Reading, Tour guide: Eyewitness Travel China

Hong Kong

Over last few months I have seen a lot of tour guides. It seems like the format would be pretty cut and dried – they’re all about the same, no?  Well, mostly that's true - but in checking them out at bookstores there was always one series that stood out: the Eyewitness Guides: ‘the guides that show you what others only tell you’.

These books are beautiful. Several full-color photos and illustrations decorate every page. Printed on glossy paper these guides were always the first one I picked up at the bookstore - but I never bought one.  They were just too darn heavy and I knew if I bought them I would never be able to leave them behind when I left the country. I would end up lugging several pounds of guidebooks all over until I got back to California.

Guilin/Yangshuo

But this trip was a one off, starting in California, so I could use my favorite guide. It was a double-edged sword. The purpose of the guide in this project is to help me figure out how to spend the limited time I have in the country.  Every country has more to see than can be seen in a single visit, even if it is a month-long visit. You just can't see everything.

That is especially true of a country as large and diverse as China. You're going to miss things. I know we missed some great things in Turkey, but somehow knowing of those things only from black and white print, it was less painful than it would have been, seeing the great pictures of all the extraordinary sites you were going to have to blow off.

Shanghai

But you can't do everything. Maybe we saw the best? It was good, even if pretty common as China itineraries go.

We started in Hong Kong, the most modern and western of China’s cities.  From there we went to Guilin and Yangshuo, the scenic country side. Then Shanghai, the economic dynamo. Before Beijing we took the obligatory side trip to China's ancient past Xi’an. We may have missed a lot, but we saw a lot too.