A Peace of China: Chinese tour group

With a free Saturday and forecasted nice weather, PCV Stephanie and I decided to finally take a long talked about daytrip to Dazu, a world heritage site. Dazu is a town about 100 km from Chongqing where the surrounding area has 3 sites of Tang and Song dynasty (892-1245) Buddhist cliff sculptures carved into caves and overhangs.

It’s a trip we had already researched, so we had the lowdown on how to get there, but at the last minute, that Friday night, we made a plan change to go with a tour, booked through one of the local youth hostels. It seemed like a good idea, the tour promised all we were planning, but with an English speaking guide and without the travel hassles, all for about the same price. It sounded good. It turned out to be something else, still we were glad to have a Chinese tour-group experience. Now we know.

our tour group

The Chinese prefer to travel in groups, using arranged, packaged tours, and with the growing middle class, they have the time and money to travel. Western, independent travelers contradict their ideas about the value of being in a group and about organized travel in general. They find solo travelers very confusing.

The first problem of the day was waiting at the Yangtze River boat dock to leave. River cruisers can take the add-on daytrip to Dazu, but the bus won’t leave until it’s full. Several buses loaded and left; ours left 1 ½ hours later. Even before we got on the bus, we were accosted with the “look-look, foreigners! Take a picture of them!” For about 5 minutes it was amusing to listen to them speculate about where we were from and if we could speak Chinese. Another problem for the day was the guide only spoke Chinese, very fast Chinese, so we didn’t understand any of the interpretive information.

at the lunch stop, Stephanie show off her tour group sticker

Our first stop on the way was a Buddhist temple where we spent about an hour standing around. The next stop was lunch.

Finally at about 2:30, we arrived at Boading Shan (1179-1245), one of the sites, and as it turned out, the only Dazu site on the tour. We had an hour there.

Then, we loaded up, drove about 20 minutes to a knife factory, where the tour unloaded to hear a hard-sell presentations on their wonderful knifes. It worked because people were buying them. An hour later we were again back on the bus. I was feeling disappointed because we could have seen all 3 sites if we didn’t make all of these other stops.

English interpretive signs that make sense

As we were coming back into Chongqing, the bus drove into my district, Shapingba, so I asked the driver to let me off and thankfully he did. Stephanie sent me a text 15 minutes later saying they made another stop at a shop of local Chongqing food. It took her another 2 hours to get home.

We agree no more tours; we’ll do independent travel! Then just now, I got an email from Stephanie saying that starting this year China changed the restrictions for tourist travel to Tibet, but on the condition that foreigners go with a tour group.