• Pictures taken: 1448
• Separate destinations: 6
• Approximate distance transferring between destinations in situ: 4,090km
• Humongous man-eating spiders encountered: 1
• Praying mantises nearly trampled: 2.
• Victorian style fainting spells: 2.
• Steps up and down terraced rice fields: too many to count.

We returned from our long haul adventure last Sunday, the latest of 5 consecutive trips with a UK tailor-made holiday operator. I will ‘fess up immediately to the more respectable of my two near-fainting mishaps: I had a bout of food poisoning at the end of the trip. Not much fun at the best of times, but half way through a 12 hour flight made for one of the most memorable journeys of my life.

Before I get into the litany of the trip, the various venues and photo opportunities [which I will probably spread over a couple of postings] I’ll give a bit of an overview. As you can probably guess by the list above, this was the most challenging itinerary we have ever undertaken, and we are both still shattered.

It’s a particularly urban-centric itinerary, which sets the tone for some of the encounters that we had. If either of our India trips [a comparison that I will come back to later] had included Delhi and Mumbai, it would no doubt have changed our impressions of the country significantly.

We had an absolute ball, had some of the best food we’ve ever eaten on holiday, met some really lovely people, and also probably the rudest taxi driver on the planet. Based on our limited experience, China is a country of extremes. Perhaps a good litmus test is a comparison between the London and Beijing undergrounds, where the former is a good training ground to prepare you for the lack of personal space and general elbows-out / through-you-for-a-shortcut modus operandi. [Another couple of differences are that the Beijing subway seems to run like clockwork and has air con, but that’s another story].

Beijing

Our first venue was Beijing, where we stayed in a small hotel on a hutong in Shichahai. It was a lovely little place which provided our first encounter with a couple of recurring themes on the holiday: noisy streets and beds that are so hard that it feels like you are sleeping on a door.

Given the nature of the area we were staying in [i.e., the hutong], Beijing imparted the sensation of having retained more of its heritage than the other big cities we visited. We packed a lot into our 3 days, including a very bleary eyed trip to Tiananmen Square about 2 hours after we got off the plane from London.

However, our first evening meal provided some unexpected entertainment. We asked our guide for a recommendation, and she suggested a local restaurant which sold Xi’an style noodles, had menus with pictures, and which was less than 10 minutes away. Thus commenced our baptism in small restaurant etiquette. The waitress handed us the menus, and then waited to take our orders immediately. We gestured that we needed a couple of minutes [waitress eye rolling / staring from other tables ensues] and we tried to figure out what species / vegetables we were looking at… And despite not knowing how to order rice, and getting bottles of Sprite instead of beer, we managed to have one of the best meals of the trip: 3 main courses with the soft drinks for just over £5. We subsequently asked our guide for some cheat sheets [rice [steamed / fried], Tsing Tao, ‘spicy?’, large / small] which proved extremely useful.

We had a couple of good trips out with our guide over the next two days, including the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace, which I found – photographically – interesting in a low density way. The degree of specialisation that some of the rooms and buildings were used for was extraordinary – e.g., the room that was used to celebrate the emperor’s daughters’ birthdays, for example.

We had planned a night trip to the Bird’s Nest [only four years after the fact, but better late than never!] but discovered that it’s no longer illuminated at night. With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been interesting to visit Tiananmen Square for some tripod messing, but we were so jetlagged that it was about 3 days after we left the city that the idea even occurred to me.

The highlight of the Beijing leg of the trip and – let’s be clear – pretty much any trip we’ve had, was to the Great Wall at Jinshanling. We covered 5 gates over about 2 hours of walking, which started in a very dramatic way: thunder and lightning and then hailstones. I was worried about the visibility but the cloud burned off within about a half an hour, leaving us absolutely glorious conditions for the hike. We picked up a couple of local people [our guide didn’t accompany us] for the entirety of the trip. To be completely honest, we were a initially grumbling that they had grafted themselves onto us with the intention of guilt-tripping us into buying something, but within about 20 minutes that had charmed us with English way better than our Mandarin, and unnecessary though not unwelcome help for my wife on the slippier steps after the rain shower. They also fashioned a temporary cover for my camera from a plastic bag when it threatened to rain again.

