China is hard.  It’s the most incredibly, beautiful place I think I’ve ever visited and the people are friendly, helpful and very kind, but there were times on my trip when I just stopped still and thought “I can’t do this.”  I expected there to be problems with the language, with the mountain, for sure, maybe even cultural differences, but what I didn’t expect was that it would at times feel just plain impossible.

I guess we (Mandy who I was travelling with and I) didn’t really make things easy on ourselves.  There are so many incredible places to visit in China and we only had two weeks.  We finally narrowed it down to Hong Kong, Guilin, Shanghai, Huangshan and finally Beijing and only managed to squeeze it all in by flying everywhere rather than taking the train.

When we arrived in Hong Kong I was a bit disappointed - everything was in English as well as Chinese, and it all felt a little familiar... and then there was the torrential rain!  But slowly, through the pollution and the rain, the real Hong Kong emerged, beautiful wildlife, beaches, and the most wonderful spa I’ve ever been to.

Then came the most horrendous journey to China - everything took so long, especially Chinese immigration in Shenzhen, that we ended up going flat out in a Chinese cab trying to make our flight - we were the last on the plane, and it took me until at least the next day to recover.  This, of course, was the only internal flight we had that wasn’t delayed!

We arrived in Guilin at night, so waking up in Yangshuo was the most incredible experience.  It was lush, relaxed, beautiful, full of tourists, but we still managed to go a little bit off the beaten track and discover it for ourselves.  I couldn’t help but fall in love with Yangshuo.  By the end of the second day we were relaxed, getting on really well, and that’s when things got complicated.

First of all I had a stomach bug, and then sadly Mandy got the news of a family emergency.  Instead of spending our last day visiting the Longshen area as planned, we had to book Mandy on a flight back to Hong Kong and back to London, and I then spent 7 hours in Guilin Airport changing my travel plans as I was carrying on by myself.

The first thing I did was change my hotel in Shanghai, upgrading to, quite simply, the best hotel in town.  Arriving at 2am in the morning by myself I decided it was Safety First and I wasn’t going to mess around with our existing hotel as it had had some mixed reviews on Tripadvisor.  It was the best thing I ever did!  Shanghai is a town for luxury, for spas and for staying in the shade.  Over three days there I slept, ate and tried to get my legs back to normal after my stomach bug and get ready for that great big Yellow Mountain (Huangshan).

I won’t lie, I was pretty nervous about going up the mountain.  Actually I was terrified.  Although I had changed my plans a little (cancelled the infamous Beihai Hotel on top of the mountain and booked instead another night at the Old Street Hotel) and asked to get a guide, the Old Street Hotel assured me that I really didn’t need a guide...

Huangshan is the most beautiful natural place I think I have ever been, it’s really suck your breath in awesome.  It’s also really, really, really high.  I’m not necessarily talking about metres above sea level, it’s more, how far down is the bottom from here.  I actually took a photo when I could finally see the bottom.  And the stairs and the bridges, I mean, who, what, how... and of course... I got lost.

You’ll hear a lot more about this in the actual Huangshan bit, but this was one of those impossible moments.  And it didn’t matter to me that it was a mountain with hotels and lots and lots of tourists - I still felt that I had to, just had to, get that last cable car at 4.30pm.  And through sheer bloody mindedness and tearing up and down countless stairs, I did.  4.27pm - the last cable car, and a whole lot of tears.

The next day I cancelled my village sightseeing and just spent the day recuperating in Tunxi (near Huangshan), and having the most painful “foot”massage of my life.  I finally got on my last internal flight to Beijing - twenty minutes before we landed I’d had it - my legs hurt, my head hurt, my gums hurt...

And if there is anywhere you need energy it is Beijing.  It is the daddy of Chinese cities.  The Forbidden Palace, The Great Wall, The Temple of Heaven... you could easily spend a day walking round each one of these.  But limping along, trying to avoid as many stairs (and stares - oh yes I appeared to be the only Caucasian in Beijing) as I could, I could only really give Beijing a very little of my attention.  But the great thing about this website, and about China, is that when I completely melted down I just jumped in a cab and headed over to one of the best spas in town - yeah baby.

But every time I picked myself up and got myself together I felt like China just pushed me over again, and by now I was feeling that maybe I should just stay down.  But that of course is not what happened!  So on my last day in China I took my time, I got up, I figured out how to get something to eat in a Chinese food court and I finally found my spot in Beijing.  In the Temple of Heaven Park where the real Beijingers come to play, a Chinese grandma asked me to get up and dance.  Unfortunately I couldn’t because my legs were still in bad shape, but I was okay.  I didn’t need language and I didn’t need my credit card, I just needed what I had told myself was the most important thing to bring with me... a good heart.

China is another world - there are still so many places I would like to visit there, and it’s taught me a lot.  It really is the farthest I think you can travel, not just geographically but in terms of culture - after all it was shut off from the outside world for so many years - but there is also a familiarity, probably from all the hundreds of years of history and stealing each other’s culture.  I’ve never been somewhere where I’ve felt so “other” - standing in a sea of Oriental people.  But don’t think there isn’t racial diversity, there are so many tribes, so many cultures within the culture.  Each place I went to was like visiting a completely different country - yes, just when I cracked it one place it was time to move on to another.

But the biggest thing for me in China was family.  Yangshuo Mountain Retreat said it in their guest information “we are a family”.  It hit home for me.  Everywhere I stayed, each hotel, was so much more than just a room or a place to eat, every hotel became my family - whether it was helping us to sort out Mandy’s flight home, getting me safely around in Shanghai, taking care of me in Huangshan, or becoming my friends in Beijing... If and when you travel in China this is the one piece of advice I hope you remember, your hotel is your family, and in China you really, really need them.

And in Beijing another thing about family in China hit me.  Because there were so many people travelling to see family as it was the mid-Autumn festival (more on moon cakes later!) there were a lot of American/Chinese, Australian/Chinese, and these people had children.  When I woke up in Beijing to the sound of children playing together I was in tears.  All through my journey in China I had seen individual children, (actually I did see two in the river in Yangshuo) but they are surrounded by adults, parents, grandparents, unlike my own unruly bunch of nieces and nephews, unlike my own wonderful brothers and sisters.  In theory yes I knew about the one child policy, and the occasional exceptions for the rich and the very poor, but the reality is something different.  It means no brother and sisters, no aunts and uncles, no cousins, and whatever the ecological and economical reasons, it made me think of my brothers and sisters and I missed them so much.  I wasn’t homesick, just family sick (and this time in my life I was sick for them - not sick of them for a change.)

As I’ve arrived back in London I’m going to try and remember that, remember how blessed I am even when the kids wake me up at 5am, or my siblings drive me crazy.  China is so rich in beauty, culture, history, incredible food, healing, luxury, but the really, really rich people here are the farmers who are allowed to try for another baby if the first is a girl, the families who can afford a fine or bribe for a second baby, or the expats who get to visit their parents with their children, and me?  Without any kids of my own, but with four brothers and sisters, six nieces and nephews and seven “sort of” godchildren?  I’m the richest of them all.