A photo of a Purple Swamphen taken at Caohai Lake

We read with interest recently that over a five-day period bird watchers found more than 60 different species of birds in a small marshy lake in Yunnan province—one of WildChina’s favorite places to visit in China. Among these species were Tundra Swans, Purple Swamphens, Ruddy Shelducks, as well as species of coot, egret, grebe, goose and duck.

The survey, which was reported by local Chinese-language media, was carried out at Heqing county’s Caohai Lake, in the same area as the popular WildChina destinations of Dali, Lijiang and Shaxi.

The lake is small by local standards, with a surface area of a mere 1.5 square miles. But a dense bird population and stunning diversity of species has nevertheless made Caohai a popular spot for wild bird watching among local Chinese and, increasingly, foreigners on bird watching holidays from abroad.

Reading the news and looking at brilliant photos of some of the species found at this lake reminded us of what a gem of a birding destination China is. This is especially true for North American birders, for whom a birding vacation to China presents the opportunity to see many new Eurasian species.

WildChina’s February lifelong learning trip, Winter Birding in China, for instance, spans the country to seek glimpses several magnificent examples of the birds of China, such as Red-crowned Cranes, White-naped Cranes, Hooded Cranes and many others.

The trip is led by WildChina expert and Kunming Institute of Botany ornithologist Wen Xianji and includes a stop at a different Caohai Lake in Guizhou province that is also a center for birding trips.

Contact WildChina today to inquire about this trip or to custom craft your bird watching vacation of a lifetime.

Photo: Dali Daily Online

“There are a lot of things in China that are hard to relate to,” Jen Lin-Liu says. “I don’t understand Chinese opera,” She jokes; but food is easy for Liu to understand.

The young founder of Beijing’s Black Sesame Kitchen, and author of Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China, Jen Lin-Liu believes food can help her relate to Chinese culture, as well as better understand her Chinese roots. Though her family is originally Cantonese, Liu grew up in America with a mother who wasn’t a big fan of cooking.  “It’s a generational thing,” Liu says. Though previous generations of women felt pressure to cook for their families, most women today can choose. “I like to cook because I’m not forced to cook,” Liu says.

Liu’s Chinese-American colleague, Candice Lee, has similar memories. “When I asked my mom how to cook Ma po dou fu, (Mapo tofu),” Candice recalls, “she said to go to the store and buy a box!” Both Liu and Candice agree that Chinese don’t consider cooking an art form; for many Chinese, food is merely sustenance.

At her previous job, as a journalist for Newsweek in Shanghai, Liu was required to report on a wide range of stories. “Reporters in China have to cover everything” Liu wanted a focus. In 2005, Liu started taking cooking lessons; soon after she started rethinking her career. It turns out Chinese food was just the focus Liu was looking for.

But going into the food business has been surprising for both women. “I’ve always been interested in food,” Candice says. “But I didn’t know it would become a career!”

Liu thinks Chinese food is improving. Beijing is an international hub, and according to her good ingredients are easier to find than they used to be. “I used to be really picky,” Liu says. She remembers being intolerant of certain Chinese foods like la jiao (peppers). But that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Though remote regions have a more difficult time getting access to quality ingredients, that hasn’t stopped Liu from doing extensive foodie research. She recently got back from three months on the road. Starting in China, moving through central Asia and ending in Iran, Liu learned a lot about various regional cuisine, as well as culture. She plans to pick up her tour again in the spring, sampling even more regional foods.

Mm, I can’t wait to taste that next dish…

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Taylor is a member of WildChina’s operations team.  She works in our Beijing office and can be contacted at taylor.smith@wildchina.com. Photo from China Daily.

Growing up, my parents owned a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in a small town in northern Tennessee.  Every day for the sixteen and a half years that this restaurant was open, I watched my dad cook delicious food while I sold, served, and ate it after school and on the weekends. However, I was “that kid” who, despite being surrounded by the family business her whole life, never picked up a spatula or a wok to learn how to cook…

This holiday season, however, I have finally been bitten by the family cooking bug!