I always get the feeling, when I have had the chance to visit the few world famous sites I’ve been to [Pompeii is another good example], that they’re not quite real – that someone has gone to an awful lot of trouble to make it look the part, but it just doesn’t look like it should somehow. It’s probably an issue of scale [or mild solipsism]. The Wall is simply stunning.

A part of the city that we particularly enjoyed was a shopping area called Nanluoguxiang where I bought a couple of pretty touristy bits and pieces, including a chop, which I’ve wanted since I went to Japan about 12 years ago and ran out of time to get one. [Not entirely true, I got drunk on the last night, missed my flight back and stayed an extra week but that’s another story.]

My wife has already banned me from using it to ‘sign’ any Christmas cards bound for her immediate family :).

One other quick experience to recount before we left Beijing was a night market that we went to in Wanfujing. The food at the various stalls was hit and miss in terms of quality [noodles: awful; fried dumplings: fantastic; fried soft-shell crab: some debate about ‘soft’], but one of the stallholders tried to short-change my wife. Despite the jetlag, my wife noticed immediately and the stallholder seemed to panic, and ended up giving back in total more money than the denomination of the original note. It’s one of those things that’s more annoying on principle rather than for the amount.

Xi’an

The next leg of our journey was to Xi’an via an overnight train. This was probably the only significant error of judgement that we made in terms of putting the itinerary together [I can hear my wife saying ‘we?!?’ :)]. It could have been a lot of fun, but we were sharing our sleeping quarters [2 pairs of bunk beds] with a couple of businessmen. Unbeknownst to us, we were in the company of two international athletes who were competing in the snoring and farting championships.

Where we had envisaged being rocked to sleep by the gentle movements of the carriage rolling through the countryside, what we actually got was a chorus of reverberating bass notes and other sensory assaults. Lovely. Note to self: never travel on a sleeper unless you have the compartment to yourself. Second note to self: just get the plane.

Xi’an is an industrial city which gets its primary tourist trade from the Terracotta warriors. We stayed in a slightly bizarre room in a hotel in a [collective noun for a ‘flock’ of hotels? Anyone?] clump [that’ll do] of four: the slightly scary communist era People’s Hotel, the Sofitel, the Grand Mercure and the Mercure, which we stayed in. Bizarre, because the back wall of the shower was actually a glass panel, the outside of which had louvred shutters to separate your blushes from the bedroom. Why?!? What were the designers thinking of? This really tickled us. Possible scenarios: quick reveal, and a knock on the glass with either a ‘Oi, love, you want a cuppa?’, or possibly a ‘are you nearly done in there?’ The alternative is obviously the slow reveal and the accompanying music…

Speaking of entertainment, we went to a traditional song and dance thing, with dumplings on the side, the ‘Xi’an Dumpling Banquet and Tang Dynasty Show’, on our second night. It was OK. It was a reasonably interesting spectacle, but the food wasn’t great. The service I can best describe as grim. Me: ‘Can I order a beer?’ Waitress: ‘No’. I asked someone else.

And so we come on to another star turn event, the Terracotta Warriors themselves. My expectations around access to the event weren’t that high: I’d assumed that the figures would be behind perspex in order to stabilise humidity. So I turned up with only my 24-105 [and ultra wide lens which I didn’t use] and was hoping for the best. Wrong! It is fab. The pits are open and surrounded by barriers elevated above the figures by about about a metre or so. To be fair, we went the week after the national holiday, so it was probably about as quiet as it gets. We never had to wait more than a minute or two to get a spot [I am sure this could fluctuate wildly].

Flashes and tripods are banned, so it was quite tricky doing some of the long exposures by hand. I wrapped my coat around the barrier and was able to get pretty clear images, with shutter times up to half a second. I thought it would be quite an interesting subject to try some HDR with.

I wish I’d taken my 100-400mm with me to take some portraits, but the reality of the situation is that it was hard enough to hold the short lens steady. That’s what I’m telling myself at least. I’d say that a 70-200 with a beanbag would be the ideal setup.

