I was woken today at 6.20AM, so you get to hear my thoughts on a 2 week trip to China before breakfast. First, where did I go? It was a 2 week trip starting in Hong Kong, then flying to Beijing, then a train to Xian, then a flight to ZhangJiaJie, then a flight to Shanghai, then home. Yes, multiple flights, I know. I offset everything, and took the train for the one trip where it was viable. Anyway, here is my experience!
Hong Kong!
…was amazing and cool, but at the end of the holiday it became clear that Hong Kong is massively like the west in comparison to the rest of China (still). It reminded me more of South Korea than the rest of China. Its also a fairly ‘low-key’ city. I thought the skyline was impressive, and we went out on an old Chinese fishing boat on the river to see it (which was probably the highlight of that city for me), but later having gone to Shanghai, Hong Kong was ‘meh’. However it was a good place to start, to get used to using the payment system everyone uses (alipay), the food, and the rarity of people who speak any English.
Beijing!
Beijing is FLAT and has a lot of trees. Two things nobody expected! They seem to deliberately limit high-rise building. And there are a lot of tree-lined streets, even really major ones. This was our first encounter with electric cars in China. OH MY GOD. They are EVERYWHERE, and I would guess 99% of the motorbikes are electric. Its so amazing. Super-busy intersections are both quiet and pollution free. Our guide told us charging-points are everywhere and electricity is super cheap. And no, he really didn’t seem to be a communist party agent! Most of our guides had worked or lived in the west at some point.
The highlight of Beijing has to be the forbidden city. It is HUGE and also amazing. Imagine something like Buckingham Palace in the UK, but about 20x the scale. And its a super popular tourist spot with the Chinese. This was another shock. Really very few western tourists. It felt like 90% internal Chinese Tourism.
We also took a day-trip to see the great wall of China. Its pretty incredible. While we were there we saw a helicopter zipping around, asked the guide, and he said it was £300 for 10 minutes. I am NOT going to return to the great wall in my lifetime, so that seemed like a no-brainer. I love helicopters :D. So we did it. I’ve done a lot of helicopter trips on holidays. I have NEVER had one booked and arranged so casually. No 30 minute ‘safety briefing’ here. Just write down your weight, tick a box and jump in!
It sounds like an indulgent luxury thing, but I massively recommend it. You see the wall in a totally different way, including bits that are not accessible and overgrown with plants. It was incredibly cool.
Xian!
We took an eight hour high speed train to Xian. This was pretty good, and it was how we saw ‘rural’ China. SUPER FLAT for the whole trip (although I assume the train is routed that way for this reason), and oh my god the number of wind turbines was insane. I can assure you Trump is wrong. The Chinese love wind farms. Also we zipped past a LOT of farmland on that trip.
Xian is visited mainly for the terracotta warriors which are very impressive, and presented in a way that the scale is vast, like everything in China. On the way to the site, we zipped along a motorway past dozens if not hundreds of huge apartment blocks and skyscrapers, as our (second) guide casually mentioned that this was farmland five years ago! They literally build a city in five years. Its staggering…
I am very pleased with that photo. Check out the people at the sides to get the scale. It helps that I am a foot taller than the average Chinese tourist.
Also we had another insanely good Xian experience. On a guide’s recommendation, we went to the ‘local show’. We expected a normal theatrical performance. But no… its China. So this one hour theater/acrobat/dance performance had six distinct scenes. In the west, we would pause, maybe lower a curtain, and stage-hands would shuffle the scenery. HA! In China they build SIX massive stages around the theater (which held about 3,000 seats I think), and then rotate the ENTIRE BUILDING around the six stages, so there are no gaps. Yup. Just build an entire theater on a turntable. Simple. Also the show was amazing…
Oh and the show had a ton of people in it, and live animals, dogs and camels and so-on, and incredible acrobatics. The tickets were cheap and it was not full.
ZhangJaiJae!
This is my new favorite place on Earth. I simply cannot possible describe it in words, I could paste a hundred pictures here. Its basically ‘pandora’ from avatar (and the inspiration for the movie). It is STAGGERING. Its like some artist took the Grand Canyon in the US, made it ten times larger, filled it with tropical plants, and then installed glass bridges, cable cars and lifts to make it possible to view all of it from a hundred different places. If you think China is all tower blocks and concrete go here. Its amazing. It also has the worlds second-largest glass bridge (the other one is also in china). I am VERY scared of heights, but crossed it twice!
