We have just come back from our first visit to China since COVID. We had a grand road trip planned, as well as seeing family and friends. A key gap in my China experience was Zhangjiajie in Hunan province, one of the film locations for the Avatar movie.
I’d seen the photos (and the movie) and had always wanted to go. This would be followed up with a road trip down through Guizhou to Guiyang, the provincial capital, and then a long bullet train ride to the family province of Zhejiang.
What would have changed? In my experience, China changes very rapidly, let alone over four years. The plane trip is much longer now from the UK on Western airlines, as they have to fly south to avoid the tragic conflict in Ukraine.
Arriving at Pudong Airport seemed so familiar, the route through the terminal almost without thought. Quite soon, we were heading for lunch in downtown Shanghai to meet an old friend. One thing I discovered very quickly—prices have not gone up in five years, no inflation!
Also, the £GBP conversion rate to RMB is higher than before; you can almost divide the RMB by ten now. So, eating out is incredibly cheap, as are good hotels. This remained a pleasant surprise throughout the trip. Upscale meals were £20 per head, everyday meals £3 per head. Nice 4- and 5-star hotels often cost £35-45 per night per couple, including breakfast. Holidaying in China is both very affordable and enjoyable!
We flew the short flight to Zhangjiajie and were completely blown away as we walked the trails around the spectacular sandstone region. The cable car kicks it off, travelling over lush montane forest before reaching the escarpment where the exploration begins. You will spend a couple of days looking out at dizzying views, and with a guide, you will know where certain clips of the Avatar movie were filmed—you will recognise them. This is one of those places where a picture or visual experience says a thousand words. There are myriad isolated towering sandstone pinnacles stretching across canyons as far as the eye can see in all directions. This is another vast landscape. There are lots of tourists, and also, seasonal planning is important. It rains around 200 days a year here, and it can snow in winter. We had beautiful warm weather, fortunately, on this day.
For the sake of brevity, I will move on to the road trip now, moving through days of mountains covered in deep green conifer trees. More like Norway or Canada, with very few interruptions or towns in this often pristine vista. In fact, I was surprised to find that this less visited province of Guizhou is still 72% covered by original forest—rare anywhere in the world anymore.
There are amazing new highways with fresh tarmac surfaces and tunnel after tunnel through this very mountainous region. The reason for being here was to see first-hand some of the remarkable national costumes of the Dong and Miao people. The elaborate costumes are well worth seeing.
Firstly, the Dong people. There are variations for everyday and special occasions. The special occasion wear includes silver decorative features that twist through the hair with necklaces. There can also be feathered headdresses and varying levels of substantial silver necklaces. It seems each village has a variation, with dresses in red, blue, and bright pink.
The Miao people take it up a notch with exquisite ornate silver headdresses, like silver hats, made up of hundreds of intricately formed pieces of silver, sometimes adorned with a large silver crescent cow-horn design atop. Again, generous silver necklaces feature, along with skilfully embroidered pleated dresses. Both peoples have a tradition of welcoming visitors with a dance and a drink. This is now repeated daily for the tourists’ benefit and is quite beautiful to watch.
The silver adornments of the women have a practical purpose, as well as a beauty aspect. Developed across history, from when the lands were lawless in ancient times, and robbers and bandits were sadly all too frequent visitors and stole all they could from the peaceful villagers. The story has it that, in order to protect their life savings, they used silver as a precious saleable metal and fashioned it into jewellery. When the bandits came, the women of the village would run into the forest wearing their jewellery and hide from the bandits. When the bandits left, the women would return to their homes. Over time, this made the women very important, and the men would take great care of them as they held the wealth of the family.
On one of the days of this trip, I was very ill and came down with E. coli. The symptoms are horrific, but the fever was even more worrying, along with an accelerated heart rate. At one point, my Apple Watch showed a resting heart rate of 147! I was very ill.
At the time, we were visiting one very remote region and staying in a mountain village house. We were up a mountain and a couple of hours’ drive on slow roads from help or the nearest hospital. It wasn’t safe to drive at night, and stormy rain had descended with fog that made a drive impossible. The next day, this being China, I thought we could see if anyone had any antibiotics. They might have them at home for emergencies. Fortunately, that’s exactly what happened. A few doors were knocked on, and some amoxicillin was secured. Now, I must say I support the control of antibiotics, but when you are remote and so ill, you need to act with purpose quickly.
Over the next few days, the medicine did its work, and a weakened, three-kilo lighter version of me was operational and mobile again.
After the ordeal and around 1,000 miles of spectacular roads, we took the peaceful option of a long bullet train ride from Guiyang to meet the family on our way back to Shanghai. The ride was easy enough and also very relaxing—when you are travelling at 280-300 km/h, 2,000 kilometres pass very quickly.
It was great being reunited with family and friends after so long apart, and we spent a fun few days together doing ordinary things and also some special meals, which once again were remarkable value.
Soon it was time for the trip to the airport and the even longer journey home—now nearly 15 hours flying time. Plenty of time to catch up on sleep.