CHINA - out with the old, in the with new

A final post on the 'motherland', a country that must be changing more quickly than any other in the world. Though we didn't meet all of its 1 billion plus citizens, we felt like we met most. Here is Western's lightweight and probably ill-informed report on the first country on this trip that we have been happy to leave.

Why is this? Its possibly travel fatigue, but its also possible that actually the country is now not particularly interesting, certainly if you want an adventure you best look elsewhere. We arrived hopeful of encounters with old wisened chinese cadres, and of cities filled with cycles.....nope. We felt like tourists all the way along, obviously our complete lack of mandarin didnt exactly help the situation, but it really felt like the Big Cheeses in the Chinese Tourist Board had pretty much mapped out the whole country....stand here for the best photograph of the rice terraces.....dress up in tradtional garb and look like a Tibetan.....stick your head through a hole in a painting and look like an emperor...blah blah blah. The domestic tourists lap this up, they have money to spend, and are travelling in huge numbers (in July & August). Old towns have miraculously reappeared after being wiped off the map by the Red guard, and some towns have more 'old' buildings now than when I visited in '97.

The Country is actually far more familiar than you would think. From the shops and the cars, to the excellent train system ( did I say familiar?), the vast majority of people are decked out in the same clobber as you would see at the Whitgift centre in Croydon on a weekend....its not India for sure.

We arrived expecting to have difficulties getting around and making ourselves understood, and that was often the case, but there was always someone on hand to help us, whether it was a student wanting to practice their English, or someone quite happy to play charades with us. We were treated well, and every day something very nice happened to us. As Europeans, or Westerners, we are in a favoured position. If we were Tibetan or Uighur, we would not receive the same hspitality....the amount of times we were told of their primitiveness, or dangerousness...I wonder where they get their opinions from.

As previously mentioned, there is an exploding middle class with money to burn, and people are buying cars in large numbers. One Chinese chap told us they drive cars as though they are still on their bikes, I wouldnt argue with this, reckless at best!

As Western has often banged on about this before, he wont go into detail about the feral-like toilet behaviour of some of the citizens, but he will mention some equally attrocious dental hygiene, that prompted Kiss to comment that some people would only seem to clean their teeth on Mao's birthday. This sounds harsh, but we have never noticed this before in any country, and blimey lets be honest we've visited a few.

State TV does its best to promote ethnic harmony by showing and showing and showing footage of happy minority groups enjoying the benefits of China 2009, I'm not so sure, the Mongolians, Uighurs and Tibetans all seem to have a bit of a beef with Beijing....'splitters!' (name the film for more carbonara!) Internet gets closed down as soon as there are signs of unrest, and blamed for spreading misinformation. And people do disappear here. Tibetans do get shot if they try and escape over the Himalaya.

Most workers from what we can find out work 6 days a week for 51 weeks of the year, wow, a proletarian paradise, and needless to say some of the conditions........

So, all in all, we feel we have spent too much time here, but we HAVE seen some great sights. The wall, the panda's, the rice terraces at Yuangyang, the opera in chengdu, the warriors, the forbidden city, t-drinking in the temples, the beautiful landscapes of Yangshuo....