Xi’an has a very impressive city wall of its own. I was amused when our guide told us that it is renovated every 200 years – can there be any comparable cycle of investment? The wall is quite spectacularly lit at night. Unfortunately the one evening that we did have to explore didn’t afford the greatest of views, so I grabbed a shot of the bell tower in passing.

We had another interesting meal that evening on the edge of the Muslim Quarter. Our driver recommended a place which, when we showed the greeter at the front our cheat sheet, said no, try the place on the other side of the street [I am guessing this was to protect us from the pictureless menu]. Regardless of whether we ended up in the venue he suggested or not, there was yet another mysterious billing situation.

We ordered, with the usual waiting staff intense expectations, and two printed bills were presented before the food arrived, one on of which was put under a glass panel which covered the table, the other on top. These showed a total of 120 Yuan. The first dish arrived with a flourish: a boy walked the long way to our table and removed a cloche, so the waitress could present the food. The boy then stamped the top bill. I assumed all of the items would be stamped to show that they had been delivered and we would be left with the copy. Nope. Two stamps for the four dishes and at the end both bills are removed from the table. The result? The puzzled author went to the counter and with some gestures and a calculator was asked to pay 130 yuan. I have no idea why. The food was glorious.

Guilin and Yangshuo

Our first internal flight was from Xi’an to Guilin, which was a couple of hours, and a very efficient process from start to finish. We had been warned about very strict limits on luggage allowances for these parts of the trip, so I left my laptop at home. My camera bag was the guts of 7kg [the limit was 5kg], so I thought I was pushing my luck as it was. In the end the hand luggage wasn’t actually weighed.

We got into Guilin pretty late [though it was something like 27 degrees and very humid when we got off the plane], and had an early start the next morning, so didn’t get to explore the kitsch charms of the Bravo hotel, with its fur-trimmed lights in the bedroom. We really enjoyed the atmosphere in the bar there, and would have quite fancied an extra night despite being unceremoniously dumped into an overflow [i.e., conference] room for breakfast the next morning.

From there, we had a short drive to a boat trip on the Li River. Unfortunately it was a little misty, but it was a pleasant 4 hours down to Yangshuo.

The hotel that we stayed at here was about 15 minutes walk out of town, and one of our accommodation highlights of the trip. It’s called the Li River Retreat. We had a lovely corner room with its own little balcony, and an unfettered view of the limestone formations. It was also the venue for the huge spider, perched menacingly on the wall when we were coming back from the bar.

Yanshuo is quite a touristy affair, although the main shopping drag, West Street, has suitably ancient provenance. We enjoyed idling away our free day browsing relatively hassle free at the stalls, and had a nice lunch at the Cloud 9 restaurant. We had another nice meal in town – beer fish [AKA catfish cooked in beer]. You are invited to choose the live victim in a restaurant which didn’t have an English name, which was at the recommendation of our guide. The main dish was fairly pricy but delicious – very spicy, the fish on the bone, and retaining a fair few of its organs that would normally be considered in scope for the gutting process elsewhere.

We took in the second of the shows that we went to, this one at the recommendation of our tour company. It was called the Liu Sanje Light Show, which was choreographed by the person who was at the helm for the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. I recall that there was some odd setup with the seats: the ones with the best view are at the front but are are like tractor seats, and are the cheapest. The most expensive seats are at the back, are comfortable, but have an accordingly distant view. We went mid-range. Again, it was moderately pricey [say around £35 each], but the show was absolutely stunning.

There were about 3000 people at the show which is performed entirely on the Li River. Unless you are right at the front and fancy blasting the 600 odd performers with your flash, it’s not a great photo op, but we both really enjoyed it.

Longji [Longsheng]

Our penultimate pit stop was at Longji, the ‘dragon’s backbone’ rice terraces in Longsheng. The countryside is breathtaking, with trees clinging to the most extreme slopes, switchback roads [and constant white knuckle encounters with the ubiquitous Higer buses], and the terraces themselves. We were based in Ping An, or ‘new Ping An’ as we discovered – there is an older village with the same name a couple of hours walk away.