Like anywhere truly amazing you cannot really capture it in photos. Just go there. If you go nowhere else in China, go here.
Also we went on an insanely good cable car. Why be like boring westerners who would build a cable car from the base of a mountain to the top? Just build a cable car from the city center right to the mountain top, and have it trundle over half the city! Because China… Also we went to the 999 steps to the gate to heaven. But I am not super-fit, so we took the series of NINE escalators in tunnels bored into tunnels in the rock that take you to the top. Again, because… China.
Shanghai!
I was VERY sorry to leave, but next up was Shanghai. Wow. If you have been to a place that feels more like Blade Runner, I would be surprised. They do love their high rise skyscrapers here. This was another city massively into Electric Cars, and a city with a ton of variety. We saw parks with retired people doing Tai-Chi and playing jazz and dancing. We saw an amazing night food market, we went to some brilliant shopping areas, saw some incredible historic buildings, and crazy skyscrapers. This was taken from my hotel room 17 floors up.
I bought a cool watch from the shanghai watch company! We mingled with all the trendy young Chinese people (95% women) dressed up in traditional Tang-Dynasty outfits. It was amazing. And like everywhere we went, it seemed 100% safe, 100% clean. No litter, no graffiti, no homeless people, no begging. You can be cynical about this, but I think the west over-do that cynicism. Anyway I preferred shanghai to Hong Kong.
Thoughts!
99% of what you read in the west about China is BOLLOCKS. We talk about Chinese state propaganda, but its got nothing on the hatchet job the west continues to attempt on China to distract from our own problems. Actually going there is amazing, but also depressing, because you see just how much we are being lied to. We had 4 different guides, so we didn’t get just one perspective. They all worked for private companies. Don’t believe conspiracy bullshit about them being ‘party’ appointed. Our first guide was especially relaxed and frank about what is good in China, and not so good. They make it hard to get a job in a city you were not born in, (in some cases). Another guide admitted he had one child because of the one-child policy (not in place now), and you could tell he was a bit sad about that. He also pointed out that there were real ‘ghost cities’ where too much housing got built.
Too Much Housing
This is the thing. China has its problems for sure, and its NOT a place for the privacy minded. In 15 days I reckon my passport was scanned 60 times and my face scanned each time too. On the flipside, we saw zero litter, zero crime, zero graffiti, and a lot of police in busy public places. To be fair the police seemed fairly chill, and some traffic laws get casually ignored by people on scooters. But anyway let me return to… Too Much Housing.
I am a lucky middle-aged man in the UK who owns his house outright. But young people in the west are kinda *fucked*. House prices are insane and unaffordable. Now to be fair house prices in trendy bits of shanghai are no different to central London, but in general, everything seems CHEAP in China. They have just built so much infrastructure its insane. There was a maglev train from the airport to city-center in Shanghai that goes 300kph, took 8 minutes and cost peanuts. All public transport is ludicrously cheap. Food is roughly a third of the price in the UK. And the public transport is modern, fast and high spec. And the provision for electric cars… oh my god. They are the DEFAULT in many cities. Not just of new cars, of ALL cars on the road. Its wonderful.
When I got home to the UK, I made my regular weekly drive to Bristol. For the last 6 months there has been ‘road widening’ on a stretch of an A-road, maybe 2 miles long (at most). Its still not finished. If you had told me all work had been paused for the 2 weeks I was away I would believe it. We spend BILLIONS on trivial infrastructure that takes decades and progresses at a snail’s pace. China builds fast and dramatically and at huge scale. My local road widening would be at most a week’s work in China, not six months. It is *embarrassing* how both technologically behind the west is, and how useless we are at construction.
Anyway, don’t take my word for it. Search youtube for China impressions from US tourists. They are always similar. Its amazing. Do not believe any western media bullshit about China. And do not listen to anyone who has not been there in the last five years. This is a staggering country that is accelerating away from the west so fast we cannot comprehend it. And go there! Especially ZhangJaiJae!