Finally we find the tourist zone

I'm loving the internet cafes (网吧 or Wangba to those in the know) in China. They are invariably enormous with around 100 - 200 pcs, dark, equipped with sofas, widescreens and fast connections. All have headphones and video cameras, and typically cost around 20p an hour. Best of all though, there's at-computer food. While sitting browsing, someone came around shouting something random. As he passed I mimed eating, he nodded and two minutes later I had a bowl of tasty noodles, for about 30p.





Most places we'd been in China to date had not been on the tourist trail but Wulingyuan is a world heritage site and we were expecting the full tourist paraphernalia. It was still excrutiatingly difficult to make ourselves understood. No-one seemed to understand our request to find the bus to the park, and when we got there we found the hotels available were sterile and expensive. We arrived and were trailed by an English speaking Chinese guy who was a wannabe guide. He followed us around the village as I looked for a place I'd found listed on the internet advising us that he could get us a good rate in his hotel. After half an hour of this we caved and followed him into a hotel where he promised us the rate was 180 Yuan per night (about 12 stlg). We paid up and went to the room thinking we'd escape him that way. But no. After 20 minutes we had a call to the room asking if we needed a guide. We said no. Then we went to the park. He intercepted us en route and trailed us into the park asking if we needed a guide. We said no, again. Eventually we shook him off and enjoyed a fabulous walk through the kind of scenery you only see in films, only spoilt by innumerable Chinese tour groups toting megaphones. Fortunately all they seem to do is go to the nearest beauty spot, take their posed shots and leave. We soon shook them off, which is more than we could say for our friend who was waiting for us on the exit to the park and offered us massages, dinner, tours, you name it while regaling us with a guilt trip about his lack of work and money that day.

In the end we caved (again) and asked him to organise a rafting trip we had been unable to organise ourselves due to the supreme lack of tourist infrastructure and english speakers in the village. China just doesn't do international tourism - why would you when the domestic tourism market is probably the biggest industry in the country? As foreigners we were sufficiently unusual in this major tourist attraction that one chinese guy took photos of us on his mobile phone.

We warmed towards the guide slightly and even let him profit from a vastly overpriced dinner at his commission restaurant. That was until we discovered the price of the hotel he'd led us to was not 180Y per night, but per person, which made it very costly indeed for China. Clearly he was getting the cut of the profits here and our rafting trip was tainted by resentment as a result.

The trip the next day was booked through an agent in the city and we joined two Chinese couples in a minivan. Together we toured the biggest cave in Asia (Jiuntian) (commentary in Chinese only), a Ming dynasty village where an old lady allowed us to see her house and was so delighted to see some foreigners she could hardly wipe the grin off her face. We were ordered into another (we can only assume) commission restaurant to eat horrendously overpriced lunch at 11am. The waitress was very upset with us when we told her we wanted what the Chinese couples were having, presumably because it wasn't the most expensive thing on the menu!

Then came the rafting. We had thought we were going whitewater rafting. In fact it was more like bananaboating down a river on a motorboat. The full force of the China tourist machine became evident. We thought it was just the six of us doing the rafting waiting on the river bank, when swarming over the brow of the hill came 50 (mostly male) chinese who'd arrived on a tour coach. We jumped on the banana boats and headed downstream through dramatic limestone cliffs towering about 600 metres vertically above us. At the half way point we were unceremoniously dumped along with the 50 other tourists onto a tiny rock where entrepreneurial chinese hawked photos of drenched tourists on their boats from their digital printers which were miraculously powered on the isolated outcrop.

The lack of women everywhere in China is noticeable. To a limited extent this may be to do with the one child policy and the notorious selective abortions. But not to the extent we notice. On the rafting trip, for example, I counted 7 women and 40 men, and this from a tour bus. On the buses and trains the ratio of men to women is roughly 2:1 and on beaches more like 8:1. Just what are all those women doing while their menfolk are merrily lapping up sunshine and floundering down rivers? Answers on a postcard please.

We were quite relieved to leave Wulingyuan after all the guiding stress, though it is truly fabulous and the photo I have here doesn't do it justice at all (my battery failed at the crucial moment). Wannabe guides are fine if you want the help but when all we wanted to do was walk around the park it was very unwelcome.

Next stop Fenghuang, reached via a two hour winding road through a patchwork of rice terraces, with naked boys swimming in rivers, butterflies flitting around, melons for sale by the side of the road. If we hadn't been bouncing around on a suspensionless smoky minibus it would have been a fabulous journey.

Fenghuang is a gorgeous riverside town mostly built of wood, some houses stilted and swarming with (mostly Chinese) tourists. I counted 7 westerners, including ourselves, but that's quite a lot for a place two hours from the nearest rail line. After dark we bought a heart shaped paper candle boat for our 6 year anniversary, and floated it downstream. It promptly caught fire and eventually sank in flames. I wonder what that means!


We're currently in Huaihua. We were just discussing how you might pronounce it to ask for the right bus in the station in Fenghuang when a guy bowled up to us and seemed to know where we were headed. Within a moment we were hustled onto the bus. LP reliably informed us the bus departed every 20 minutes. It was 10am so we could expect to leave by 10.20 at the latest. However, the fullness of the bus is far more important than the timetable in China and the powers that be won't let it leave until each corner is equipped with a pot noodle toting customer, and it took an hour for our bus to depart.


We agreed after attempting to buy train tickets in Huaihua that bus travel is infinitely preferable to train travel. We queued for about 40 hot, sweaty minutes just to get to the counter to buy our tickets to Sanjiang. When we got there, 50 impatient Chinese clamoured behind us eager to purchase their tickets and getting increasingly agitated at our inability to understand the frenzied Chinese of the lady in the ticket booth. Steve stood his ground though and miraculously an English speaker was procured. Again we couldn't get a ticket the same day and have an enforced stopover in a nondescript place, having curtailed our time in gorgeous Fenghuang unnecessarily. Ah well. Internet here is virtually free so I'm not complaining... Over and out...