The village is being quite heavily developed at the moment, with a lot of building work going on. I generally have a high tolerance for such issues, as the influx of tourist cash [of which we are obviously a small contributor] is always going to create change. But the level of development is quite extreme in contrast to what the tourists have come to see. The fact that the building work kicked off very close to our hotel [which I’ll come back to], and insufferably early, didn’t help.

I won’t name our hotel, as it was a bit of a ramshackle affair, and one bad breakfast shy of a complete savaging. The rooms were poorly sound-proofed, so on our first night we were treated to our neighbour’s ritualised spitting, followed by his snoring, and our morning call  was the building noise at cock-crow. Oh, and there was an actual cock-crow, just to add a suggestion of bucolic idyl. Breakfast was fairly hit and miss [in terms of quality and a selection of empty dishes to peer into], but to be fair, the guy who was on the front desk did arrange for us to have some eggs on toast when we had made up our mind to go out for breakfast and turned up late. Despite all of that, it had a chaotic charm, the staff were very friendly [with a mysterious capacity for managing running bills without ever appearing to write anything down], and the hotel had some great views.

The village itself isn’t for the faint of heart. Getting there is a 40 minute hike, although there is a sedan option if you can deal with the ‘you lazy git’ stares from the worthy outdoor-types with their GoreTex bobble hats. That’s not actually true: like most of the places we visited, the majority of people around were domestic tourists. We saw people trailing around the precarious paths in some of the most unlikely footwear. The village has a series of unfenced paths, which can be tricky at night and / or after a couple of beers. But the walks are unavoidably going to cover some quite serious inclines. We must have walked for about 8 hours over the course of the two days we were there, and our calves were aching after it. There is some glorious scenery, which made it thoroughly worthwhile.

One final venue worth a mention in Ping An was the Green Garden restaurant. We ate there a couple of times and the food was absolutely delicious, among some of the best food we had on the trip. The stuffed mushrooms were particularly nice.

Happening across this little fella [and another later in the day] was the second time during the trip that I was caught with the long lens:

The road trip back to Guilin airport, and our flight to Shanghai took us into the home straight. A quick trip to the traveller passing through this airport: the food selection air-side is shocking. If you are stuck, buy some of the instant noodles and use the hot water dispensers. We contemplated this but weren’t sure if the packs came with utensils [the one we saw being consumed did], and went to a cafe for the worst meal of the trip. A lot of the airports are comfortable charging the equivalent of £4 for a coffee.

Anyway, on to Shanghai, where we stayed at the Astor House, just beyond the Bund. It’s a nice building, but a little pricy [a fiver a pint in the bar]. Our room had no safe, and a view of more hotel, but to be honest we didn’t really care: the location outweighed everything else.

The breakfasts did have some of the more bizarre options we encountered in standard issue congee avoidance mode. On my final morning, for instance, I had steamed pork dumplings, carrot pizza, toast and a danish. And then I wonder why I was sick on the plane :).

Shanghai itself we really enjoyed. The view east over the Huang Pu river is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. I’ve subsequently [and tongue in cheek] described it as how southern Manhattan will look in a few hundred year’s time.

I had a couple of bites at the HDR shot above on consecutive nights. It was a little hazy, which causes an odd distortion through the camera – the ‘vertical halos’. It’s a problem that I’ve come across before taking night shots in Manhattan. At least I think it’s the haze that causes it.

Coincidentally, my wife’s brother was in town, and we met him for drinks in the jazz bar of the Peace Hotel, which deserves its must-see status. It was an interesting contrast to hear his take on the city: hard work. As a man there on his own on business, he was getting a lot of hassle for services which, shall we say, weren’t being pitched at a married couple.

We enjoyed a free day to ourselves browsing the shops and taking in the sites, although the amount of walking we had been doing was really starting to takes its toll. One of the sites we included was a trip to the 100th floor observation deck of the Shanghai World Financial Centre [the ‘bottle opener’], the tallest building in China. I was feeling the effects of a few beers at the jazz bar the night before, and the combination of hangover and perspex floor tiles was almost too much. I really don’t like heights at the best of times. So in order to avoid falling over in an embarrassing heap, I had to prop myself up in a corner of the observation deck where I couldn’t actually see outside [or the transparent floor sections] while trying to distract myself with my phone. My wife, who has no problem with heights thought it was fantastic, and the process of getting up to the viewing deck, with a short video and a lift straight from the set of Star Trek, was extremely slick. And hence concluded the second of my Victorian style fainting spells :).

