glovely

I will be doing some work in Shanghai in mid-September of this year... when I finish working my husband may join me for a 2-3 week visit in China. The challenge is, we don't usually travel to cities on our vacation journeys as we love the outdoors, open spaces, etc... are we crazy to consider China for our vacation? Can we find the kind of quieter places we prefer?

We are comfortable walkers, but not hikers. We enjoy camping, walking, photography, exploring cultures, etc. I would like to visit Xian and the warriors, and to see the Great Wall... but where should/could we go to get away from crowds and cities? What would YOU suggest?

I look forward to your knowledgeable and honest responses.

PeterN_H

> are we crazy to consider China for our vacation?

No.

> Can we find the kind of quieter places we prefer?

Absolutely.

> We are comfortable walkers, but not hikers. We enjoy camping, walking, photography, exploring cultures, etc. I would like to visit Xian and the warriors, and to see the Great Wall... but where should/could we go to get away from crowds and cities? What would YOU suggest?

Well, most of China is rural space largely undiscovered by foreign visitors, so there's a staggering range of options.

From Shanghai, for instance, you could hop from place to place down the east coast, taking side trips (one-day or longer inland to rural areas), e.g.:

Shaoxing -- Smaller digestible city with low-key historic areas, traditional housing, waterways, and several interesting sights in the surrounding countryside easily reached by public bus, including a pleasant 'water town'

Wenzhou -- Large, characterless city with very little of interest, but from there buses go up into the interior mountains where you could explore Taishen county, for instance, with its corridor bridges

Quanzhou -- A town on the same scale as Shaoxing with a lot of ancient sites, plus access to some wonderful ancient stone bridges, and a day trip to a small seaside town with its city wall intact (and on which you can circumnavigate it)

Xiamen -- larger but with a historic warren of shop houses, and ferry to the former foreign enclave of Gulangyu, which is car-free and perfect for a day's walking through its psuedo-European mansions, military tunnels, coastal route, etc. Inland you can visit and stay in the tulou or 'earth houses' around Yongding, which are vast fortresses originally housing hundreds of people.

You might also want to look at the villages with 'wind and rain' bridges in Guizhou, approached from Nanning. You could try Yinchuan and make your way down the spine of Ningxia from there to Xi'an. Going west from Xi'an there are sleepy back-road alternatives to reach Tianshui (cave temples), and then via Gangu, Wushan (ridge-top temples), to Linxia (mosques, stone cutters). You could follow the route of the Yangzi overland (there are no longer any ferry services) west from Shanghai, which has several smaller cities that used to be treaty ports, all lapped by countryside. The loop around the Yellow River starting from Beijing--Datong, Baotou (ugly but side trips to major rural temples and officially but not factually Genghis Khan's tomb), Yinchuan (many rural side trips to Xixia dynasty sights unique to the area, including 'China's pyramids'), and then down the spine of Ningxia as already mentioned, or on round the loop to Zhongwei, then Lanzhou (ugh, but cave temples to the south at Bingling Si) and on from there quickly by train, or slowly by the Linxia, etc. route backwards to Xi'an.

You're unlikely to see more than a handful of foreign faces on these routes, if any, but none of them is exactly pioneering (I've done them all), and there are very many more.

Time to get a good guide book, look up some of these places there and on Google maps, and come back with more detailed questions. But certainly there are innumerable rural destinations, and no reason whatsoever why you shouldn't venture into them, lack of Mandarin not withstanding. Further responses to more detailed questions available here.

Peter N-H

Axel2DP

For the Great Walls, visit the more remote Simatai or Mutianyu sections of the walls. There are less visitors there as the majority of tourists hit the Badaling section.

Xian is crazy crowded, but I think you'll enjoy the Muslim section of the city, especially in the evening. The street food there is quite good. You can also walk around the city wall in the evening for a quiet stroll.

One advice: Do not order off any menu that does not list price next to the item. I made that mistake and was ripped off big time for a simple bowl of dumpling soup.

atravelynn

Maybe the Janshanling section of the wall. You can stay over night there. An experience of a lifetime!

Maybe you'd like to visit or better yet volunteer at a panda sanctuary. I think that can be done again at Wolong in Sichuan province. I went before the earth quake. You can volunteer from a couple days to a month or more. I did a week.

If you want more info on either suggestion, I'll put in report links.

Axel2DP

atravelynn,

Have you stayed overnight at Janshanling? Is that accessible from Beijing? How did you arranged that? If I get a chance to hit China gain that would be something I'd love to do. Thanks.

PeterN_H

All the main publicly open, rebuilt, and touristed Great Wall sites listed so far (Ba Da Ling, Mutianyu, Simatai, and Jin Shan Ling) have accommodation. There are outfits that also offer nights sleeping in one of the watchtowers, usually at Jin Shan Ling which is notoriously cavalier about conservation regulations (having been known to host raves on the Wall). This is, of course, illegal; but this being China, it happens.

Since the Wall is an unknown number of thousands of km long, it goes without saying that 99% of it, beyond these tiny publicly open rebuilt sections, see no visitors at all. There are several other points not yet redeveloped and in reach of Beijing which are known to be accessible, but visited by few other than Chinese and expats with their own vehicles. And there are sections refurbished enough for safety (buxiu, rather than zhuangxiu), advertised as open, but that probably have no right to be so. These see few visitors, and are probably the best choice for the first-time China traveller wanting genuinely to avoid crowds. Some afford long wall-top walks with scarcely another person to be seen.

There's nothing wrong with Ba Da Ling, however, except that it can be busy, and it's fashionable to decry it, especially be people who haven't been there but who want to reassure themselves that the choices they made were superior. Even there it only takes about 20 mins walk/climb on the Wall to leave almost everyone behind, and standing on the Wall with it springing over hills through 180 degrees of horizon can only impress as much as it always has.

Peter N-H