Some thoughts after visiting China

What the report says

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.

Key details

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!

More from the announcement

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.