Introduction
One of the things we were most apprehensive when we decided to go on our (supposed to be) year-long travel was visiting China. The lack of available online resources we’re used to as well as the language barrier and culture shock was something that we thought would be a challenge to move around the country.
Although we only decided to visit the south, specifically Guangxi, we found China to be a surprisingly easy country to navigate and travel in!
Digital Resources
As we had travelled from Hong Kong, we managed to get China Unicom and China Mobile SIM cards from there that also work in Mainland, these cards allowed us to still be able to use our favourite apps (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, TripAdvisor) plus we downloaded a more reliable map app for China (Google Maps does NOT work) Maps.me.
Language barrier
Well, the available digital resources kind of made it easier to overcome the language barrier plus in tourist spots it was relatively easy to find someone with basic notions of English. It was, however, more challenging to try to understand labels, signs and menus. Translation apps don’t really translate non-Roman alphabets too well and mandarin are particularly notable examples of that! (Plus some things we just didn’t really expect to find in certain packages, such as chicken feet powder).
Cultural differences
Yes, we won’t lie, China did feel like a different world to what we were used to, as we had only travelled in Europe and the USA. For most of our time there we were in relatively touristic areas yet at times we did feel a bit out of place.
A great example was Yangshuo, an internationally touristic town had police in each and every nightlife club and pub. In fact, there is police everywhere, in banks, supermarkets, and every few kilometers on the street and cameras are also watching from above. We felt this police presence to be quite unusual. However, saying this, we always had good experiences with the police, in Guilin, we came into a bank with our big backpacks and a police officer gave us a chair and a glass of water because he thought we would be tired of walking with heavy bags!
Another shock for us was the food, Ainhoa is vegetarian (flexitarian, if she needs to she would be willing to eat fish) and it was not that easy the first days until we knew where to expect to find vegetarian food and to what level (most of the time, broths won’t be vegetarian). We relied on bakeries a lot and supermarkets and, in the end, we got brave enough to order at traditional restaurants.
With all this in mind, Chinese people are very welcoming and helpful, even if they didn’t understand and couldn’t talk to us, they always tried helping us or found someone who could.
Overall we found travelling in China with resources to be a very enjoyable and stress free experience and we are already planning a longer trip to this beautiful country (after the COVID-19 pandemic is over, of course).
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