“中国人一定要购物，不愿意在酒店，餐饮和服务上花钱！” 这是一个WILDCHINA的资深导游告诉我的。她特别期望WildChina开始做不同的出境服务，但是又很善意的警告我：

“中国人还是和外国人很不一样。我带过一些国内素质很高的客户，至少他们不再随地吐痰，大声喧哗，他们都已经不愿意参加那些欧洲10天8国游了，都 在等着找点新的。但是，他们也还是要去大家都去的地方，买大家都买的东西，只是想别那么赶那么累，罢了。咱也别太新了，比如去了美国不去拉斯维加斯是不行 的。而且，购物还是要有的，否则，等他们回了家，没买到什么珍珠粉，维他命，或者去趟德国，没买到德国的菜刀，他们还怀疑是不是去错了地方。为什么别人都 去了的地方，我错过了？”

“我替朋友带团出国做领队，国外当地的导游都骂我，让我不能对中国游客那么好，对游客太好了是管不住团的。他们都说，一定不能听游客的意见。WildChina的客户第一的服务精神拿来伺候中国客人，一定是不行的。“

她的这一席话让我感慨了很久, 主要有几点

1. 我觉得这里描述的中国游客要参团，一定要在自由女神前拍照，一定要最实惠地多走几个地方，不是中国人特有的，而是世界特有的。这叫旅游的大众市场，是旅游金字塔的最强大的基石。世界上的很多发达国家曾都有这个市场，而且仍然存在。 美国1969年有一部人人皆知的电影叫：If it’s Tuesday, This must be Belgium. 翻译过了叫“今天是星期二的话，那我们一定是在比利时。”电影描写的就是60年代，美国人刚刚开始到欧洲去旅行，因为好不容易出次国，所以一定要好好利用 这个机会，多走几个地方。他们当时的团才448.5美元－18天9国欧洲游！咱们中国人更不怕苦，所以可以10天8国 （当然梵蒂冈也算一国吧。）。 是随着时间的迁移，大家旅游经验的增加，才慢慢意识到，这种旅行真累！还可以参团，但是别那么赶。
2. 旅游购物也是人之常情。 人旅行时喜欢买东西也是很可以理解的，买家乡买不到的。我自己就在乌兰巴托买了差不多一万元的羊毛衫，给家人朋友都买了一件。为了买东西，把去博物馆的行 程都取消了。为什么，他们的羊绒质量特别好！昨天一个朋友说在美国发现了一个商店叫 WHOLE FOODS, 里面的东西好极了，全是质量可靠的有机产品，什么婴儿洗发水，维他命，之类的，一定得排到行程上。（其实这家店就是美国中上层人士的京客隆，以有机蔬菜水 果肉类而出名。） 是啊，中国有机产品没人相信，也难怪大家都愿意在国外消费，LV 店里的包总假不了吧。
3. 但是，我反感的是零团费的进折扣店购物。 我坚决相信，零团费的团，永远不能为高端市场服务。这个经济模式有一个最根本的问题，它本身在刺激导游引导你买不该买的东西，或者出更多的钱看什么无聊的秀。如果一个导游总在心里攒着怎么让客人多购物，那他很难把心思用来客服上。就好像不给医生付诊断看病费，而让医生从卖药来挣回扣一样。结果如何？有病 没病，先开500块钱的药，打打点滴再说。感冒也打点滴？不该开的药也得给你开一大堆，不该照的X光也让你多照。 从此，因为大家都照了X光，而我不照就是亏了。美国的医疗体系，尽管有她自身太多的问题，但是医生收取高昂的诊费至少保证了他没有必要让我吃不该吃的药。当然，这也不仅仅是中国的问题。在很多国家，比如埃及，游客购物，导游拿回扣也是常事。在美国，导游从大峡谷imax影院拿到折扣票，全价卖给游客，也是常有的。旅游没有涉及到生死的那么大问题，但我觉得旅游行业过于激烈的低价竞争最终受苦的是消费者。

   再者，购物和附加演出都是很容易规模化，佣金化的旅游项目。这无疑产生了更大的经济动力鼓励旅游行业朝丽江模式发展吗？那么，对环境和资源消耗小一些的生态旅游和其他的可持续旅游，自然而然地就处于劣势。

