"Okay, I get the picture - White Tigers, Lords of Death, guys in funny suits throwing plastic explosives while poison arrows fall from the sky and the pillars of heaven shake, huh? Sure, okay, I see Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu and a hundred howlin' monkey temples, and that's just for starters, right? Fine! I'm back! I'm ready, goddammit let me at 'em!"


-- Big Trouble In Little China


It's that time again... After seven weeks in China, we're getting ready to leave for Laos. And, to justify the fact that the majority of our posts are pretty low on intelligent comment and pretty high on drunkenness, debauchery and handlebar moustaches, it's Retrospective time. So sit back, relax, and enjoy our fantastically biased and completely incomplete guide to China....

Our Route:

Beijing, Hohot, Yinchuan, Xi'an, Chengdu, Kangding, Litang, Xiangcheng, Zhongdian, Qiaotou, Dali, Kunming, Jinghong, Mengla, Mohan, Laos.

Beijing can be a daunting place to start your travels, as it is huge, polluted, and full of Chinese people staring, prodding, spitting and taking photos of you. After a while though you realise that the majority of Chinese in Beijing are tourists from the more rural areas, and their "White Devil, White Devil" approach to you is just curiosity. We stayed in Leo Hostel, which we would heartily reccomend for its air conditioned rooms, hot showers and bar staff that go to bed leaving the customers in charge of the beer fridge. The restaurant is also great, full of cheap and nice Chinese food.

Culture Shock: As previously mentioned, in our experience it is the Chinese, and not the foriengers that experience the culture shock in China. There are a lot of strange things for us to take on board or course, but then I went to Peterborough once and that was pretty unsettling. The spitting is a main thing here (and I'm back to talking about China now). It's not the little chavs on the street corner spitting because it is a small act of rebellion, or to get the taste out of their mouths, it's everyone and everywhere. At first it's surprising, then it's amusing, and then it becomes unpleasant. But then, after a little longer, you just get used to it.

The smoking is also hard to take. And that's me saying this. I know. As a smoker, it feels like a betrayal to my brethren to complain about smoking in public but there you are - it's a disgusting, antisocial habit that's only cool when you're not forcing it down other people's lungs.... and if you're wearing a leather jacket. In China people smoke in restaurants, while they're eating, they smoke on buses and trains, they smoke whilst they're taking a s*** (more on how I know this later). And they have absolutely no regard for others. This isn't out of spite or nastiness, they simply don't consider that not everyone wants to smell the grey s*** coming out of their lungs. Smokers everywhere unite - the ban on smoking in public places is a GOOD THING.

Travelling: Public Transport is good in China. By this I mean that it exists. Where you go from there is rather a roulette of possibilities. Trains have four classes - soft or hard sleepers, and soft or hard seats. We only travelled in hard seats as anything else was rather tricky to get hold of at the kind of short notice we were offering. Also, you can only book sleepers in the cities where the train starts from. Apart from that you can go for an upgrade but hard seats aren't that bad. You travel the way the Chinese travel, and although you are a bit of a freak show, it's usually fun. Eighteen hours in a hard seat was a little too much, but twelve is about right.

Buses are a little more random, and in many places they are your only option. Some are very good, others are thirty year old minibuses, all have psychopathic drivers. But they get you from A to B, usually in one piece. We have found almost without exception that everyone in every ticket office we have been to is helpful, friendly, and when they don't speak a word of English (which happens about half the time) they are patient and do everything they can to make sure we get what we want - basically the polar opposite of Russian ticket office workers.

Toilets: There is an old adage - the more you pay for a toilet, the worse it'll be... and this is pretty much fair. Apart from the odd hotel and guesthouse, all toilets in China are squat. This varies from a nice tiled affair through to a hole in the ground above a mountain, covering all kind of open sewer unpleasantness in the middle. Vinny and I don't mind the squat toilet thing, and your knees get used to it. The one time you get a little uncomfortable is in public toilets in places like bus stations, where there are fifteen chinese people squatting down, having a chat and a smoke, their 'cubicles' two foot high walls on three sides. It really puts the 'public' in public toilets. There is also none of that 'stare straight ahead and certainly not at the other chap's penis' etiquette that we in the west are so proud of. I did meet a guy who had been in China for a month and was proud to say he had never used a squat toilet - but that's just cheating... I feel sorry both for his cultural enlightenment and his bowels.

Tours: Where you stand on tours is a personal thing. Some like the fact you can use them to meet people, others like the hassle of organising a trip taken away from them. I hate tours. I think they suck ass. We were pushed towards tours by various people (usually tour operators) while we were still in the UK, telling us we wouldn't know what we were doing without a tour group and we wouldn't experience China as much as we would if we had a translator and all that b******s. This was arse. You don't experience a country by being shepherded from one site of historical interest to the next. You experience it by getting on buses when you have no idea where they're going, using a combination of sign language and expressive dance to ask if there are any hotels nearby and ordering things off the menu that turn out to have Rooster feet in them.

We also met a lot of lone travellers, and a lot of lone female travellers, who had travelled all over China on their own without having a single problem.