share of jerks and thugs and fools; every country and culture does. But I haven’t met them yet in China, other than the one asshat who loudly answered a cellphone call in the middle of a performance by the Shanghai acrobatic troupe during a previous visit. I find the people friendly, curious, helpful, and generally admirable hosts. I also love the diverse regional food, even the tourist-friendly varieties, and the culture, including the art and poetry. In short, I would happily return annually if I could muster the energy and funding. I’m still hoping that as I decrease my workload and move closer to retirement, I’ll be able to free up enough time to teach English, writing, and editing at a Chinese university. I did this for three half-days during my last visit, and loved it. This opportunity would also strongly motivate me to learn more Mandarin and polish my currently primitive skills; there’s no better way to learn a language than to live in it for several weeks. (I have an informal offer to return to teach in Beijing, but they want a month of my time, and I can’t currently afford that much time away from work and family. Maybe in a few years.)
Chinese beer is decent, but not diverse. Tsingtao is the brand most people will be familiar with, and it’s a simple, straightforward lager with an almost sweet taste because it’s very lightly hopped. But there isn’t much choice for alternative types of beer unless you want to try imported foreign brands; there’s no microbrewery movement that we noticed, other than in one place we saw (but didn’t have time to stop), and that may have been done by a few expats. If you like really bitter hoppy beers or dark beers or Belgian styles, you won’t find much in the way of local options. But the Tsingtao Stout that we tried was pretty good, and suggests that Chinese tastes in beer are broadening. By the next time we return, a local beer culture may have evolved. Here’s hoping!
China isn’t as inexpensive as it used to be, though it’s still quite affordable. I use what I call the “t-shirt index” to account for prices. When I first visited China in 2003, a t-shirt could be had for about $1. During my second visit, in 2011, costs had increased to between $2 and $3. This time around, shirts were about $5 or $6. Although we almost certainly could have negotiated lower prices, it strikes me as petty to extort the last possible penny from someone who relies so much on tourism income for their livelihood. This is clearly an entirely unscientific index of inflation, but it nonetheless provides some indication of the rise in prices. Note that griping about prices falls firmly in the category of "first world problems", so I gripeth not. I know full well how rich I am by global standards.
For another entirely unscientific index, this time of the state of the global economy, I offer the following anecdata: in the Travel Zoo newsletter I subscribe to, there’s an enormous number of 50% off deals for cruises and guided tours, including the Sinorama tour we took. This suggests to me that there’s significant economic uncertainty going on and that the middle class (i.e., people like me who might take such tours in fat times) isn’t nearly so confident in the economy as they were a year back, when such deals seem to have been less common. I suspect that mining the Travel Zoo archives, if such exist, would quickly prove or disprove this thesis.
Other thoughts on China as time permits and inspiration strikes. Bottom line: If you have any interest in China, visit. I think you’ll enjoy yourself.
As usual, I took nearly 600 photos during the China trip. That’s the lovely thing about digital cameras: you can take as many as you want, then sort through them to select only the good ones for sharing. If you happen to be in Montreal and want to see the whole collection, drop me a line to arrange a time. Click here to see a sampler of some of the best of the photos.
Enjoy!
First days (18-20 April)
19-22 April: Guilin and surrounds
23-30 April: rural Guangxi province
Nothing stands out about our final day and a bit in China; mostly travel to get us to the airport for our final trip home, with a few brief stops shoehorned into the itinerary so we could feel we were getting in some tourism on our final day. Largest cultural disconnect: the deluxe 38-story Howard Johnson's hotel in Wuhan, where we slept for our last night in China. Swankest hotel I've ever been in, and definitely not your grandfather's HoJo. Since we were heading home on 1 May (international workers' day and an important Chinese holiday), our guides were worried the airports would be a madhouse. So they woke us up call at 4:30 AM, and out the door by 5 AM. In practice, the airports were calm, and an extra hour of sleep would have been nicer. Still, better safe than sorry.
On the whole, a great trip. Some parting thoughts:
Sinorama provides an excellent tour service, and particularly at the 50% discount on the tour price that let us go to China even though we’d committed to an expensive trip to Iceland this coming June, provided excellent value for the money. The guides and bus drivers are excellent (friendly, patient, knowledgeable, highly efficient and well-organized), the food is good (if overly Westerner-friendly; we would have preferred more exotic local dishes), and it’s awfully nice to have someone else handle all the details, including getting us to and from the airport, and dealing with idiosyncracies of hotels (such as photocopying our passport at each new hotel). They also schlepped our big bags around for us, so all we had to do was ensure they were packed the night before we were relocating, then push them out the door of our room by breakfast time the following morning. It’s a very comfortable experience if you want to focus 100% of your attention on enjoying the scenery and culture and 0% on the details of navigation and dealing with administrivia.
Good guides make all the difference in this case, since you get broad (and sometimes deep) information on a great many things you’d never get on your own without a ton of research. One of the things we learned in Japan a few years back is just how nice it is to have such expertise available. Of course, with a little research, you don’t need a tour company to organize your whole vacation. You can find and hire local guides on your own; guidebooks such as the excellent Lonely Planet series often provide contact information for such people, and local tourism offices also generally provide lists. I’m not sure how well the Chinese equivalents function, but there are definitely local tour organizers (I saw their desks in a couple of the hotels where we stayed or had lunch), and I’m confident they can hook you up with local guides. Possibly even with their friends, given the importance of guanxi (connections) and the tendency of the Chinese to refer you to people they know.