4. 最后一点就是对服务的态度。中国人太多，愿意提供服务的人很多，所以人工便宜，大家都对服务提供者不用太尊重。大家都不觉得导游有太多的技术含量，所以在 美国，可以把中餐馆里洗碗的叫出了，换件衣服，开个车，就是司兼导。其实，很多这样的导游完全生活在一个美国社会的华人圈里，对很多美国社会怎么运转并不 是很了解。但问什么不能有一些对美国社会更了解的人做导游呢？价钱！又回到零团费或低团费的团，旅行商不可能按照美国的基本工资付导游费。中国的游客也接 受不了按劳动小时付费的情况。结果，才会出现，导游和游客常常对立，对服务不满而纠纷。客导双方都有责任。

整个行业有改的希望吗？其他模式的旅行有存在空间吗？

A couple months ago, you heard from WildChina travelers Jan Heininger and Jamie Reuter saying that they were thrilled with [their] tour company, but not seduced by China.  Their journey in October of 2010 took them through Beijing, Tibet, Yunnan Province. Guangxi Province, and finally to Hong Kong. Here is the second part of a series of articles detailing their experience.  Stop 1 – Beijing…

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We flew to Beijing via Toronto on Air Canada.  Our plane was equipped with lie-flat, business class seats.  OK food.  Great lounge with free dinner in Toronto.  The tickets were half the price of other airlines.  Definitely recommend Air Canada for anyone travelling to China or other points in the Far East.  12 hour flight with 12 hour time change meant we didn’t have to reset our watches which was sort of weird.  It took both Jan and me several days to get past the time shift.  12 hours is tough (though Jan thinks it’s easier than 8 hours).

Oddly, we arrived a full day early.  We had figured: depart on Thursday (10/14), cross international dateline and arrive Saturday.  So our hotel and ground arrangements all were set up to begin on Saturday.  I’m still not quite sure how or why we went wrong, but we actually arrived on Friday.  So there we were in the Beijing airport: no Chinese money, no one to meet us, and few people with any English to help us sort out what to do.  After an hour-long comedy of errors (cell phone with locking key-pad and no instruction booklet, low volume on cell phone, receiving text message instructions in Chinese characters, etc.), we finally convinced our tour company that we were actually in town and received their instructions.  We were asked to take a mass-transit “airport express” train into town because it would take too long for our actual guide, Andy, to come pick us up.  We didn’t really understand this at the time but our subsequent experience with traffic jams demonstrated the wisdom of this suggestion.  Eventually, we managed to get our luggage, get money, find the train, buy tickets, get off at the right stop (the last one) and meet up with our guide who then took us to our hotel.  By this time, we had finally sorted out that the timing screw-up was actually our fault, and not an error by our tour company.

Our hotel in Beijing was the Opposite House (don’t ask about the meaning behind the name; I don’t know it), an ultramodern, minimalist-design hotel in the embassy district.  Very, very nice—the kind of lovely boutique we prefer.  In fact, tourists (both Chinese and western) routinely came in to photograph the interior spaces.  Good bed, wooden sinks and bath (a little odd), good shower, great service, and a very good breakfast.  The breakfasts were fairly uniform (and excellent) across all of our hotels.  By a large, they were based on large and diverse buffets with egg stations, bacon, cheeses, breads, rolls and muffins, cereal, yoghurt, etc.  In addition, they had a whole range of stuff for oriental breakfasts.  If you’ve never seen this, it includes broth, noodles, and a wide variety of meats, vegetables, fish, seaweed, sprouts, tofu, etc that are combined in a big bowl as a sort of breakfast soup to be eaten with chopsticks.  The broth itself is simply “slurped” down.  We looked at it.  We tried it and poked around a little.  But basically we stuck with the western fare for breakfast.  We excused ourselves by saying that two good Chinese meals a day was enough and who wants seaweed for breakfast?  There were no really good breads or hard rolls anywhere in China until we got to Hong Kong.  Maybe it has to do with the types of wheat they grow or something?

