Chinese Tourism 101
When my grandmother and I were making plans to travel to China together, all the seniors at her Chinese church thought that she was crazy.
They were all traveling to China as well. But while they were going for two months, my grandma only wanted to go for two weeks (being a Manhattan gal, she couldn't bear to leave that city for a day longer). And while they were all going in the early summer, my grandma and I had planned our travels for August - a month with a reputation for being hot, humid, and sticky throughout the Orient.
But our Manhattan pad was also hot, humid, and sticky - so when we took off from there and landed in my parent's air-conditioned Beijing flat, things didn't seem so bad. Although outdoors it was brutally hot, inside was a breezy 72 degrees. And taxis abounded to whisk one away for sightseeing or shopping in a/c equipped locales.
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The Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, at the edge of People's Park. It isn't raining - all those umbrellas people are carrying are for shade from the intense sun. Nanjing Road, Shanghai, in the somewhat cooler evening hours.
Skyline of Pudong, an concentrated area of new development on the East bank of the Huangpu river, Shanghai. |
Last week, though, granny, mom, dad, and I braved the heat to travel South - far away from Beijing and far away from the embassy's climate-controlled comfort zone. For a week, we were going to be real tourists: and as I soon found out, being a tourist in China - especially in the dog days of summer - can be a true learning experience.
The plane from Beijing to Shanghai was sold out, as, my mom informed me, pretty much all flights in China are. In a reversal of North American ticketing schemes, the closer you get to a departure date and time, the cheaper tickets get, ensuring that every plane fills up. Our carrier, Hainan Airlines, was one of a myriad of discount airlines beginning to fill the runways. Recently, one new player was offering Beijing-Shanghai flights as low as 99 RMB ($12 US) each way - and no 9/11 security charge, either. Beat that, JetBlue.
A short two hours later, we had arrived at our first destination - Shanghai, the "rising star" of China.
Lesson 1 - Shanghai: Keep your head, and keep cool
Shanghai has a reputation for having a "Shanghai vs the rest of China" complex - and perhaps with some reason. The city has a more cosmopolitan air than its rivals, complete with Mercedes dealerships, neon-lit night life, and women clad in non-fake-Gucci (invariably in high heels). While its century-and-a-half long history lends a certain pedigree, a good part of the development is stunningly new. With eyes freshly accustomed to still-developing Beijing and long-established New York, I found myself gaping at the myriad of steel and glass pinnacles and high-tech structures performing feats of architectural acrobatics. Over four hundred towers taller than 100 meters populate the skyline - all but six of which had emerged, ex-nihilo, over the past fifteen years.
Still, there was no climate-controlled glass bubble built over the downtown core (yet) - and the heat was a stunning 100+. An hour of walking the Century Park area about did us in, before we retreated to the city art gallery - and from thence to an air-conditioned restaurant on the park - and from thence to a huge shopping mall (shopping definitely being a valid form of cultural experience - but that's a topic for another travelogue).
In that kind of heat, the proposal to take a day-trip to a water-side village seemed like an excellent idea.
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Part of our Zhouzuong tour group, examining an inscription in the pavement of a historic courtyard house.
Traveling the canals of Zhouzuong by gondola |
Lesson 2 - Zhouzhuong: When in doubt, head for water
Many of the tourists traveling to Shanghai end up squeezing in side trips to outlying areas, like Zhouzhuong. Why Zhouzhuong? Among six Chinese towns in the region built up, Venice-like, around extensive internal canal systems, Zhouzhuong is ranked #1. Of course, in a national tourism industry full of potential revenue-grabs, every village and mountain apparently ranks #1 or #2, on some form of completely arbitrary scale.
Our modus operandi for getting to Zhouzhuong: a coach-bus, air-conditioned and complete with a Chinese-speaking tour guide.
