background information on china for walking holiday hiking stories yunnan great wall

This page and the next two provide some thoughts about what it's like to visit the vast country of China for a holiday, and to walk in some of the countryside and cities.

For many people China may still retain the image of a secretive authoritarian state, where it's difficult to travel freely and mix with the local population. But this is now an outdated view, as China has opened up to visitors over the past 20 years at the same time as its economy has been developing rapidly.

Increasing numbers of people are now travelling to China for business and tourism, and finding out about the great contrasts between the dynamic 21st century cities and the more traditional rural towns and landscapes. These offer many different hiking experiences.

At the end of May 2005, I went out to China with my son Owen to join my daughter Catriona for a 3-week holiday, at the end of her teaching year. A collection of walks from Beijing, Yunnan, Sichuan, Chongqing and the Great Wall will be added over the coming weeks. The first of these has been posted covering an epic (for me) 2-day walk in Tiger Leaping Gorge, on the edge of the Himalayas.

We found a country that was easy and cheap to travel around, where the cities and towns have all the facilities you'd expect in the West, the food is terrific, and there are plenty of hotels and guest houses to stay.

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Some likes and dislikes

I liked:

being in such a different place, once away from the shopping centres in the cities
the good value food, accommodation and transport
the parks, early in the day, with so many people enjoying themselves
seeing people playing cards and mahjong at any opportunity
relaxing with a pot full of Chinese tea
the unforgettable scenery in Tiger Leaping Gorge
the rural villages and people working in the fields
glimpses of domestic scenes through doors and gateways
the magnificent stone carvings at Dazu and Leshan
of course, the grandeur of the Great Wall, and
thinking I'd got a bargain after some haggling

I disliked

thin, small plastic cups to drink beer out of in restaurants
streets crowded with traffic
being driven at high speed round bends and other vehicles
so much fried food
the dirty grey air in the cities
grotty squat toilets with no loo paper
McDonalds and KFC outlets so prominent in the cities
discovering that some "old towns" are newly built for tourists
being ripped off as soon as we arrived
being told I'd actually paid a high price for my "bargain"

Particularly interesting and amusing were

some of the signs translated into English
the razmataz around some product promotions in the cities
TVs on every bus, and the diet of kung fu films

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Overall impressions

China is changing so fast, it's breathtaking. The cities are modern and very crowded - I read somewhere that China has over a hundred cities with more than a million people. The capital, Beijing, has a population of around 14 million. Chongqing, in central China, which few people outside China have even heard of, is now one of the world's biggest cities. Depending on which parts of the sprawling urban area you include, it has anything between 6 million and 33 million inhabitants! Chengdu, provincial capital of Sichuan in west, has over 11 million people, and Kunming in Yunnan has around 4 million.

Much of the old heart of the cities has been removed to make way for shining retail centres to compare with anything in London, Glasgow or Edinburgh, with business districts extending out along the many freeways. Some of Beijing's hutongs (the old housing streets) still survive, but they are disappearing fast as the city prepares itself for the Olympics in 2008. Chongqing retains an old town beside one of the rivers. In city centres, old gateways and belltowers are preserved among the high-rise blocks. But apart from these occasional traditional features, you feel at times you could be in a big city almost anywhere in the world, with the KFC and McDonalds restaurants.

Then you notice the many bicycles and pedicabs trying to negotiate the junctions amongst the cars and buses, helped by a traffic attendant sheltering from the sun under a parasol. You wander into a park and see people playing mahjong or cards, couples dancing to music, and larger groups performing martial arts together. Street cleaners are busy sweeping up litter, and construction workers seem to do most jobs with little more than their bare hands. There are numerous tea shops and medicine shops alongside those selling the latest electronic goods. And you soon value these differences.

It seems to be a society where the universal ideology is now consumerism, not communism, and the drive for prosperity and prestige is wrapping the people in concrete and congestion and choking air pollution. Where will it take China over the next 20 years, and what will be the impact on the rest of the world?

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The countryside

And that's just the cities. China still has hundreds of millions of people living in rural communities, and we managed to sample a few of these. The shops are more basic, covering everyday necessities, lined up along the streets in standard units with wooden or metal shutters. Some units are occupied by workshops, dealing with metal or timber, car and bike repairs, and recycling of piles of waste.

People walk along the streets from the fields carrying their produce in baskets on their backs, or on bam-bam poles across their shoulders, or in carts pulled along by hand or bicycle. They seem to do all the hard physical work themselves rather than using animals - the only place we saw horses carrying materials was in the Tiger Leaping Gorge. At Qincheng Shan, Sichuan, lines of porters were carrying sacks of cement on their backs up the mountain for construction work. Perhaps it's simply that human labour is cheap in China, and livestock are relatively costly to buy and look after with no room for stables or paddocks in fertile highly populated areas.

Seeing people working the land in this way, carrying or dragging heavy loads,

Travelling through the countryside, it was striking just how intensively the land was worked, with every inch of the low-lying plains seemingly put to productive use, supported by intricate irrigation channels. This was most obvious in Yunnan, around Lijiang and Dali. Further north, on the train journey from Xian to Beijing, there seemed to be more evidence of unproductive land due to quarrying, erosion and industrial pollution. Both in Yunnan and north of Beijing, however, there was extensive afforestation to repair damage to the land and improve water retention.

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Culture and religion

We didn't see a lot of modern-day Chinese culture, in terms of music or art, but found a lot of traditional designs in the objects for sale to tourists - particularly in Yunnan. Walking around the stalls in Baisha village we were told by all the vendors that their goods were genuine Naxi designs, but it wasn't easy to verify these claims. When we found a shop in Dali where a young woodcarver was creating the goods on the premises, we were more confident of making a good purchase.

Many religious and cultural monuments survive in the cities and the countryside, attracting tourists and their spending. One Buddhist temple was tucked away in the hutongs east of our hotel in Beijing, and we visited another Tibetan temple to the north where many visitors clearly still held strong religious beliefs. In rural areas, hilltop temples provide the objective for lengthy walks along constructed paths (see China for Walkers).

However today, rather than Buddhism, Confucianism or even Communism, consumerism seems to be the dominant belief.

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Next page >

Language and signs

Attitudes to visitors

Accommodation

Toilets

Food & drink

Getting around

Page 3 >

Money and prices

Ripoffs