Every other week at WildChina’s Beijing office, we have a company lunch.  The menu usually consists of yummy, homemade jiaozi (dumplings), but this week, we had a special treat – HOT POT.

As grabbed a bowl of creamy peanut sauce, fresh cilantro, and lajiang (red pepper chili sauce), I realized how easy it would be to whip up this tasty treat myself.

All you need is:

1 hot plate

1 metal pot w/ lid

Chicken broth

Ginger and Spices  (like salt and pepper, or for you adventurous and creative types, some mixture of chili or curry powder)

Veggies

Thinly sliced meat (such as lamb or beef)

Sauce, as mentioned above: peanut sauce (available in packages), fresh cilantro, red pepper chili sauce

Directions:

Wait for the chicken broth and spices to boil, throw in your meat and veggies and allow it to cook fully (usually just a couple minutes), and dig in. This is the perfect meal for a large group of people to keep warm with and enjoy together – and it’s healthy to boot.

The simplicity of it all has inspired me to become an experimental chef (stop laughing mom and dad) and has alleviated my worries about what to make for the holiday dinner party I’ll soon be hosting.

Happy cooking!

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Nancy is a member of WildChina’s marketing team.  She works in WildChina’s Beijing office and can be contacted at nancy.tan@wildchina.com.

I’ve been to China a couple times for extended periods, and have recently settled myself down in DC (well, Silver Spring, MD) in an apartment by myself (miss you mom and dad!). Having lived in metropolises in both countries – DC and Philly in the US and Beijing and Shanghai in China – there is definitely one thing I notice above all that the US is lacking: street food.

Admittedly, DC does have many restaurants where you can go in the evening for a quick and relatively cheap bite to eat, and the diversity of these establishments seems unlikely to be matched (do I want falafel, a burrito, a burger and fries?), but the US can’t match China for the abundance and low cost of street food.

When in the big cities of Beijing and Shanghai – and even in “smaller” cities such as Qingdao and Guiyang – it feels like every street you turn down has a chuar stand (various meat and veggie kebabs grilled to order) ready to serve you cheap, deliciously seasoned food. When in China, my philosophy is to try as much as possible (and to tell my friends about it when I get back to the States) to see what’s good and what to avoid next time. I’ve sampled a variety of things that Westerners are not accustomed to – frog, turtle, chicken hearts, the stomachs and intestines of various animals, etc. – and have been able to expand my palate and experience things I never would have thought about eating when I was a kid.

The charm of these stands comes from men (typically) tending their grills, as well as the diverse clientele of the chuar stands. It seems like every kind of person visits these stands – Westerners, students, posh 20-somethings, the middle-aged and elderly, men and women; no one is immune to the allure of a good stick of lamb or potato. I have always had positive experiences getting street food, and I feel it’s an important thing to experience when venturing out into Chinese streets in the evening.

Again, I don’t want to get down on the DC food scene – there are many awesome restaurants around (and even a man that sells fruit on the street near my apartment). It might be nice, however, to see people on the sidewalks in the evening selling a cheap, delicious dinner or midnight snack, enriching DC’s nightlife with the delicious aroma of their peppery, smoky, irresistible offerings.

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Pat Ouellette is a member of WildChina’s marketing and client services teams. Pat works in our U.S. office and can be contacted at pat.ouellette@wildchina.com. Photo Source: Flickr.

Tangyuan, or balls made from sticky rice flour are a popular food to celebrate the winter solstice.

As we look forward to a gradual lengthening of daylight and the eventual arrival of summer, WildChina wishes a happy winter solstice to our friends around the world.

The shortest day of 2010 was considered to be December 21 in the West, but this year’s observation falls on December 22 in China.

The Chinese festival marking the day is called Dongzhi—literally, “the arrival of winter”—and has traditionally been a time for families to gather together for meals and to honor their ancestors.

