Going solo in China

I was sorry to read, in the subscriber’s letter “China Countryside Tips” (June ’12, pg. 14), that her tour company abandoned her partway through her trip. While I sympathize with her situation, I can’t agree with her conclusion that you should not travel in China without a guide or a Mandarin-speaking companion or that you should stay only in high-end hotels.

In 2004 I spent seven weeks traveling on my own in China. It was my third visit, but I have subsequently read several reports on the Fodor’s forum (www.fodors.com/community; click “Asia,” then “China,” then search for topics matching your interests) from people who successfully traveled independently in China on their first visits.

I did have a guide for three places — the Buddhist caves and the Hanging Monastery, both near Datong; the gardens in Suzhou, and the sacred island of Putuoshan — and I did have train tickets and prebooked hotels for the first couple of weeks, but that was because I was traveling during the October holiday, when it seems everyone in China is going somewhere.

After I headed west from Xi’an to Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, I had no guides and nothing booked. I do not speak Mandarin, but, even if I did, the accent is quite different in different parts of the country. The few words that I could manage in the east, like “rice” and “beer,” didn’t work in the west.

The most important things to take (aside from toilet paper and Purell® or another hand sanitizer) are a good phrase book (with characters, not just pinyin, which no one in China seemed to understand) and one or more guidebooks with place names in characters.

I agree with the subscriber that you should always have your hotel’s address card with you. I bought my train tickets from whatever travel agency was most convenient, after researching the trains on the Internet. I would have the train number, date and time written down.

For buses, I wrote out the characters for my destination (copied from the guidebook) to show at the bus “station.” In some places I found a proper bus station with a ticket office, but in smaller towns the station was a bus parking lot with a “fixer” at the entrance who would point out the correct bus to me.

When I reached a new town, I would head for whatever hotel looked good in the guidebook and show the clerk the phrase, “I want a single room.” She or he would write the price of a room on a piece of paper. I subsequently discovered that, at that point, I should have bargained, but the offered price was always less than the posted price (except the one time I stayed in an expensive, Western hotel).

For meals, I learned the characters for some dishes and used the language section of my guidebook. On several occasions, I simply went into the kitchen and pointed at what looked good. This always resulted in an excellent stir-fry.

The very few people I encountered who spoke English would go out of their way to help me, but, in general, I managed by using sign language and my phrase book and pattern-matching the characters.

It was a wonderful trip, and I’m not sure why I haven’t been back.

KATHY WILHELM
Cary, NC