Once settled in Beijing, we did all the usual things.  We went to Tiananmen Square (covered with tourists).  We toured the Forbidden City.  We had Peking Duck (greasy).  In the rain (on our third day) we visited the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace.  We drove past a couple of Olympic sites (the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest Stadium).  We took a pedi-cab tour of a hutong, a traditional Beijing neighborhood jammed in between all of the various high rise apartment buildings.  The hutongs are sort of like old, single story, traditional ghettos that are slowly being consumed by new high-rise construction.  But the Chinese who live in them love their traditional way of life, though they have no private baths or toilets.  The pre-Olympic destruction of several hutongs caused such a fury that it seems that the local “Central Committee” is trying them out as tourist attractions to see if showing them off can provide a positive financial return.

Our favorite things were the Ceramics Museum within the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall.  The museum was a quiet, deserted haven away from all the crowds with very good signage in both Chinese and English.  The Great Wall looked exactly like all the pictures you’ve seen of it.  But actually experiencing it was special.  We visited the Mutianyu section, which is a partially restored but far less touristy section of the Wall.  Jan and I took a long (2.5 hour) hike along its top.  The Wall actually just follows the crest of a mountain ridge.  The path along the top of the Wall can be extremely steep in places.  We both ended up with sore thighs and calves from climbing up and down some really steep and long stretches of steps, but loved the experience.

The food in Beijing was very so-so.  They seem to use a lot of oil so the food was very greasy and not all that flavorful.  Even when we went to a restaurant that specialized in Peking Duck, we were pretty underwhelmed.  We were not terribly adventuresome in our choices, so we probably missed a lot of what a real “foodie” would find interesting and good about Beijing food.
One of the oddities of being in China was the Chinese tourists’ fascination with us.  It started in the Tiananmen Square where this nice couple asked if they could have their picture taken with us with the Forbidden City in the background.  According to our guide, this was due to the inherent weirdness of westerners in general, and a tall, bearded westerner like Jamie in particular.  While this first incident was unique in that it included Jan, 10 or 12 times during the trip some couple or group of giggling girls or whomever wanted Jamie to pose with them for a photo – more or less to prove to their friends back home that they had seen, and even touched, a foreigner—but mostly because Jamie was so tall and looked even taller with his Australian Tilley hat.  Another tall American that we met on the trip had similar experiences.  After a while, the whole thing became a bother and bit irritating.  It was, in some small way, like having paparazzi chase after you.  It eventually made me feel like a creature in a zoo that people gawked at.  Weird.  And yet, despite such experiences and our reaction to the hordes and hordes of Chinese tourists, we found the Chinese, as individuals, to be friendly and welcoming.

We spent hours in traffic going to and from the Great Wall, and trying to get around inside the city.  Drivers are crazy there.  They push and shove in traffic using cars, trucks and buses pretty much the same way they push and shove in queues.  As one guide told us, there is no concept of personal distance in China (unlike in Japan where they create their own).  It’s not rudeness; it’s simply cultural norms. However, they always beep their horn when passing (they are taught to do this).  And when passing, they pull back into the right lane when the front seats have barely passed the front of the car being overtaken.  Several times, I was sure that we would clip the front of a car being passed but we never did.  Crossing a street on foot was also a challenge.  Initially I thought that cars were aiming at us on purpose.  Later, I realized that there just wasn’t any concept of pedestrians having the right of way.  A car making right hand turns just keeps going.  It was up to the pedestrians to get out of their way.  Given that the city was laid out in huge squares, Beijing was not a walkable city anyway.

Beijing was clearly an example of the “new China.”  Designer stores were everywhere.  Many young people clearly had lots of money and were stylishly dressed.  There was a long line outside an Apple Store near our hotel, as people waited to buy iPhones at five times the US price.  High rise condominiums and office buildings were everywhere.  Some brand new, some older and clearly showing their age.  Construction cranes were everywhere.  Our guides quipped that China’s national bird was the crane (i.e., steel crane, not feathered; get it??).  But the old neighborhood (hutong) near our hotel didn’t have a sewer or clean, public water.  Beijing was clearly a city of contrasts, with rapid change being driven by the “new” China economy.

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Stay tuned for more tales from Ms. Heininger & Mr. Reuter’s journey.  For more information about adventures in Beijing, see a sample itinerary here or contact us at info@wildchina.com.

All photos by Ms. Heninger & Mr. Reuter. To see all of their photos, visit WildChina’s flickr page here.