Therefore, visitors to northern parts of China during Dongzhi may end up joining a local family for a meal of hearty boiled dumplings. If they are in the southern part of the country, they will more likely eat balls of sticky rice that are called tangyuan and are served in a sweet or savory broth.

In both areas one might run into bowls of slightly sweet and mildly alcoholic fermented sticky rice named jiuniang.

These warming, carbohydrate-rich traditional Dongzhi foods make sense not just because of chilliness and lack of sunlight, but also because many Chinese people will spend at least part of the day outside making offerings or visiting the tombs of their ancestors.

As during other festival times, it is common to see locals burning fake paper money on the street, which is symbolically intended for use by the deceased in the afterlife.

Many urban families also venture from the city out to the countryside to visit the graves of their ancestors for some tidying and to burn incense and perhaps leave some small portions of food.

Thought it may be the shortest day of the year and chilly in many parts of the country, there are still plenty of great places to visit in China during the holiday season. In fact, this is one of the best times to visit warmer southern areas whose low latitude bestows them with longer daylight.

The expected high temperature today in Jinghong, capital of the Xishuangbanna region of Yunnan, a popular WildChina destination, is 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celcius). Happy Dongzhi and we hope to see you soon.

Image credit: 5Q Blog

Happy Holidays from all of us at WildChina Travel - We thank you for your support in 2010 and wish you all the best in 2011! Photography by WildChina

WildChina’s U.S. office will be closed from Thursday, December 23 to Monday, December 27. It will reopen on Tuesday, December 28, 2010.

Both the U.S. and Beijing office will be closed on Monday, January 3, 2011.

For emergencies or inquiries, please e-mail info@wildchina.com.

Seldom seen in the west, the numbing/tingling flavor of the Sichuan pepper is a hallmark of Sichuan cuisine.

When returning from a trip to China one doesn’t carry only the memory of the sights and sounds of a far-off land: a journey here is also an immersion in a world of exotic flavors and aromas.

Authentic Chinese food is as varied across the country as the cuisines of Europe. And from the sweet flavors of Shanghainese food to the spicy and numbing fare of Sichuan, the best of each region represents a careful marriage of flavors and textures–often executed with lightning speed and perfect control on the unforgiving surface of a 400-degree wok.

Eating Chinese food in China is one of the greatest pleasures of a trip to the “Middle Kingdom.” And as interest increases around the world in Chinese food culture and the health benefits offered by diets high in vegetables and low in processed sugars, we thought we would offer WildChina clients the opportunity to do more than just take home the memory of the flavors of traditional Chinese food.

One sunny day in October 2009, I found myself on a wooden walkway overlooking the magnificent quartz-sandstone columns of Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, Hunan province. As I stood trying to take in the view, wave after wave of people pushed past me, eager to have their photos taken and move on. Around every corner, park staff dressed in ethnic minority clothing touted overpriced skewers, rickshaw rides and plastic bric-a-brac, and guides wielding megaphones shouted in a dozen different dialects. Fed up, tired and irritable, I then queued two hours to exit the park.

Unfortunately, most of China’s tourism still caters to the mass market. Zhangjiajie received thousands of visitors over the 2009 Golden Week Holiday alone, while Beijing’s iconic Bird’s Nest stadium received over 30,000 people per day in 2009. So many people passing through a place puts intense pressure on the local environment. What’s more, visitors are shuttled from site to site by large tour operators, outside investors open restaurants and hotels, and local communities have neither the money nor the skills to compete with them. Locals either move out or become part of the show, performing ‘traditional’ singing and dancing routines or selling tacky souvenirs.

But tourism, if managed properly, can be a powerful engine for social change. The concept of responsible travel has been around for three decades, and is based on the principle that tourism should:

• respect and preserve local culture and heritage;
• protect the environment and conserve natural resources;
• help local communities develop and improve their quality of life.

Happily, this form of tourism is gaining increasing support within China, from both the eco-conscious traveller and those who want to escape the masses and have a more meaningful experience.

