There are all kinds of guides in China - guide books, the information for guests provided by hotels, the helpful staff in your hotel, the signs which may be carefully placed to give you information about your location and then the actual real guides who help you not get lost.  For all of these please remember the lyrics from Baz Luhrmann’s Sunscreen;

“Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

Guide books: I suppose it’s good for me in a way that the guide books for China weren’t extremely helpful - because there’s lots of new or correct information for me to add to the website, but I do want to caution you on a few things that tripped me up. 

Lonely Planet do a valiant job of trying to cover the world - an almost impossible task - and their guide book on the whole of China was something we used a lot to fine tune our trip, but... the most important areas for us were the ones not covered in the city guide books - so Yangshuo and Huangshan.  Yangshuo is incredibly difficult to cover as it changes so fast.  For the best, most relevant information I would use the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat website - and also, once there, their guest information - they are also very happy to recommend other accommodation if you need something different or they are fully booked.  Trust them.

For Huangshan I have read a lot of information in various books, and I’m sorry but it all seems to be cribbed from the same source as the Lonely Planet - i.e. that, if you are “reasonably fit” it’s an easy two and a half hour hike to the top on the east side and a harder four and half hour hike on the west.  I think something got lost in translation.  Because in my experience it was that - AFTER you’d gone up in the cable car.  (Seriously - save your energy - there are mountains to climb on top of the mountain!)  The area that I got lost in was the West Sea Canyon (or Xihai Canyon) and this is quite new, but still I felt so sorry for all the English people determined to do this easy hike up the mountain, and felt a bit naughty for taking the cable car (but my hotel advised me to do this and my legs were still a bit wobbly from the stomach bug).  Once I had gone up in the cable car I just felt worried for all those poor English people - who had read the Lonely Planet and refused to believe their hotel!  Please listen to your hotel.

I often think when I am writing this that I could save you money, discomfort, embarrassment or just time, but in the case of Huangshan I think that good information might just save your life - or at least some time in a Chinese hospital.

The best guide books once again were the DK Eye Witness - I bought the ones for Beijing and Hong Kong and they were the most reliable, especially in terms of restaurants in Hong Kong.  The maps are also good (I advise you to mark your hotel on before you leave), but unfortunately they don’t do one for Shanghai.  But here again I think that they underestimated the hikes.  They call the walk from Po Lin back down to Tung Chung “a lovely four mile wooded path” - once again I went over it in the cable car and those are not easy stairs, especially in torrential rain (unless of course there is another pathway that I couldn’t see - well I suppose, if it’s wooded...)  I also thought that some of their suggestions were a bit dubious - Temple Street Night Market is now a real dump (but more on that in my Hong Kong Spa Princess section!)

The most irritating guide books were the Luxe ones.  These are a very small, posh (basically folded A4 card) that just list the best places to go and things to do in each city - so we had the ones for Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing to hand.  These were Mandy’s and she swears by them, “they’ve never let me down”, even after we couldn’t find three of the restaurants that were listed in there - ending up finally in a dodgy apartment building with Mandy insisting on going to the end of the corridor.  My thinking was that even if there was a restaurant I really didn’t want to eat there! 

The Luxe was my only guide in Shanghai.  One of its advantages is that it features shopping heavily as an activity, of course the disadvantage was that all the shops I went to, following its advice, were a let down.  As with restaurants, for shopping sometimes it’s worth just following your nose.

By the time I got to Beijing the Luxe guides were really annoying me.  They’re written in a kind of, aren’t we so special and privileged, colonial throwback voice, and the one for Beijing kept calling me a Clever Poppet - I was not amused.  But... as I couldn’t rip them up because they were Mandy’s this guide did finally redeem itself.  When I completely melted down at the Lama Temple in Beijing I just looked down their list of spas, found the one with a pool and stuck it under the cab driver’s nose, because... it does have the addresses written in Chinese, so it has to be a thumbs up for this guide in the end as it did save the day!

But I do think, especially for China, that guide books should have an “as at” date, so you can see exactly how current the info is (and that’s what I’ll be doing when I produce my guide books!)

Guide information when you’re there - hotel info, maps carved into the rock... :  Read it properly.  We went out on our little jaunt in Yangshuo and made it back by late lunchtime - the staff were impressed.  When I reread the guest information the advice for this trip was like this; “this is a fairly short trip but with some arduous cycling in places, make sure to take a packed lunch, lots of water and make plenty of rest stops, and leave a full day.”  Oops.

Also, if a sign is carved into the rock it is entirely possible that it hasn’t been updated to include the third path that is actually very, very long and hard. 

Actual guides:  If you are going to have a real life guide then ask your hotel to find you one.  You may be approached by people asking if you need a guide.  Whether they are actually a guide, or if they speak English, is debatable.

Guides in natural areas in China seem to be obsessed with what things look like.  On my cave jaunt the guide kept shining her torch on various brown formations; “...and this one looks like a cow...” and so on.  She did get a bit frustrated by the Dutch guy who wouldn’t take things seriously “you have to use your imagination”.  I was keeping quiet because all I could think was “...and this one looks like a poo...”  There were some cool ones, like the Buddha hanging from the ceiling but I do think they must have been really bored here (I know I was.)  This is the same on Huangshan, with the celebrated umbrella pine, the dragon’s foot roots of a tree.  I tell you all of this just so you know what you are letting yourselves in for if you join a tour group.  I quite enjoyed sitting by one of the features, letting a tour group go by, listening to 2 minutes of guide talk, and then having a rest.  But, if you have your own guide presumably you can enjoy the bits you’re interested in, and of course, not get lost!