Getting lost and found in China’s spectacular south

“Remember, we’re the weird ones,” my husband advises as we try to explain ourselves to a confused hotelier. Using Google Translate, we asked if we could drink tea with our breakfast consisting of noodles, side dish and warm soy milk. “Do you want me to make you tea now?” responds via the app. Clearly an unusual request, but he brings us two cups of green tea.

Confusing hoteliers is just one of the many surprises on our first holiday in China, which included the sleek modernity of towns and cities, the sheer size of everything and being mobbed by giggling teenagers.

Encouraged by a three-week trip to Taiwan earlier in the year, and armed with just two Chinese expressions (hello and thank you), my husband and I thought heading to China for a few weeks would be a breeze.

How wrong we were, but the unexpected complexity was a taste of what traveling was like before translation apps and GPS navigation, when itineraries could be delightfully derailed by a simple misreading of a map or a misunderstood question. It’s also a reminder that the best tourist experiences depend on the kindness of strangers.

The decision to visit China was born out of a combination of cheap flights. visa-free entry (currently 30 days). Once we realized how much luxury $200 a night in hotel accommodations could buy, the exchange rate (in our favor for once) sealed the deal.

We decided to skip the big cities in favor of the natural attractions of Yunnan in the south of the country. It is a mountainous region dotted with picturesque “ancient” towns (many of which have been rebuilt for the tourist market). It is also one of the most popular regions for domestic tourists in China (the region had 539 million visitors in 2023) due to the architecture and culture of the ethnic groups living here. We naively thought it would be relatively easy to travel there.

Decades of anti-China rhetoric in the West, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, have apparently made some Western tourists reluctant to visit. “Why do you want to go there?” was to avoid friends when they heard our destination.

The lack of Westerners is both a blessing and a curse for non-Chinese speakers. We were clearly a novelty and were frequently asked to be photographed with random strangers. In the perfect and truly ancient town of Shaxizhen, my husband was surrounded by a group of giggling teenagers who wanted to take photos with him.

During our entire trip, we generally only saw dozens of white faces in tour groups at the most popular tourist spots and only a handful of independent travelers, none of whom were Australian.

Whatever the reason we stay away, it’s our loss. Yunnan’s landscape is literally breathtaking, as the average elevation of the region is 1700 meters. In addition to hiking, there are many cable cars that take visitors up the high mountain slopes. The highest reaches 4500 meters at Yulong Snow Mountain (also known as Jade Dragon Snow Mountain) near Lijiang.

In lush green valleys, often on the banks of lakes, there are low-rise towns filled with wooden buildings close together. The perfection of these venues gives them a Disneyland feel and makes for an ideal backdrop for endless photo ops, mostly of young women in ethnic attire.

Minority dress photography is big business: Photo studios in ancient cities outnumber souvenir shops, and the hashtag “I wore minority dress” has more than 440 million videos on the Chinese version of TikTok.

In the tourist hub of Xizhouzhen, we find ourselves off the beaten track in an area of ​​the town where the Bai people live, as both Google and Apple maps are inaccurate. It’s an unexpected look into their lives. The women we see are all wearing traditional clothes, but we don’t get the opportunity to ask them what they think about Gen Z fashion.

Since Google’s services (maps, email, YouTube, everything) are blocked by China’s great firewall (the company fell out with the Chinese government in 2010 over censorship of content), navigating it is one of the biggest challenges we face. Apple has a better relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its maps are more accurate than Google’s, but they’re still far from perfect.

We can access our Google applications using eSIM. For some reason this bypasses China’s firewall. When using the hotel Wi-Fi we can sometimes get a VPN working which allows us to access Google and English news sites.

Like many people, we’ve become accustomed to GPS guidance wherever we go. Outside of Australia, Google maps can be problematic; Many times in Jordan we were directed to roads that did not exist; However, in China, translation problems were added to these problems. Searching for maps for our hotels using the English name provided on Trip.com sometimes leads us to the completely wrong place.

Fortunately, our rideshare and taxi drivers are incredibly helpful and in some cases even talk to hotel staff on the phone to get the correct location.

This warmth of welcome is the biggest surprise. Everywhere we go, our busy staff takes time to talk to us through translation applications. On our last night in Kunming, we were treated like royalty when we stayed at a hotel inside the World Horti-Expo Garden. This is the site of a 1999 exhibition featuring gardens from around the world. Some of the gardens have been taken over by hotels and other businesses, and some remain as they were when the exhibition opened.

We go to what we think is an ordinary restaurant for dinner and are ushered into a large private dining room served by a group of people who cannot do enough for us. We take photos with the staff before leaving. It’s weird to think that it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to someone in a day.

While the landscape is epic in scale, so is the built environment. As we speed through the countryside on the high-speed train from Kunming to Dali, we can see new highways rising above the fields and skyscrapers rising in the suburbs. Tourist infrastructure includes large ticket halls in major areas and efficient shuttle buses to transport visitors between landmarks.

Despite the popularity of the places we visited, it is very easy to stand out from the crowd by walking just a few hundred meters from the entrance.

At the Shilin Stone Forest, a labyrinthine rock formation near Kunming that attracts 5 million visitors a year, we quickly dodge rival tour guide shouters and find ourselves virtually alone for most of our visit.

Unlike other countries we’ve visited, China regulates its natural attractions, and even with such a large area as Pudacuo National Park (also known as Potatso National Park) and Yulong Snow Mountain, tourists are limited in where they can go. The benefit is that the roads are well constructed and there are food outlets and toilets at regular intervals. The downside is that there are security cameras and speakers everywhere.

An exception is the Tiger Leaping Gorge walkway, which is unsupervised but features food stalls selling locally grown produce and a coffee shack serving unexpectedly good coffee.

The existence of coffee culture is another pleasing discovery. There are nice cafes almost everywhere we go, many selling flat white products. The strangest location is the Starbucks inside a cave in the Yilian Jiuxiang Scenic Area outside Kunming, 40 kilometers up a winding mountain road.

Luckily, ordering food is easy if there’s an illustrated menu, and Google Translate helps when there aren’t any.

Despite the luxury of our accommodation and the modernity of our surroundings, what this trip provided was the same, slightly thrilling, feeling of not being fully in control, a holdover from the Lonely Planet backpacking days. Would we do it again? I am sure!

details

Fly
A number of carriers fly to Kunming via various major cities. We flew into eastern China and transited through Shanghai, but other options include transits through Beijing (Air China) or Guangzhou (China Southern). To see oa.ceair.com; airchina.com.au

To spread
You must obtain a Chinese driver’s license before renting a car. This can be complicated and we did not do this. For a detailed summary of your options, see farwestchina.com

To wander
We used a mix of planes, trains (which were excellent) and taxis for transportation, but we also hired private drivers to take us to areas where public transportation was limited. Drivers were organized for us by hotel staff and we paid the drivers directly. We found that our Australian bank did not allow payments to individuals via WeChat and AliPay, so we paid our private drivers in cash.

Visit
You need to make advance reservations at Yulong Snow Mountain if you want to guarantee access to any of the park’s options, not just the mountain itself. Yunnan Exploration details various ways to do this. To see yunnanexploration.com

The author traveled at his own expense.