In high heels, of course. While English language resources are somewhat scarce, Chinese-language tourist resources abound - including all-inclusive guided day tours, which run at about 140 RMB ($17) a head. That reflects a burgeoning domestic tourist market, a sector with nine times the number of tourists and twice the revenue of foreign tourism. Significant when one considers that tourism accounts for 5.4% of China's 7.2 trillion dollar GDP.
Add it up, and you'll find that takes a fair quantity of $17 tours.
As for the bus that we found ourselves on - the company runs so many daily tours from Shanghai, that they've been nicknamed the "bus tour supermarket".
Naturally, our bus was packed to the last seat, and after the obligatory stop at "Most famous Chinese Silk factory" (a commission-based factory outlet - there's one in every tour, though the pushed products vary), a scenery-hungry crowd disembarked at the sought-after village. Ours was one of only a few tour buses that day, because of the continuing oppressive heat - but that also meant that we had run of the town. Its labyrinthine roads were a little less Renaissance than Venice, but as promised, certainly picturesque. Possibly, even, the #1 scenic canal-town in the area.
Lesson 3 - Hangzhou: Know when to retreat
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The path to Tiger Spring Shrine, Hangzhou.
Boat tour of the scenic West Lake, Hangzhou.
West Lake, Hangzhou - without the crowds! |
The sense of splendidly (if heat-induced) languid travel felt in Zhouzhuong disappeared even before our arrival in Hangzhou. During the two-hour train ride from Shanghai, a travel agent roaming the cars had sold us city maps, convinced us to drop previous reservations, booked us into her recommended lake-side hotel, and signed us up for a day-long city tour, leaving the next morning at 8 am.
Rising to the wake-up call ring of the telephone, we threw bags together and dashed down to the lobby to meet our tour bus - again a packed affair. This particular tour came with a veteran of the tour-guiding arts: a cell-phone-bearing, flag-waving, bull-horn wielding matron. With lightening speed, she strode the aisle of the bus, collecting fares and pinning admission-badges to each passenger, all while announcing, in a non-stop tirade of rant-qua-information, the six famous scenic spots on the day's agenda.
Scenic spot number one: Tiger Spring Shrine, where a Buddhist monk was saved from dying of thirst while meditating, by a tiger who scratched through the ground to reveal a spring. A pleasant jaunt through deciduous forest to a minuscule waterfall, though one had to fight with the other tourists for space on the path. Fierce shoving ensued at the water source, with all able-bodied men, women, and children vying to wash their faces in the sacred spring.
I simply presented a simple prayer to thank God that this wasn't a country where people bear firearms.
Scenic spot number two: West Lake, the effective centre of Hangzhou, made legendary as a favoured imperial retreat and the subject of several dynasties' worth of painters and poets. Billed as the #3 lake in China - a pretense of false modesty? But indeed, the lake did seem quite beautiful - at least what we could glimpse of it from our standing-room-only boat tour.
Scenic spot number three: The Mausoleum of General Yue Fei (and I simply must quote travelchinaguide.com here) "is a monument to the patriot who was murdered in 1141 at the behest of his archrival Qin Hui, the Song prime minister. These buildings add to the calm and beauty of their surroundings." Nothing like a bit of murder and mayhem to add to the #3 lake's scenic value.
Exhausted by the overly-full morning, we turned in our badges and skipped out on scenic spots numbers four-through-six. Instead, we chose to nap through the hottest part of the afternoon, then opted for a quiet evening walk along West Lake by ourselves.
Along the non-scenic-designated paths, the crowd of tourists disappeared. A few local residents lingered in the parks around the lake. An elderly woman played ballon-soccer with the toddler in her charge. Groups of men gathered around stone tables to compete at mah-jong. Young couples strolled in the gathering dusk.
Here, the beauty of the lake did, indeed, emerge: its waters shimmering in the sunset, willows softly rippling along its banks, tall mountains framed in the hazy background. And in those moments of perfect calm, the heat of the day seemed to melt away.