We took in our last show which was a mix of acrobatics and stunt motor cyclists – once again, fantastic. Photography was strictly banned, in case of an inopportune flash distracting someone which made absolute sense.

Our final trip before heading home was a day trip to Suzhou, the Venice of the East. It was pleasant enough – again very touristy – but we were so taken with Shanghai, looking back we would have preferred to have had a day to ourselves. But we had the most eccentric of our guides for our time there, and she was really good fun.

Final Thoughts

The trip was fantastic and, looking back at it, apart from chucking the businessmen off the train at Beijing, there is very little that we would change in the itinerary with the benefit of hindsight. We had to set a hectic pace to cover the amount of ground we managed in 14 nights.

That said, looking ahead to the next holiday, we agreed that we would be unlikely to set the bar as high. Due to various health campaigns we were fitter going into this holiday than we have been than any of the long haul trips we have done over the last 5 years, and it still really knocked us for six. This observation is irrespective of China per se, but it casts a long shadow over the ‘balance’ of what you want to try to do and see when you travel a long way to a country that you may not be coming back to.

So China itself is an amazing country, with great scenery and an abundance of history on show. We met some of the nicest people we have ever encountered, and also some of the rudest.

A couple of quick final stories to illuminate the range. We went out for a Peking duck banquet on our second night in Beijing, which was absolutely amazing. Our guide [the wonderful Emily] arranged the trip for us from start to finish. The restaurant had no English or pictorial menus so she took us to the restaurant [called the Beijing Tangyuan Restaurant] before it opened, took our order, told us what the bill would be and showed us where we would be sitting [!]. The duck was worth the trip on its own. Anyway, the final chapter to the cotton-wool clad experience was catching our first Beijing taxi on our very lonesome – high adventure! Emily warned us that the cabs may drive away if the drivers didn’t fancy the trip for whatever reason which the first car duly did, after about a 10 minute wait. So we got straight into the second cab, and presented our detailed instructions which Emily had written out to get us back to the edge of the hutongs. So far so good. At the end of the journey, another Chinese payment mini-mystery started to unfurl, as what was showing on the meter clearly wasn’t what the driver wanted. The meter was showing 20 Yuan, which I duly presented. The driver gestured 3, so I assumed a total of 23, and [as my wife had change] I took the single Yuan notes from my wife’s purse. He lost his temper at this point, said something negative in a raised voice and snatched a 10 Yuan note from my wife’s purse. He then presented us with 7 Yuan in change.

We found this… puzzling.

At the other end of the spectrum, we had a couple of occasions where domestic tourists asked to take pictures with us in them. Our guides had said this might happen, and we were happy to oblige. The second of these had us in hysterics. On our last shopping day in Shanghai, I was sitting on the steps outside a shop on the Nanjing Road, while my wife was having a browse. She emerged, and as we were both suffering from the walking at the terraces from the day before, she sat beside me. A group of about 8 people were milling around in front of us with cameras, on what is a very busy thoroughfare. One of the group peeled off and semi-surreptitiously stood on the steps behind me, so that some of the group members could take shots with us in them. I realised what was happening and turned round to smile at the guy standing behind us. He pointed at his camera and I gestured – sure, no problem. There then ensued a photo shoot, where the group must have taken about 30 pictures with us: different group members, my arm round the elderly lady sitting beside me, shots with my wife, my wife standing for a group shot… By the end of it, we were all in absolute stitches.

While it sounds inconsequential, it was a very touching moment and a standout memory of the holiday for us. Regardless of the fact that somewhere in China there is a social media site with a picture of my head photoshopped onto the body of a water buffalo :).

I mentioned India at the start. There is no objective reason to compare the two countries, but it’s unavoidable for us at it was the destination for our two previous holidays. We remember India with a genuine affection that, much as we enjoyed the country, I can’t say we feel for our Chinese experience. Will we go back to China? Maybe. Would we recommend it? Without missing a beat.