Unearthing Small-town China

It’s 2 pm. The April sun is beating down on my face hotter than it should be this time of year and little beads of sweat are starting to form on my back. Dust is kicking up from a nearby construction site as my friend and I wander aimlessly down a side street in Hengdian, a tiny town in Zhejiang Province that is supposed to be the ‘Hollywood of China’.

It turns out that no, this isn’t the Hollywood of China, but rather a bunch of massive movie sets scattered to the ends of the town, impossible to reach on foot. My friend and I just ate pizza covered in sweet corn and peas for lunch, we’re down one passport and we’ve got nowhere to sleep for the night.

It’s 9:25 pm. The Yiwu taxi driver has just dropped us in front of a bar he assures us is an “England bar”. That would be fine except the writing on the sign is in Cyrillic. We’re still down one passport, we’re 200 km from home and the left passport means we won’t be getting a hotel at all tonight.

There’s a city park showing a movie on the big screen for free. Too bad it’s all in Chinese. And really too bad about the naked hobo we just passed. “There’s a bar,” says my friend. Beers for the next three hours.

Some of my best, most memorable adventures have come from exploring small towns in China. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had got a story or two from rafting in Utah and driving the back roads of New Zealand with my dad, but China is just so… weird. And small-town China is even weirder!

It’s not that you can’t have amazing, life-changing experiences in places like Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai – what I like to call the Golden Triangle of Chinese travel – but traveling in small-town China is simply on a different level of weird, all on its own!

I like to think that there are a three different major routes of travel in China. The first and most obvious is the Golden Triangle. Two types of travelers embark upon this most basic route, baby boomers on pre-booked tours and backpackers without much time. Another route includes some of the major provincial cities like Hangzhou (which Marco Polo called ‘heaven on earth’), Qingdao (because everyone loves beer) and Guangzhou (for that ever popular Cantonese delight, dim sum). It also incorporates some of China’s more well-known sights, such as Yellow Mountain and the Three Gorges River Cruise.

Small, unheard of cities and tiny villages comprises the final route. Most people never get to travel this route because they don’t have the time or are limited by their mindsets – because, let’s face it, getting around China is no piece of cake, even if you do speak some Mandarin. This is unfortunate, because small-town China ultimately offers some of the most rewarding travel one can do in China.

My small-town China adventures have taken me across the Inner Mongolian plains on horseback, into the western wine country where I dined under grape trellises, afield into the camps and forts of the Maoist revolution and aboard a night ship in the East China Sea. Most importantly, these adventures have taught me how vast and diverse this seemingly mono-cultural nation really is, and how beautiful it is to journey for the sake of the trip.

It’s 3 am. We’re on the slow train to Hangzhou, but we couldn’t get seats at this time of night, so we squeezed onto a bench and pretended to sleep. Since we’re foreign, the 320 other people in this car aren’t grumbling too much about our seat-stealing ploy. “Just close your eyes and maybe this night will end.” I’m carting a fake fifty bill that the taxi driver slipped me as change. It was too dark to see that it was counterfeit.

It’s 6:30 am. Dawn is breaking over Hangzhou’s high rises. The first bus back to the tiny city we call home leaves from the north bus station in thirty minutes. Just enough time to get a cab across town from this internet café where we’ve been holed up for the last hour. I’ll probably sleep all day.