A detour to China

How far have you traveled?

There used to be an ad campaign in NZ that had the tagline - ‘Don’t leave the country until you’ve seen it,’ which is a pretty good line considering NZ has also been described as ‘The world in one country.’

We have fjords, geothermal geysers, active volcanoes (do not go visit them), beaches that look like the south pacific (um that’s because we are in the south pacific), mountain ranges, rolling hills that are gree, rolling hills that are burnt ochre, and rolling hills covered in rabbits.

So while a tiny country there’s a lot to explore which is what my wife and I have done over the years and we still have places to see here.

However, for overseas travel we were a bit like Samwise Gamgee and haven’t really left the shire.

Hopping over the ditch to see family or to do work in Australia is not really going overseas. It’s very much the same as NZ just on scale and with better weather.

I’d always imagined I’d go to the UK or do the Grand Tour in Europe… China was not on my bucket list.

It’s amazing how a cheap tour deal can change your mind. For the mind blowing price of NZD$1300 per person which was AUD$900 we could get a 10 day tour of China including airfares, bus and train travel, guided tours, 4-5 star accomodation, and full breakfasts. We couldn’t do a trip in NZ for cheaper… there was a catch of course…

The catch was China selling China to us… at every second of the day… at times it felt like we were walking through a Home Expo as we visited a Jade Factory, Silk Factory, Pearl Factory, Tea Plantation and Herbs that would make Gandalf happy.

That said we got to see the Great Wall - this is a photo of me asking my wife if she thinks we have the energy to climb it in 36℃ heat…

Those steps were brutal… we explored the lower guard houses instead… much cooler and we made a friend of a young person on the tour who decided the steps were not for her.

Notice the haze on the hills… this was something we got used to… it wasn’t that China had bad smog it just had this persistent haze where we couldn’t see a horizon. And the haze turned everything slightly beige. There are loads of trees in the cities but overpowering everything was the apartments that ran for miles and miles. We’d never seen anything like it.

I had wondered if I would find scenes to inspire paintings and yet so much of China was muted in colour…

One of the most colourful experiences we had was seeing the latest trend for young women. Wearing imperial clothes for the day. Everywhere we went there were young women doing ancient cosplay, even some boys were getting in on it. Maybe I’ll end up painting some of the cosplayers…

This had to be one of the most charming things we saw in China, young people dressing up and going to cultural sites to hang out. Nothing like imperial dress with cross trainers for comfort underneath.

My wife and I loved chatting with the Chinese, especially the young ones. While we had translation apps on our phones, most could speak English or wanted to practice their english on us.

There’s a lot of fear about China and I have no idea what their government plans to do with all those weapons it is stockpiling. I do know that we felt relatively safe there, that the people would smile and wave and didn’t mind being engaged with. That they have the same regional rivalries and prejudices that I’ve seen in my own country.

China was overwhelming as our first real overseas experience. We chickened out a couple of times on eating locally and ate McDonald’s - we never eat that here in NZ but we sat with a family who also were chickening out and laughed at how we had traveled around the world to eat the same bad food from home. Still when we did eat local it was honest food and really cheap.

All in all I’d recommend China as a holiday destination. They have issues, you are constantly monitored, they have immense pride in their products and want to sell you 24/7 but it is a county that is in a constant state of transformation. It looks forward more than it does backward. Maybe that’s a good lesson for us all.

It’s not where we’ve come from… it’s where we end up.

Hope you all have great journeys this year.