In a nutshell, I like the ‘sights’, not so much fond of the ‘seeing’ part.
China is abundant with amazing places. During our first month in China, around the Golden Week of October, we’ve been to some of the most famous attractions in the country like the Terracotta Army near Xi’an, the Forbidden City and the Summer palace in Beijing, as well as some spectacular places like the Hanging Temple near Datong and the Great Wall near Shaanxi. The second time, in December, we went to Zhangjiajie, Tianmen Mountain, the Stone Forest, Tiger Leaping Gorge and more (links to individual posts to follow ;-) )
In most places we’ve been to during late autumn and early winter, we definitely saw there were less people around as it was low season, and it made the whole ‘seeing' experience much more tolerable than before. I had some interesting discussions about what bothered us most, with M and with other foreigners traveling in China, which led me to some personal insights on sightseeing in China from a foreigner point of view:
- The crowd — anywhere you go, off season, shoulder season, high season, you’ll not be by yourself. This by itself is not a bad thing, but the Chinese masses tend to be somewhat of a nuisance - many are loud, smoking, inconsiderate by Western standards. A picture worth a thousand words, we’ve seen almost every item in action:
- The signage —with a striking contrast to their ancient marvelous history of astronomy and geography, it appears modern Chinese do not know how to draw a map on scale or post usable signage (at least in English) in most of the scenic areas we visited. This makes hard to evaluate the distance and the time to get somewhere. The worst by far was the Summer Palace in Beijing where there was either no signs or they were misleading, especially outside the main gates. We ended up wandering around trying to locate some of the places we wanted to visit, eventually missing some of them.
- The service — the main audience at the sites we visited were local tourists. Although most sites, especially the World Heritage sites, have explanatory signs in English, but even there English speaking staff is still relatively rare. ‘Tourist information centres’ do not offer information or services either, and staff often don’t speak English. It seems locals prefer to travel in groups, where a guide with a flag and a loud microphone is followed by a dozen or so tourists. Many places are designed for that — the groups usually get a priority over individuals, so it was not uncommon for us to wait in line while the Chinese groups were bypassing us (and the local individual tourists as well). On the other hand, these groups are being led on very explicit paths, so in some places it was possible to avoid them by taking the roads less taken.
- The facilities — in many places, you pay a hefty sum of money to enter, sometimes you need to pay extra inside the site to be able to access some a special exhibition or a mean of transportation. In many places you see there was the initial investment to make the site nice and attractive, but then you notice quickly the lack of maintenance that prevails all around. You go through a corridor with bare electrical wires, you walk on broken side walks, many things simply do not work, especially in museums, and you can figure out it is out of order for a long time.
I suppose this is partly due to culture, partly to the rapid pace of development China is experiencing in the last decade; visitors and tourists who visited 20 years ago say today is much better and easier than it used to be, as you can travel independently and you’re virtually free to wander wherever you like. I assume at some point, there will be more investment towards foreign tourists, maybe in a generation or so. After two months, we’re happy to move on.
