The China Journal - Day 38 & 39

I always assumed that the legions of Asian tour groups that swarm to popular Canadian tourist spots like Vancouver, Banff, and Niagara Falls was a result of a desire for ease and security, as it is certainly much easier to leave your travel itinerary and bookings to someone who is familiar with the geography and language of a country such as Canada which is so very different from anything you'd see and experience in Asia (this is a bit of a misnomer, especially if you've been to Vancouver's Chinatown, or Coquitlam Centre for that matter). What I had always perceived as strength in numbers, however, is nowhere near the truth.

In reality, the ideal form of tourism favored by most Chinese is to be led around by some obnoxious tour guide with the personality of an automatic banking machine for the blind, who marches to and fro with a brightly coloured flag and megaphone in hand as a herd of tourists, who are in turn garbed in the most criminally ugly baseball caps enblazoned with the tour company's logo and colours, making it easy to spot one should they wander too far from the pack.

Nowhere was this made more apparent than at Zhangjiajie National Park, where fleets of buses come and go each day, delivering to the park's gate a wealth of Chinese eager to enjoy the splendours of nature by shouting at each other as loudly as possible and by feeding the wild monkeys despite the numerous posted warnings to do otherwise.

The sheer number of Chinese tourists begins to have its effect on both Laura and I, as we become increasingly irritable towards the countless number who belt "HELLO!" as we pass and proceed to laugh and talk about us with their companions, oftentimes directly in front of us. While we have typically been pretty good sports up until this point, we've not chosen to outright ignore them or simply stop and give them a dirty glare. However, the few times where I've broken out with a string of words in English that would have no discernable meaning in any language results in expressions of bewilderment and discomfort that serve to do nothing more than make people feel overly self-conscious, which in turn makes me feel great. Clearly, the novelty of our ethnic celebrity status has officially worn off.

Despite this, Laura and I spend two days surrounded by magnificent landscapes, where over 3000 karst upthrusts that formed the region's geography seemed at time to defy the laws of physics. In attempt to break away from the teeming masses, we ventured off the standard tourist trail on our way back to the park entrance, resulting in a long march of our very own, in which more than two hours of a five hour hike were spent climbing a steep grade some 1100 metres above sea level up a never-ending series of concrete steps that led to the summit.