Traveling in China alone

[Snowy]

I am a newbie here.. hi everyone

Just wanna ask your opinion. I am planning to travel to China by myself, but I can't speak Chinese. My advantage is I look Chinese as I have Chinese heritage...

Definitely don't like organised tour as I like to arrange my own time ... uhhmm... so can sleep over till very late ... and I prefer to choose my own destinations. I mentioned this plan to a friend who visited China recently and he said people might try to take advantage of me along the way becoz of my language limitation, he strongly suggested me to take organised tour

What do you think?

Thanks in advance for the reply...

[Danski]

I would thoroughly recommend the by yourself option. Going on a tour is the easier option but a little less adventurous. Unless you can find a tour group full of miss world contestants or heavy drinking aintipodeans I would suggest hitting the road alone. Don’t want to be stuck on a tour group full of fat Yankie wrinklies.

When I first started traveling in China I didn’t speak any of the language – I lived in Hong Kong and used to take weekend trips by myself, Guangzhou, guilin, shanghai etc – in the big cities you can get by without speaking any Chinese. I used to just get hold of a map, jump in a taxi and point to where I wanted to go on the map – pretty easy. Eating gets a little tricky sometimes though but the best thing to do is find a restaurant with pictures, or point to what other people are eating and ask for the same.

Further afield, if you step off the beaten track it does get a little troublesome if you have no language skills. I traveled from Ka shi in xin jiang all the way overland back to Shanghai a few years ago, but this was after a year studying the language. Absolutely amazing trip – made a lot easier by being able to speak Chinese.

Some might say the fact that you look Chinese is a disadvantage, especially if you can’t speak Chinese. If you look Chinese, people will expect you to speak the language. Also, if you look western, it’s a lot easier to meet new friends, especially in bars at nighttime.

If you stick to wherever Lonely planet suggests, you’ll have a good time and never be too far away from an English speaker.

One suggestion – if you can’t speak the language, don’t turn up at a train station and try and buy a ticket during spring festival!

Good luck and have a good trip.

[Snowy]

Thanks heaps Danski.. I will definitely give it a go

[Serenawang]

If I were you, I would join organised tour. If you decide go by yourself, make a detail plan first, or you will suffer trouble.

[confucius]

It would not be difficult to travel independently along the route that most tour groups visit. For example, many basic group tour itineraries include Beijing, Xi'an, Guilin, and the area in and around Shanghai. More adventurous travel groups head to Yunnan and Sichuan.

My guess is that you will likely be visiting at least one or two of the above mentioned places and possibly your ancestral land in Guangdong or Fujian.

You will not encounter any serious language problems in the popular tourist destinations mentioned above. However if you try looking for grandma's village in rural Guangdong province even proficient Mandarin will be of little use.

If you go off the beaten path and take a minibus to somewhere in the countryside then you might want to ask fellow passengers what they are paying to go to the same destination. Even fluent Mandarin speakers can be duped by the minibus mafia's attempts to extract extra money from naive tourists.

Have fun! Sometimes not understanding what the Chinese touts are saying is a good thing.

[wushijiao]

I also vote for traveling alone, as long as you have the right mental frame of mind- willing to miss a bus or two, not afraid of annoying hassels, willing to talk to people ...etc...

You'll meet more people and learn more of the language if you force yourself to always interact with the locals.

I'd suggest you buy the lonely planet Mandarin phrasebook because it has English, pinyin and characters (some other phasebooks don't have characters). You can always find the phrase or word you want, then point to the characters and show somebody. This is how one of my Canadian buddies traveled around China without knowing more than twenty words!

[Snowy]

Hahaha… you can read my mind confucius…

I actually told my parents I wanna see grands village somewhere in Guangdong which my parents strongly opposed because they said it won’t be save for a young woman to walk around in China rural area… uhmmm don’t really know… but I think it make sense…

Dad also mentioned many years ago he asked somebody in Hong Kong to look for my grandma’s sisters… but then there were so many people claimed to be our relatives At the end dad abandoned his search mission. It sounds funny now… I just realized my dad naivety

I think I will just go to major cities.. I am chicken out to go off unbeaten track…