Collywood

Sightseeing in China



Thousands of years of culture, uncountable emperor dynasties, buddhism, confucianism, the unique nature and lots of more things. You expect tons of historic places, cultural offers and breathtaking landscapes which leave their footprints indelibly in the brains of the common tourist.

I have to admit, that our visits of Chinas main attractions in fact left an indelibly footprint. But it was in a completely different, but nevertheless fascinating and particularly funny, way, than we expected:

If one nation carried the optimization of tourism to extremes, than it must be China. In no other country we know, so many people are forced through a sight in such a short time.

By the way, the sight itself is not the most important thing at all. Normally you cannot experience much history at this sights and if there is really one small piece left, which is older than 20 years, it will be very difficult to find.

Again and again the same concrete temples with the same paintings, the endless shoppingstrips and restaurants which have to be crossed before you finally get to the entrance. Not to forget the electric busses which carry you (3 Yuan) the onehundert meters from the parking lot to the entrance of the shoppingstrip, the queues in front of the ticket offices, the queues in front of the ticket office of the chairlift which will carry you the fifty meters up to the temple and so on, and so on.

If you really reach the one and only object of interest you will have to rush through with the help of megaphones.

After all there are another 5 million chinese tourists, who want to see something and who have to burn terrabytes of imagedata on memorysticks and - by the way - it is time to have another quick meal somewhere. Besides we don't whant to check out the history!

Did I mention the busride to or from the sight before? No matter if its one, two or three hours, a very nice female travel guide will have enough information for you to talk all the way through. By the way they will never have one slip of the tongue - maybe they are not real either;-) Unfortunately we never understood, what they were talking about. But I think it was not that important, because all the Chinese, just sitting in the bus, fell into a deadlike sleep. You can image the number of questions they ask before we finally were allowed to leave the bus.

It gets really funny when the bus suddenly stops in the middle of nowhere. Than you will have a mega sales show. On one trip we attended to a knife sales show. But just for some minutes because after that Marion broke out in hysterical laughter. Flying knifes and a squeaking machine gun voice: that was just to much. But they were really successful. The Chinese carried bags full of knifes out of the shop.

Just one more thing: Join-in-actions at the historic sights. You dress up and get nice pictures, you touch something, you press buttons, you climb up somewhere, you climb through a tunnel and everybody joins in. Mutimedia backup is fully appreciated. And one also attends a chinese opera at 7 in the morning (wearing life vests) because the boat trip through the canyon gets boring after 5 minutes and 20 pictures.

So it is more about theme parks than about historic sights and actually I don't believe the Terracotta Warriors to be real historic. The dimly lit halls with the very bad views on the excavations (taking pictures with tripods is forbidden). That looks more like Hollywood ...

In spite of everything it was really fun. So we would like to show you some impressions of Collywood: The tourist are real tourists, garanteed. The rest ... I wouldn't vouch for that!