RECHARGE YOUR BATTERIES

A common misconception is that sustainability means the sacrifice of creature comforts and convenience. While some eco-lodges do offer a more rustic taste of simple village life, places like The Schoolhouse at Mutianyu in Beijing, naked Retreats in Moganshan just outside of Shanghai and Crosswaters Ecolodge & Spa two hours travel from Hong Kong, are showing that high-end sustainable tourism is possible. Conveniently located right outside major cities, these beautiful retreats attract urbanites looking to escape the business of city life, reconnect with nature and recharge their batteries.

This piece was written by Samantha Woods, Sustainability Manager for WildChina. Read the full article here. WildChina’s signature community service trips for schools and our new Sustainable Leadership Academy for businesses take travellers to experience China differently and create meaningful change in underserved rural communities.

Samantha.Woods@WildChina.com

One of the biggest commercial tourism projects in China in the recent past has been the rebuilding of the Daming Palace in China’s ancient capital of Xi’an. The original palace was built during the Tang Dynasty – when Xi’an was known as Chang’an – but was demolished.

The 1.2 billion yuan (US$180 million) “Daming Palace National Heritage Park” involved the demolition of a large swathe of urban space in which 100,000 residents were displaced before their homes were destroyed. The remaining ruins of the Danfeng Gate were also demolished. The vast space is now home to military re-enactments and a miniature model of the old palace.

The project aims to attract the millions of travelers who visit Xi’an every year, primarily to see the Terracotta Warriors – which were not destroyed and then rebuilt. It opened on October 1 of this year.

Kitschy? Yes. But the huge investment in the rebuilding of Daming Palace underscores how the people involved in the development of Chinese cities are beginning to look at history and heritage differently.

An article about the Daming Palace project and cultural heritage in The National touched upon something we’ve been noticing in recent travels around China. The story quotes Leo Yatming Sin , a professor in the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong:

“Sometimes they have sacrificed cultural heritage for development … Now many government officials have noticed cultural heritage is important for attracting tourists, [so] now they start thinking about preserving.”

In other words, officials have realized that historical sites don’t stand in the way of economic development, they enhance it and give a city the kind of character that cannot be manufactured by modern property developers.

As we recently noted in the case of Beijing’s Gulou area, many irresponsible real estate projects that would have been approved in the past are now being rejected or downsized significantly.

Over the last two centuries, China lost countless important historical sites and artifacts, but there is still much left that is worth saving. We are heartened to see that the people who decide the fate of China’s heritage are beginning to appreciate the irreplaceable value of history.

Daming Palace Image: UPI

Just a decade ago long ago, most rail service in China was well-run, punctual and very, very slow. As the countryside rolled by slowly, it was difficult not to think about how nice it would be if China were to one day have its own version of Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train.

What a difference ten years makes. China not only boasts the world’s largest high-speed rail network, but it is aiming to set a record for the fastest train in the world sometime next year. The announcement was made at the 7^th World Congress on High Speed Rail last week, held not coincidentally, in Beijing.

The current fastest train in the world is France’s TGV, which in 2007 was clocked at a record 357.2 miles/hour (574.8 kilometers/hour). China’s CSR Corp announced in Beijing that it is developing a train aiming to top the TGV. There is plenty more ambition where that came from: China is planning on having 42 high-speed rail lines totaling 10,000 miles (13,000 km) in use by 2012.

What does this mean for travelers? Let’s take a look at the upcoming Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line, which is currently being tested. Once operational, it will only take five hours to travel between the two cities in the comfort of a train.

Figuring in traffic, advance check-in and the duration of the Beijing-Shanghai flight itself, the new rail line will only be a little slower than flying, and without any turbulence, delays or airline food. China’s high-speed trains are also newer and more spacious than most of its air fleet, with the added bonus of being able to see the country as it whizzes by.

Right now the recently launched Shanghai-Hangzhou line and the Chengdu-Chongqing line are already an option for WildChina clients. In the coming months and years, high-speed rail will become an increasingly common transport option for anyone looking to experience China differently.

Image: China Daily