China blues & greys

I am now officially all China'd out! If I never have to see one more pagoda, negotiate with one more taxi driver, eat one more dish with mystery meat, I will be happy. Of course I've picked totally the wrong place to get to this point as the city of Guilin is supposed to be known for it's beautiful karst scenary and laid back attitude but honestly, to me, it's just one more big Chinese city.

The Blues
Please allow me a moment to break from my usual cheery self and give you a real picture of China from the ground level.

1. Chinese people, as far as I can see, are obsessed with redefining themselves and becomming the big, powerful, superpower they should always have been. What this means in practice is that everywhere that we go there is evidence that anything that is old and interesting is being systematically ripped up or torn down to make way for skyrise apartments and office blocks.

If there is something that has had special significance then it is designated a tourist spot or scenic area of some rating (from 3A to 5A) and then they slap gates on it, charge you 40 RMB and it immediately becomes overrun with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of Chinese tourists. It then becomes a bit of a battle to see anything of worth.

2. Something like 94% of all tourism in China is by Chinese domestic tourists and what that means for the Western visitor is that they really aren't that interested in you. Sometimes it's good - some of the tat-shop keepers just ignore you because they can't be bothered to communicate with you and there are loads more tourists that speak their language that they can harass instead. But most times it's not so great - taxi drivers either hike up their price to ridiculous levels or refuse to take you or you pay your 40 RMB to enter a museum only to find that all the commentary is in Chinese.

3. It's easy to forget about trying not to offend the Chinese person next to you when their behaviour defys all of your own social norms. It seems to be a popular sport for Chinese people to push, shove and elbow everyone around them just to get ahead in the queue to get on the train even though everyone has a designated seat and there is plenty of time before the train leaves. People are constanty hacking and spitting everywhere, even right in front of where you are walking so you have to walk around their phlegm. And the noise, people find it acceptable to talk at the top of their voices to their friend who is sitting 1/2 metre away from them, or honk their horns costantly on the road. Not to mention the chaos when you are trying to cross the road, even on a pedestian crossing, when the green man is showing.

At first it's interesting, and you put up with it because you are trying to be culturally sensitive but when I lost my rag the other day with the taxi driver who wanted to charge us 30 RMB for a journey that was clearly worth half of that, you realise that you do have a limit. FYI, after the little outbreak he dropped his price to 20 RMB so maybe I'm on to something there...

4. Finally, I have become so cynical about the quality of anything that I would like to buy, be it in the tat-shops or markets or even authentic looking shops. I bought a "Kipling" daypack and Johan bought a "North Face" daypack in a market and they are both clearly knockoffs. While we were at one of the famous sites in Beijing we got invited to see an "exhibition of art student works" and then were invited to make purchases afterwards. We didn't buy anything and found out afterwards that it is a scam that they run in several famous sites and that the works of art aren't done by students but are prints that can be bought in the markets at a fraction of the price that they are asking for. Why are scams like that being run from places like the "Temple of heaven" or the "Forbidden palace"? How could the authorities permit that? Don't they know that it completely ruins any credibility that the site had? And when you find out that you've been swindled that it forever puts a dark cloud over your entire China experience?

Of course, several of the scenic spots and tourist designated sites are themselves fakes. He Fang Jie, the ancient street in Hangzhou was probably build less than 20 years ago, yet it is where you are directed to go to see Song dynasty houses. The entire site of Fengdu in this site is reputed to have a history of more than 2000 years however once there you discover that the site they take you to has been relocated from its original site to the other side of the river and further up the mountainside as the original Fengdu was covered by the waters of the Yangtze. And that the jade sanctuary is under construction and looks like a brand new hotel/spa complex...

What is truth? What do you believe?

It's not all gloom
I have to admit that it's not all gloom, and we have done and seen so many interesting things that we need to write them down here just to remember that we did them, that it was real.

Over the last few days we spent some time in Hangzhou which is a city only 1.5 hours away from Shanghai and a truely beautiful place, mainly because of the lake and designated scenic spot in the middle. We spent some time on a tourist boat travelling to the island in the middle of the lake. It was very peaceful and beautiful. Later we explored the "ancient" Song dynasty tat-shop street and were facinated by the Traditional Chinese Medicine museum which had captions in english.

Yesterday on our way to the airport to catch our flight that would take us from Shanghai to Guilin, we boarded one of the worlds fastest maglev train and got up to a speed of 431 km/h which was the fastest either Johan or myself had ever travelled on land. The trip to the airport only took 7.5 minutes!! Very cool.

Today, in Guilin, we went to see the famous Elephant trunk hill which turned out to be a little underwhelming, though it is still well worth a visit and it had a nice park attached to it. Tomorrow we are going to do a tour of some rice paddy fields so hopefully the weather won't be too bad (it's raining at the moment) and we will get to see some real Chinese countryside.

Please forgive my negative post, and be assured that we are having a great time overall, we have met some wonderful people, travellers as well as native Chinese and know that for every negative there are several positives that turn the experience around. I know that one day I will look back at this post and smile and nod, understanding with the full picture what a fabulous and blessed time that we had.