China: a round-up

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.

Shanghai

The end of the trip – the metropolis of Shanghai. People say it’s like no other Chinese city, and it certainly had a more European feel in many ways – not least the hundreds of coffee shops everywhere – but it is still undeniably China, with electric scooters running amok, nobody standing politely in a queue for anything, and so on.

I did a lot of walking and not many main sights, having decided I’d seen enough temples and pagodas and what-not earlier on. I did do the Shanghai History Museum on arrival day, which was great; well laid-out and interesting, and QUIET, so it was possible to browse the exhibits and read all the information without jostling for space with other people. In the evening of day 1 I caught up with the two girls who had been our key organisers for the Asian Games, one of whom is studying in Shanghai and the other who was down for the weekend, and we ate fried dumplings and saw the lights on the Bund.

Day 2 dawned beautifully sunny and bright, so I took advantage of the weather to go up the Shanghai Tower. It’s China’s tallest building and the third tallest in the world, and also has the world’s highest observation deck at 562m or 118 stories. The views were superb. On the advice of friends I paid for the full package which took you to the 126th floor to see the building’s damper and the huge jade sculpture which sits atop the damper, which they’ve used to make a sort of music and light show. It was pretty cool.

Modern art was the theme for the rest of the day – a poke around the M50 contemporary art area, where a bunch of artists have colonised a former industrial area and put in galleries, and then on to the Jing’an Sculpture Park. There was a free concert in the park I hung out at for a little bit too. I had a bit of a food nightmare in the evening; Googling night markets suggested there would be one near my hotel, but when I arrived, it was non-existent and I spent half an hour wandering around until I found somewhere which would serve me some food. Apart from that, it was a good day.

The last day was, as last days can be, a little aimless. I went to the French Concession, the old colonial area where the French used to run their businesses, and did some last-minute shopping. I wanted to go to the arts and crafts museum, but it was closed for lunch when I arrived, so I had another wander until I managed to find a mall and a restaurant for something to eat.

Then it was generally more wandering up to Fuxing (French) Park and on to the modern, flashy Xiantiandi area, where I’d hoped to find some food but it was way too posh and Western. So the trip finished back in the Yu Garden area where I’d been on the first evening to graze on random snacks, and then to the hotel for a last beer on the rooftop.

By this point my payment app, Alipay, had decided I’d spent too much and declined to let me pay for the beer (luckily normal card payment came to the rescue). The holiday was clearly ended.

Practicalities:

• Shanghai’s metro is the best way of getting around although stations are not always close to sights, and there will still be a lot of walking
• You need a passport to buy a ticket for the Shanghai Tower. I just rocked up and walked straight in – queues were developing later, however I couldn’t work out how to book online
• If you see a branch of Yang’s Fried Dumplings stop and eat there