The downside of tours is twofold: First, you’re constrained by the choices of the tour planners for a given tour, and before you hand over your credit card, you should make very sure that you want to go primarily or exclusively to the places they’ve chosen for you. Often those choices are pretty good; you get a “highlights of X” tour that provides a really good taste of X. However, Milady and I much prefer to set our own pace; I have very fond memories of our time in Xi’an a few years ago, when we were able to explore the city completely on our own for several days. Other than things that are fixed in advance and non-negotiable or difficult to change, such as airplane and train tickets or prior reservations at a really cool B&B or other residence, we like the opportunity to revise our plans on the fly: to spend an extra hour somewhere if we decide we like it, or to leave early if we decide we don’t. That leads to the second drawback, namely that tours are exhausting. The organizers believe that those who take tours are highly value-conscious and want to pack in as much experience as possible into the minimum possible amount of time. They also start from the perspective that tourists don’t want too much free time on their own. So they run you most of the day. Combined with frequent relocation, this really is exhausting, even for relatively young pups like me and Madame.
The specific tour we chose inevitably involved a fair bit of travel because it was targeted at visiting rural areas, often separated by significant distances, and we knew that upfront. However, the result was that we rarely stayed anywhere for more than 1 night. If you’re going to be staying somewhere for several nights in a row, it’s easy to bow out of a day’s tour activities and just roam around the local area on your own. We did manage to escape and explore on our own a few times, but not nearly as often as we would have liked and only for short periods. Would we take another Sinorama tour in the future? If the price is right, unquestionably -- it’s hard to imagine visiting China as inexpensively as we did this time -- and doubly so if the particular tour stayed in only one or two places for several days each so we could explore more. But given the number of people I know in China, I think we’d have more fun visiting on our own and letting these friends and colleagues show us around. That’s also a great way to deepen relationships with these people.
Speaking of which, I remain a committed Sinophile after this trip. I still love China (wǒ ài nǐ zhōng guó) and the Chinese people (zhōng guó rén). I’m sure China has its share of jerks and thugs and fools; every country and culture does. But I haven’t met them yet in China, other than the one asshat who loudly answered a cellphone call in the middle of a performance by the Shanghai acrobatic troupe during a previous visit. I find the people friendly, curious, helpful, and generally admirable hosts. I also love the diverse regional food, even the tourist-friendly varieties, and the culture, including the art and poetry. In short, I would happily return annually if I could muster the energy and funding. I’m still hoping that as I decrease my workload and move closer to retirement, I’ll be able to free up enough time to teach English, writing, and editing at a Chinese university. I did this for three half-days during my last visit, and loved it. This opportunity would also strongly motivate me to learn more Mandarin and polish my currently primitive skills; there’s no better way to learn a language than to live in it for several weeks. (I have an informal offer to return to teach in Beijing, but they want a month of my time, and I can’t currently afford that much time away from work and family. Maybe in a few years.)
Chinese beer is decent, but not diverse. Tsingtao is the brand most people will be familiar with, and it’s a simple, straightforward lager with an almost sweet taste because it’s very lightly hopped. But there isn’t much choice for alternative types of beer unless you want to try imported foreign brands; there’s no microbrewery movement that we noticed, other than in one place we saw (but didn’t have time to stop), and that may have been done by a few expats. If you like really bitter hoppy beers or dark beers or Belgian styles, you won’t find much in the way of local options. But the Tsingtao Stout that we tried was pretty good, and suggests that Chinese tastes in beer are broadening. By the next time we return, a local beer culture may have evolved. Here’s hoping!
China isn’t as inexpensive as it used to be, though it’s still quite affordable. I use what I call the “t-shirt index” to account for prices. When I first visited China in 2003, a t-shirt could be had for about $1. During my second visit, in 2011, costs had increased to between $2 and $3. This time around, shirts were about $5 or $6. Although we almost certainly could have negotiated lower prices, it strikes me as petty to extort the last possible penny from someone who relies so much on tourism income for their livelihood. This is clearly an entirely unscientific index of inflation, but it nonetheless provides some indication of the rise in prices. Note that griping about prices falls firmly in the category of "first world problems", so I gripeth not. I know full well how rich I am by global standards.
For another entirely unscientific index, this time of the state of the global economy, I offer the following anecdata: in the Travel Zoo newsletter I subscribe to, there’s an enormous number of 50% off deals for cruises and guided tours, including the Sinorama tour we took. This suggests to me that there’s significant economic uncertainty going on and that the middle class (i.e., people like me who might take such tours in fat times) isn’t nearly so confident in the economy as they were a year back, when such deals seem to have been less common. I suspect that mining the Travel Zoo archives, if such exist, would quickly prove or disprove this thesis.
Other thoughts on China as time permits and inspiration strikes. Bottom line: If you have any interest in China, visit. I think you’ll enjoy yourself.
As usual, I took nearly 600 photos during the China trip. That’s the lovely thing about digital cameras: you can take as many as you want, then sort through them to select only the good ones for sharing. If you happen to be in Montreal and want to see the whole collection, drop me a line to arrange a time. Click here to see a sampler of some of the best of the photos.
Enjoy!