At present, I’m just hours away from boarding a flight to Vietnam following just over six weeks of travel in China. I’m not going to attempt to condense the entire experience into a single post, I probably should have started writing posts a lot earlier to be honest, but finding the time to get onto the Internet to do more than Email and upload photos to Flickr was enough effort as it was. I can’t understand how some travelers manage to sit for hours on laptops in hostels on shit WiFi to write about their daily activity, but I suppose it’s easier if you’re prepared to lug a laptop around in your backpack.
China ah! Good times! It didn’t seem the best when we arrived from Japan, but in retrospect it’s easy to see why. We’d come from one of the cleanest, pragmatic countries in the world into a still developing nation. The air in Beijing was so thick with smog you could barely see beyond a quarter mile, traffic was hectic and raging with the sound of constant beeping horns and gobbing phlegm. Culture shock came on pretty fast, but acclimatising to this new environment didn’t take long.
Our visit to the Great Wall at Jinshaglin was brilliant. Much of the wall here is still original which meant we had a great time clambering over crumbling sections, it felt like a proper heritage experience. Pity I can’t say the same of the Summer Palace we visited on our penultimate day; it was rammed with tourists and it’s been raped by cheap merchandise and shitty restaurants.
Xian was second-up on the journey. The city is home to the greatest number of manufacturing plants in the country, you could feel it in the air – by the end of our stay here I was feeling pretty sick and black bogeys were rife. Having said that though, the people we met here were awesome. On one bike ride through the city we were invited by some locals to sit with them and learn the game ‘Ma jong’, drinking copious amounts of tea and making interpreted conversation via a fella who works for Volvo. It was a turning point for our travel experience; having the opportunity to mix with locals and being welcomed so warmly.
We took a bus to The Terracota Warriors a couple of days into our stay in Xian, but unfortunately it wasn’t the incredible “8th wonder of the world” we’d been led to expect. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s grand; the scale of mass-production achieved by the Chinese hundreds of years before they started making Tellys and iPods is very impressive. It’s just the legions of tour groups and lack of physical proximity to the Warriors didn’t make it feel tangible. Just over-hyped I guess.
