any one been to China ?

I am going at the end of the year and making plans to get around with a mate who is from Yantai city .

I going for 4 weeks and backpacking it all the way .

If you have some place worth the look please let me know here .

cheers seagull

[ Edited on 12-2-2006 by seagull ]

Yeah dude been there 2005 goin again in May or there abouts http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/index.htm#sutra and while your there check out a public toilet IF YOU DARE :P

i went in 2000. business trip. was an awesome experience, but we stayed int eh best accomodations etc. go see the forbidden city and definately the great wall. they have amazing history.

i still larf at about our tour guide who scoffed when we started laughing over one of his statements. he started teh days tour with... 'today we go to wuxi. wuxi is small provincial city of 4 million people'. we jsut cracked up (alcohol did a little helping). he took offence till i explained that our major capitol city was only 4 million people. he stopped pondered and then proceeded to snicker. then changed his opening to 'we go to provincial city'! i suppose when you consider that we were coming from shanghai with about 16million... puts it into prosepective a little.

hey neil if youre also going to clubs, make sure you check out the quiet joints 'down stairs'joints. they are a lot of fun!
and always try to get drinks, food at the bar. its cheaper than at the table. the whole you dont understand, so you get 'this menu' instead treatment!

ps. i will post a pic tonight of me at the great wall. i decided to hang of it rather than jsut pose on it!!! the guards only had batons there. not like at the forbidden city (guns)

[ Edited on 12/2/2006 by twoguns ]

The worlds ten most polluted cities,China has 7 of them,if u want to see blue sky ule hafta be on top of a mountain,oh yeah i forgot to mention the food sucks and take your own coffee unless u like tea,im not puttin u off am i seagull,but the shoppings great( just in department stores that are gov run) at other shops its whatever the market will bare :P,have fun dude and the cough u bring back with u will go away in a few weeks:thumb

I travelled from Hong Kong to Vietnam right through china by bus and then from Pakistan through china to Laos again by bus.

Quick ref points

Everyone spits even on the sleeper buses and they just spit on the floor, so have easy slip on boot like blunnys handy

The sleeper buses can be pretty disgusting and u sleep 2 to a bed make sure u have a foamy to separate u from the bed

The night buses are great in terms of they are cheap and u save a night accommodation, but on the other hand bus drives can be drunk and pretty dam scary.

Even in a major city’s outside of Beijing people do not speak English, Have handy cards with pictures on so you can communicate, e.g. drawing of bus, so they will show u where bus depot is, drawing of chicken and rice so you can order dinner etc try some deaf websites to get cards.

There is a FACE attitude, no one like’s to say they don’t know, so you can ask direction’s and the person may have no idea wot you are talking about, but he must not lose FACE so if u gesture one way or the other he will just nod and agree. I tested this out when in a small town. I asked a guy is this the way to hungry jacks and he was all nodding and agreeable, I then tried other different people and sure enough lots of nods and agreement, the thing is as far as I am aware China does not have a hungry jacks, and if it does it was not in this small village. So be aware when asking directions you may get the run around. You can show people maps and they lov it and nod but they have maybe never seen one before, make sure u get a Chinese map and an English one.

Also for when ordering food a good method can be to look at other people’s food decide wot looks ok and just ask the waitress for that. (had some very interesting meals this way)

Also Chinese people tend to smile if embarrassed, to give example my shoes where stolen (this happened a bit as I have size 12 feet and locals found this fascinating) from my room so I complained to the receptionist who starts smiling and looking down, I think she thinks this is funny and I get upset she smiles even more and runs off. I find out later (after meeting some foreign exchange students) that she did not find it funny she was more embarrassed or ashamed than anything.

Hair dressing shops are usually also brothels, sometimes they do not even do hair cuts. (made for an interesting story when I was trying to get my hair cut)


In more regional areas locals are not used to seeing western people let alone 185cm 95kg men with massive feet and a huge nose. In one village I had a whole mass of people around me in the street giving me food and watching me eat as if I was some sort of zoo animal. I had kids laughing there heads off to running away crying in fear, most of the time people just wanted to put my boots on and walk around in them laughing

China in the regional areas is like being on a different planet.

Toilets, wot can I say! U will never in your life come across more disgusting public communal toilets in your life. I say this and yes I have been in India, Pakistan, Burma and many other dodgy toilet areas, but china wins hands down.

It can be worth learning some mandarin, but the dialect changes so much from region to region that they may not understand you anyway. Also even if you are speaking correctly they may just ignore you. I travelled with a foreign exchange student who could speak very good mandarin however often people would just ignore him as they would refuse to believe the white man with the big nose could be speaking correctly, he would often have to say in mandarin, hey listen to me you can understand me, yes that’s right the big noise round face man is speaking.

I do not know wot your plans are, but if you are backbacking and want a chat u2u me your number and i will give ya a call and fill ya in on some excellant places.

lugnuts wrote:The worlds ten most polluted cities,China has 7 of them,if u want to see blue sky ule hafta be on top of a mountain,oh yeah i forgot to mention the food sucks and take your own coffee unless u like tea,im not puttin u off am i seagull,but the shoppings great( just in department stores that are gov run) at other shops its whatever the market will bare :P,have fun dude and the cough u bring back with u will go away in a few weeks:thumb

funny you say the food sucks... it is bad. and after the thirda day there i was bent over sick, vometing and all. but the kind nurse on the third floor of hte hilton in shanghai hapily provided a little white sach of powder that i was very strongly advised to 'mix with water'. well this sach of powder kept me firing for several days (and nights i might add). certainly helped to make most of hte time there! :o

anyway the pose on the great wall.

well thanks guys for the run down and your time doing so .

Lugnuts , thats the best input I have had to date mate , I just about woke the kids up when reading that line

i guess I will have some help as my new found Mate Lin is from there and will be going with me on the weeks we will be doing the whole trip .
In short lin is out here welding trains as the $ in China is shit he gets Au $200.00 for 4 weeks work .He tells me this is good $ in China .His father gets Au $70.00 for 4 weeks work as a gaurd in a factory .

I am sure there will be many storys to tell

thanks neil