The following post was written by Jan Heininger and Jamie Reuter, WildChina clients who traveled with us for two and half weeks in October of 2010.  Their journey took them through Beijing, Tibet, Yunnan Province. Guangxi Province, and finally to Hong Kong. This is the first of a series of articles he wrote detailing their experience.  We begin with their overall impression of China…

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Some people come away saying they “loved” China.  We didn’t.  Don’t get me wrong.  This was a great trip.  China was fascinating.  It had beautiful scenery.  It had lots of history and culture.  We had many very unique experiences.  Tibet was wonderful.  We saw the Forbidden City and the Great Wall.  We saw amazing scenery including the karst mountains in the Li River valley.  We saw and experienced (in our own way) the spirituality of Tibet and China.  We visited towns and areas still dominated by minority populations and tribes.  We had, alas, only a few great meals but we stayed in a number of really outstanding hotels.  We had excellent guides and drivers who gave us meaningful insights into China, its history, its culture and its peoples.  We came away with a much greater appreciation for how some of the more recent aspects of Chinese history (end of the empire, Mao, the Cultural Revolution and the change to the “new economy”) have molded how people live their lives today.  We walked through “old towns” and markets established a thousand years ago.  We got a better understanding of how life works under central control.  But we didn’t “love it.”  We were fascinated.  We will go back to visit other areas of the country.  We were thrilled with our tour company and will use them again.  But we weren’t seduced by the country’s charms.

Part of our difficulties was due to the constant and sometimes overwhelming presence of Chinese tourists.  Chinese tourists are an odd group and not terribly accommodating or pleasant from a westerner’s perspective.  According to conversations with several people, Chinese tourists are less interested in seeing, learning and understanding, and much more interested in taking home pictures of themselves and cheap souvenir gifts to “prove” they had been to the big city and seen the elephant (so to speak).  In the context of China’s economic growth and the spread of wealth down into the middle classes and rural communities, millions of these tourists are on their initial trips out of their local communities.  They smoke a lot.  They spit.  They talk, stand up or even walk around during performances.  They push and shove to get to the front of a line – a survival skill, no doubt, in a country with 1.3 billion people.  In small numbers (anything less than several thousand), they are no worse than any other population of large groups discharging from parked ranks of tour buses.  You ignore their presence and carry on.  But for some reason, we were flooded with them.  Clearly, it was worst in Beijing, and our experience there may have made us hypersensitive to the issue throughout the remainder of the trip.  But our guides uniformly reflected on how they were seeing substantially many more national tourists than expected.  In prior years, the number of Chinese tourists had substantially diminished following their big national holiday (October 1).  This year, they just kept coming.  As an early example, I expected Tiananmen Square to be this huge, open square, just like the pictures I’ve seen.  Instead, all we could see were the heads of tens of thousands of tourists jamming an open space between a few monumental marble structures.  There was a 4-6 hour wait to get into Mao’s tomb (we skipped it).  Given the number of people present, the square itself didn’t even seem all that big.  For communities all across China, hanging out a “UNESCO Site” sign means you’re guaranteed millions of dollars of revenue from tens of thousands of Chinese tourists jamming little historic streets lined with shops selling plastic crap and cheap reproductions (mostly made in Viet Nam).  You can’t fault the Chinese for wanting to visit the hotspots within their own country.  But their numbers and manner definitely reduced our enjoyment and, in some cases our appreciation, for particular sights or experiences.

 
Second, China is clearly struggling with the size of its population, the extraordinary rate of growth in its economy and the rapid changes that are occurring in its distribution of wealth.  Improvements in their infrastructure (highways and airports in our experiences) just can’t keep up.  So in any largish city (and a country this size has lots and lots of cities with 5-10 million people), traffic jams, litter, pollution, clean water, lack of functional sewer systems, crowded public transport, crowded airports and disruptions due to construction are real problems.  I saw more Ferraris in Beijing in 3 days than I’ve seen in Washington D.C. in 30 years.  But most of them probably never get out of 1st gear due to the endless traffic jams there.  They’re like enormous pinkie rings, serving only to demonstrate the wealth of their owners.  Our trip included many, many hours in cars and vans averaging anywhere from 10-20 kilometers per hour – both in urban areas and while driving between rural towns.  Most tourist areas are struggling to deal with the explosion of tourism by Chinese nationals and foreigners, and some sites are, frankly, failing.  For example, we had to stand around for 15-20 minutes waiting for our guide to purchase tickets to get into the Forbidden City.  There was no way to pre-purchase tickets to get into sites.  And it wasn’t just for our small group of two.  Even the large groups stood around waiting, increasing the sense of congestion and crowding around key sites.  They just haven’t learned the secrets of how to move people along.
Finally (and there’s no polite way to say this) but…  Squat toilets were not our favorite Chinese experience.  Particularly when there aren’t any doors or walls between the “stalls.”  And you’d better bring your own toilet paper because you won’t find any outside of luxury hotels and airports (and even some of the airports only had squat toilets.)
I remember when my Grandmother Miller visited us in Germany back in the 1960’s and said something like “Germany would be a great place if it just wasn’t so full of foreigners.”  That’s been an inside, Reuter family joke for years.  I am very uncomfortable with the fact that my feelings about our China trip include even a tiny hint of this incredibly ethno-centric view.  I really do believe that I’m much more cosmopolitan than that.  But it can’t be argued that in the end, we just didn’t really “love” China as a country, and these were some of the reasons why.

