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China background information for walking holidays - hints and tips

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Walking in towns and cities

For locations visited, see the China Map

Money and prices

The price of most basic goods in China is remarkably cheap by Western standards. We reckoned that for food in restaurants, hotel accommodation, transport and clothes, you could generally reckon on local prices being 20-25% of UK prices. It's no surprise then, that factories can pay people relatively low wages yet people earn enough to live on.

As an example, we stayed at a guest house at Qincheng Shan, west of Chengdu, and had two clean rooms with showers, plus a large evening meal with 4 beers, and a substantial breakfast. It cost 100 yuan for the 3 of us (£7). Not surprisingly, Beijing and other cities such as Xi'an are more expensive. An upmarket "Royal Restaurant" in Beijing's World Trade Centre set us back 300 yuan for two, or £10 each including drinks.

Luxury consumer goods tend to be closer to Western prices, such as cars and electronic goods, but plenty of people seem to be able to afford them. Presumably they spend so little on the necessities of life that they can save enough for some luxuries. This explains the retail boom in all the cities, with vast shopping malls and plenty of western brand names in evidence. Most of the images of wealth and glamour feature white Western faces.

Entry to historic attractions and parks is relatively expensive by Chinese standards - often 30 - 50 yuan (£2-£3.50). A sedan chair ride being carried by two men all the way round the Qincheng Shan religious site would set you back 248 yuan, or about £16.

The money itself is strange, in that there are hardly any coins in circulation. Even though 1 yuan is only about 7 pence (UK) or 10 cents (US) the notes are widely used. There are even notes for 1, 2 and 5 jiao when 10 jiao make 1 yuan. It's great not to have your pockets jangling with small change that you can't get rid of. The 100 yuan notes all feature pictures of Chairman Mao, although right at the end of our stay we were surprised to get one with an alternative design we'd never seen before.

Bargaining is the normal way of buying things in many shops, particularly those selling tourist goods, where you can usually get things for 20 or 30% of the price originally quoted. You soon get a feel for which places have fixed prices. Hotels will usually be prepared to agree to a lower price than the first one they give.

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Ripoffs

We were caught out three times, and almost a fourth - so watch out for similar situations!

We were charged 400 yuan for a taxi from Beijing Airport to our hotel in the city centre, when it should have been around 100 yuan. We had even been careful to resist the tactics of taxi drivers around the airport exit, heading for the taxi rank, but were then led round to a taxi parked in a car park. We should have said no and gone back, but were tired and wanting to get to our hotel. The lesson is to look out for the Beijing Taxi Driver Service Supervision Card issued by Beijing Municipal Bureau of Transportation, with a photo of the driver and a number, in a blue border, on the dashboard. We didn't make that mistake again.

However, we did get caught out by an unscrupulous travel agent in Dali who charged us double commission on our air tickets from Kunming to Chengdu (in fact he charged extra for tax, when it was already included in the ticket price).

And then we called into a cafe at the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing, and after a meal costing 45 yuan for the 3 of us we were tempted to have Western-style coffees. We didn't check the price first, and were charged 95 yuan (over £6) for 2 lattes and a black coffee.

The other trick to watch out for is the higher-priced menu in English - it's worth working out what the Chinese symbols for one or two of your favourite dishes are, so that you can double check with the Chinese menu and the waiter will be extremely embarrassed and offer you the prices for locals.

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CHINA FOR WALKERS

China only tends to appear on people's lists of walking holiday destinations either:

if they are heading for the Great Wall (often hiking for charity)
if they are climbing Everest from the Chinese side!

This isn't surprising, as it's not really developed as a location for walking holidays. That's the value of the Walking Stories concept - providing a bit of background on what it's like going out there and trying to see places on foot, so that others can get reassurance (or know what to watch out for).

Michael Palin's short section of an episode in the Himalaya series in early 2005, walking through Tiger Leaping Gorge, may have opened up a few people's eyes to the wider opportunities, but there's not much information generally around on walking in China - even less than for Japan. However, there are quite a few suggestions in the Lonely Planet Guide, which we used on our trip. I'm not going to repeat what's already covered in guides such as this.

