I was a bit apprehensive about travelling solo in China, largely because of the language – despite my best efforts at Duolingo, my Mandarin is limited to about five words. Before going I didn’t really know how safe it would be, either.
Safety-wise I needn’t have worried. Because the authorities like to keep an eye on the people, I’ve never felt safer travelling alone, apart from traffic – crossing roads is a gamble every time, as bikes and scooters do not stop at lights and cars and buses can turn right across a pedestrian green man as well. But wandering around with phone and camera in hand seems perfectly safe; after all, as a fair-skinned, light-haired Westerner I stick out like a sore thumb anyway.
Language remained the barrier and I couldn’t have done it without a reliable translation app to translate my questions, Chinese answers, and also signs. A smile and a ‘thank you’ also goes a long way when struggling to communicate.
Getting around proved dead easy. I booked trains in advance via Trip.com, and they were all electronic tickets linked to my passport. You arrive at a station, your passport number is scanned or typed into a machine by an attendant, and it knows you have a ticket. Apart from the train between Suzhou and Shanghai, which was a couple of minutes late, everything else was bang on time. Bus tickets were fine too, although I bought these as I went along.
Your passport is your key to doing everything and foreigners need their passports to buy tickets for most attractions and travel.
The other keys to everything are electronic. Don’t go to China without a phone. If you have a good roaming plan your foreign sim will get you past the Great Firewall; if you don’t, buy an eSim if you can; if that’s not an option (it wasn’t for me), get a VPN before you leave (research which ones are working at the time of travel – Astrill was the most reliable for me), and once you’re there, get a Chinese sim card for data and a phone number. It’s very useful to have a Chinese number to write down if needed, and you need data for a lot of things.
The two key apps are Alipay and WeChat. Alipay is easy: I was able to download it in advance, register all my personal information (accept it – you can’t travel in China without doing so) and add my debit cards to it. Once in China I was able to use it to pay for pretty much everything. There’s ‘scan’ and ‘pay/receive’ buttons at the top of the app: scan will access things like menus for you, with an in-app translation option, while ‘pay/receive’ brings up a QR code which retailers can scan so you can pay for things. Towards the end of the trip I had to start putting in my payment password (a six-digit code) for everything, and then on the last day it also started asking for bank verification, and then it refused my last payment, but until then it was really dead easy.
WeChat is not so easy. I was able to set up an account using my Facebook account before leaving the UK, but I didn’t add any payment options. I started using it to scan stuff and to communicate with some of the Asian Games volunteers and that was fine, until I got blocked for ‘sending too many messages to strangers’. As the only people I’d messaged had been a handful of volunteers I’d added as contacts I still don’t know why this happened.
I then never got around to unblocking it – it’s a really time-consuming process that requires a friend with certain privileges and access to verify your identity – and this was fine, until I got to Nanjing and everything involved a WeChat code. In the end I did manage without it, but frankly, it would have been easier if it had worked. However, setting up an account without a Chinese number that you’ve had for a certain amount of time, or without a friend who meets the requirements, is a hassle and a half.
You can travel in China without one of WeChat or Alipay but I wouldn’t recommend it. Get at least one of them working. Cash is rarely needed, especially if you stay on the tourist routes. I got rid of mine by using it to pay for a lot of tickets for stuff, but in the end, I wish I’d only got out a couple of hundred yuan for emergencies rather than the thousand yuan I did get.
Food is good, and cheap, although eating solo isn’t always easy as dishes are geared towards sharing, rather like in South Korea. Often the problem I found was that there were too many choices and I dithered over restaurants and maybe didn’t make the best decisions every time. And after five weeks I was heartily sick of rice and noodles and just wanted a cheese sandwich with some nice bread. Of course, a month later, I was happily devouring a Chinese meal in Chinatown with friends, and comparing with proper Chinese food.
In sum: there's so much of China yet to see, and I hope I'll get the opportunity to go back there in the future.
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