Our tour company was WildChina.  We could never say enough wonderful things about how well they actually performed.  They provided everything promised, including cars and beds big enough for Jamie.  Their guides were terrific: very helpful, informed and flexible.  While dealing with our early arrival is the best example of their flexibility, we regularly had conversations with our guides about the various options we had for spending a day.  They quickly picked up on our desire to skip the obvious and crowded and go for things that were more unusual and interesting.  They knew where the shops with “quality” goods were, and took us there.  They were very open about their own lives and experiences.  They taught us a lot about what it was like to live in the “new China.”  We highly recommend WildChina to anyone planning a trip there.  They will work with you to create the type of trip you want, and then deliver it.  A very good friend of ours, who has travelled extensively, went on a 12 day trip to Yunnan, departing two days after we returned, and spent time in many of the same places we visited.  She used one of the “usual” tour companies.  The contrast between the two trips was remarkable.  If you’re going to China, use WildChina.

 
Weather wise, we sort of lucked out.  The rainy season was supposed to have ended.  But everyone kept talking about how weather patterns had been delayed this year and that we were still in the tail end of the rainy season.  Weather.com kept predicting rain – with daily precipitation probabilities ranging from 60-80% for weeks at a time.  In reality, we had serious rain for only two days: one in Beijing (when we visited the Summer Palace and Temple of Heaven in our rain gear and under umbrellas) and one in Kunming (when a break in a steady rain let us wander around the Stone Forest without get too wet).  On the other hand, it was generally cloudy, overcast and about 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) colder than we expected.  While Jamie never put on his wool cap and gloves, he only wore his shorts and polo shirts after we got to Hong Kong.  Jan packed too many shirts with three-quarter sleeves and was stuck wearing her 2 long sleeve shirts day after day after day.  Neither of us even got close to putting on our bathing suits.

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Stay tuned for more tales from Ms. Heininger & Mr. Reuter’s journey.  For more information about the destinations they visited, check out our destinations map here.

The February 1, 2010 edition of the New York Times features a piece on Jiuzhaigou Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in China’s Sichuan province that consists of a natural wildlife and forest area.

Jiuzhaigou has experience a significant increase in visitors recently, which reflects the upward trend in domestic Chinese travel in the past year. The New York Times reports, “while the [travel] industry lost ground in Europe and the United States, China’s tourism sector posted a 9 percent jump in revenue 2009, to 1.26 trillion renminbi [Yuan], thanks to domestic demand.”

Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve in Sichuan province (Souce: NYTimes.com)

WildChina has done service work in Jiuzhaigou, and guests on our journey Tracking Wild Panda Footprints, which was featured on Away.com, witness the incredible natural scenery here. Here’s what we have to say about the nature reserve:

With its lush alpine scenery, turquoise lakes and multi-leveled waterfalls, Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve has long been a haven for nature lovers. Jiuzhaigou, where film director Ang Lee filmed breathtaking landscape scenes for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and World Biosphere Reserve. There are fixed travel routes for eco-friendly buses to drive along, with private vehicles restricted from entering the park—extremely important, given that there are 2.5 million visitors each year. Discussion on how to successfully manage mass tourism is always a heated topic here.

Want more information on Jiuzhaigou? Send us a tweet @WildChina or ask Alex at alex.grieves@wildchina.com.