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Our experience was that it was no problem going walking where the Chinese go themselves - such as at Qincheng Shan, Tiger Leaping Gorge, and around the cities. A friend of Catriona's, with whom we left our packs when we visited Qincheng Shan, felt that most of China's wilder countryside was pretty inaccessible to walkers - the Chinese tend to construct footpaths which people are expected to follow, as at Qincheng Shan and Quincheng Hou Shan, often associated with religious monuments as these are. As they are situated on mountain-tops, there are LOTS of steps to climb, built of concrete or stone, providing a clear safe route. Elsewhere it's not easy to go off road and explore.

All the same, we managed a hike around fields to the north of Dali, and a bike ride across fields to the south. There were trails up the mountains behind the town (again to religious monuments), but we didn't have the time to explore them. North of Lijiang we were able to walk and cycle around the village of Baisha and other settlements on the way there. Catriona had also managed to find routes for walks on her visit to Yangshuo and other locations. So there's plenty of scope for walking - it's maybe not so easy in the remoter areas, and the Tiger Leaping Gorge route is a bit unusual in that respect as effort has gone in to publicising it, and it's caught the imagination of a lot of overseas vistitors.

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Maps and guidebooks

The Lonely Planet Guide was a pretty good starting point, indicating many of the best known religious walks, and giving us some good background for our main expedition in Tiger Leaping Gorge.

There doesn't seem to be much in the way of decent walking maps available locally. In Lijiang we tried lots of places for maps of the locality, and Tiger Leaping Gorge, but only got a slip of paper from the bike hire shop with a rough indication of local roads, and a parchment-type brown paper map from a climbing shop in Chinese which we later realised covered a vast area of south-west China and had insufficient detail for our purposes.

For some cities, there are streetmaps available from hotels and shops. Xian was the best served, with accurate streetmaps available for 10 yuan (I think it was) at the airport and in the city. And of course it's easy these days to get a good streetmap of Beijing before going to China - I'd got a laminated Insight Fleximap which was ideal for referring to whilst walking around the city. Catriona had a Chongqing tourist guidebook produced locally in English with good information on scenic tourist attractions in the area, so these can be found if you look hard enough.

We should probably have investigated what maps might be available before we went - the Lonely Planet guide indicated Stanfords should stock walking maps of China.

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Other walkers

There was a big contrast between Tiger Leaping Gorge - where the walkers we met were from many different countries - and Qincheng Shan (and Q Hou Shan) where they seemed to be exclusively Chinese. Like walkers everywhere, they were pretty friendly, ready to exchange smiles and greetings. Those in TL Gorge were very sociable, adding a lot to the experience of the walk.

The Chinese walkers didn't seem to make any concessions to the difficulty of climbing up and down gorges in terms of their footwear or clothing - they all seemed to be wearing town shoes and reasonably smart clothes. We had our hiking boots and still found some of the steps on the concrete or stone paths through the hills rather slippy, but the locals seemed to have no difficulty. Only a few resorted to the sedan chairs that were available.

The visit to the Giant Buddha at Leshan involved a hike from the boat for us, up a hill to a temple, before we reached the hills with the Buddha on it - others took the short route from the coach park (and there were plenty of them, as the photo shows!).

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Walking in towns and cities

There's not much to be said about this really - walking is a great way to see around the cities, towns and villages just as much as the countryside. It's somewhat less healthy though, given the amount of air pollution in the big cities. We explored the hutongs and shopping malls of Beijing, the Summer Palace gardens outside the city, the old streets of Dali and Lijiang, the centre of Chongqing and the city walls of Xi'an.

The only place where we had real difficulty finding our way, was when we were looking for the Great Mosque in the Moslem quarter of Xi'an. We managed to walk around the area where it was situated at least twice, without being able to find the way to it. Then eventually we saw a sign leading down an alleyway of shopping stalls selling tourist items, eventually reaching the walls of the Mosque.

Elsewhere, the city maps we picked up (and the plans in the Lonely Planet guide) did the trick. The streets were clearly named, with signs in English as well as Chinese, unlike Japan where English was seldom used.

However, one of the odd things about China is the lack of tourist information facilities, also unlike Japan. We didn't come across any in the main tourist locations of Beijing, Xi'an, or Lijiang. Where there appeared to be offices for tourists, they were effectively agencies selling tours to the Great Wall or the Tiger Leaping Gorge, with no unbiased information on local attractions, walks etc. This seemed to be something that the authorities ought to be sorting out as the Olympic Games approach!

As mentioned elsewhere, the city parks were delightful, being great places to walk especially early in the day when groups of people were practising their Tai Chi and martial arts. Many of them had various fitness machines, including some for walking, in case you don't want to go anywhere!

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