Foreword
Posted in China | By tim |
At first glance, there appear to be few positive reasons to go to China and even less to commend it over, say, five weeks on a beach in Thailand; the toilets are medieval, the customs are unpleasant, the people are hawkers, spitters, starers and litterers, all the means of transport are noisy, dirty and sometimes dangerous, the cities are polluted and smelly and frequently tourists are charged three times as much as locals. Not having ever visited before however, I felt convinced that in all of this great giant of a country there must be plenty worth seeing, and that if there wasn’t that travelling there would be a fine experience anyway.
So it was that I persuaded Llewellyn John, a worthy travel companion having already been to China once before, to accompany me on an adventurous five week back-packing journey across China. I had no real agenda, nothing I was going to hold China to showing us, only a kind of unbounded curiosity about the country and what lay behind its mysterious shroud. The Chinese people have been through the political mangle more times than most and their lives have not been made easy by such great and often violent change. Without doubt a traveller in China should expect the country to have its fair share of oddities and individualities. I tried to take with me an open mind although it was often far from easy to keep it open and I hope that along the way I gave China a second chance to prove my foregone conclusion wrong.
I recount here simply the story of our travels : Tales from the People’s Country. Getting into China is no longer the great problem it once was. Our plans revolved around flying to Hong Kong, staying there for a week to enjoy a glorious moment in China’s history – the 1997 handover of British Hong Kong to China – and then make our way into China to travel for four weeks.
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