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| Talk,
Thomas Garland,
19 January 1999 | |
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Having sat in an increasingly packed minibus for hours, waiting to leave the smog shrouded port of Tianjin for Beijing, I remembered why Id made a mental note, two years previously as I was leaving China for Vietnam, never to return. I did however return and this time I was coming from Japan and the contrast was only going to make things worse: Having noted that the Japanese are particularly polite, courteous, considerate, well mannered and helpful, one can only conclude that the Chinese are generally not. China is not the land of smiles as Thailand can be said to be, but more the land of spit. Combine this total lack of social graces with a brutal, officious totalitarianism and a little chaos and you have China, so the question is why go? And having returned from my second trip, Im still asking myself the same question.
China should be a tempting place to visit with its civilization that goes
back as far as the faerohs of Egypt and a quarter of the worlds population.
Its got vast wilderness: the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the deserts out
west and the mountains of Tibet (arguably not in China). It has a handful of great cities: Beijing has its forbidden city, summer palace and the mind boggling Great Wall nearby, Shanghai its Bund and Hong Kong plenty more. The food isnt a disappointment, especially if you can read the menus and best of all the policy of milking the tourists for everything theyre worth has been laid to rest, now everyone pays for everything.
However the impression when travelling through this vast and crowded country is that theres not really that much to see. There are countless big cities that have all come to look the same, all of then being reconstructed, anything of interest being bulldozed for the sake of progress which seems to be a flashy glass tower with a revolving restaurant on top and eight lane avenues. The outskirts have remained as grim as ever and everywhere evidence of the waste disposal problem that has yet to be worked out. Each city or province will however claim some site of great interest, usually a pagoda or temple, but having slept on a spit covered floor of a train or gambled your life on a bus to get there one is usually disappointed. Budget accommodation isnt very inspiring either, forget the laid back homely hostels of your dreams and get used to Soviet style Holiday Inns: paperwork, dirty carpets, 40W bulbs and bathrooms seemingly tiled by blind dogs. God knows what creatures worked on the plumbing. Transport can also become frustrating with an archaic booking system for trains that takes some getting used to and delays on buses that you would not believe.
So my advice is if you have to go, and I wouldnt say this about anywhere else, is take a tour so that you can be comfortably shielded from the many frustrations of travelling around the country. Otherwise become exceptionally patient, tolerant, good natured and if possible fluent in Mandarin.
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