The sights are disappointing, the people are appalling, and then there's the spitting. Aengus Collins was looking forward to visiting boom-time China. Instead he endured a holiday from hellTHE PEOPLE WERE DIFFICULT TO GET ALONG WITH. PERSONAL SPACE SEEMED NOT TO EXIST AT ALL. GETTING AROUND WAS A TRIAL OF BEING STARED AT AND TAPPED, BUMPED INTO AND GRABBED
I had great hopes for my visit to China. I had already been to Hong Kong, which I left with mixed feelings, mainly because of its surreal combination of the Chinese and the hyper-western, as if it were a postcolonial theme park. I wanted to see the real China, the emerging powerhouse with a long history more or less of its own. I'm still not quite sure what I expected, but with hindsight my hopes were decidedly rose-tinted. I was ready for the drab industrial sprawl - economic development is a dull and dirty process, however rapid the expansion - but I thought the country's history would add a patina of romance. I was wrong.
Take the Forbidden City, the first sight I visited and the historical heart of Beijing. It was disconcerting to find that the narrator of my audio tour was Roger Moore, and things only got worse. The complex of imperial buildings dates from the 15th century and should have been breathtaking, but the spectacle was curiously deflating. Its grandeur was all but lost - to poor presentation and to Chinese visitors shoving their way around. There were many things I expected to be surprised by in China, but teenage boys elbowing elderly women out of the way to get a better view of some dimly lit imperial chambers wasn't one of them.
It wasn't just the Forbidden City. Repeatedly in China, the sights disappointed and the people appalled. Had I had more time to travel into the countryside, my experience might have been better, but the two cities I visited - Xian was the other - were tiring to spend time in. I'm a big-city person, but the way the people interacted here was simply wearying.
And for the heart of such a large city, central Beijing had surprisingly little to offer that ranked in the must-see category, once you'd ticked the Forbidden City and the magnificent Great Wall off your list. Tiananmen Square was drab and soulless; to its south, Qiamen - supposedly a lively hub of activity - was grimy and smelly. Eastwards takes you to Jianguomen and Wangfujing, affluent districts with gleaming malls and expat supermarkets. Handy for picking up a few essentials but not exactly what you fly 10 hours to see.
The area to the north of the Forbidden City was much more rewarding. In Beihei Park life shifted down a few gears. People became more quiet, more tranquil and more respectful towards each other. On the lake boats drifted, quietly steered by couples under parasols. And north again, out of the park, the labyrinthine hutongs, or side streets, had a quiet magic, and there were rare signs of tasteful development, with inviting waterside bars and restaurants.
Farther afield there's the Summer Palace. But, restored in the late 19th century by the Empress Dowager Cixi, it felt as if it hadn't been touched since. Some of the rooms were heartbreakingly pathetic - little more than a ragbag clutter of dusty furniture and ornaments, with seemingly not the slightest thought or care given to preservation or presentation. It felt like peering in at a dead person's house rather than touring a site of national significance.
I enjoyed the journey out to the palace, though. The taxi driver was listening to beautiful, mournful Chinese pop music, and as he drove along the highway he sang quietly to himself. I think he was the only person I saw enjoying music so warmly while I was in the city. I still regret not having tried to ask him who the singer was.
But he was the exception rather than the rule. There were other exceptions, too, but on the whole the people in China were difficult to get along with. A lot of it came down to personal space, which seemed not to exist at all. The cities weren't unusually busy or crowded, but getting around still turned into an endurance trial of being stared at and tapped, bumped into and grabbed. It made for a minor irritation at first, but at the end of a long day, when it happened for the umpteenth time, the nerves frayed.
And then there was the spitting. My visit to Hong Kong had taught me to expect it, but forewarned isn't always forearmed. Expecting the spitting made it no less revolting to spend so much time surrounded by the raspy gurgle of phlegm being hawked and sent in all directions. It got to the point where, without thinking, I'd find myself trying to anticipate likely trajectories relative to my sandalled feet. There were near misses.
Presumably, life would have been easier if the language barrier hadn't been so much higher than in many other countries. On my first day in Beijing I asked at reception how to pronounce the name of the road my hotel stood on. The two people on duty spoke the words slowly for me, and I did my best to repeat the sounds. But the tonal structure of the language was beyond me, and my two helpers spent some considerable time doubled over, laughing at whatever it was I had inadvertently said.
I was lucky to eat out with a Chinese speaker one evening, a man named Paul from Connecticut whom I had met at the hotel. His Chinese was a godsend and brought forth great food: a delicious hotpot, consisting of a broth boiled in front of you at the table, into which you threw the meat, vegetables and noodles that you'd ordered. This was at a hole-in-the-wall place down the road from the hotel. It was one of my most satisfying meals in Asia. Without Paul I never would have known that the place served hotpot, let alone how to order it, as there was no English written or spoken in the restaurant.
There was no toilet, either, so after the meal the staff had to direct me across a main road and down a lane to the nearest public one. It was surprisingly clean, but that initial bonus swiftly faded in significance as I became aware of a very large man sitting on the toilet in the corner cubicle, door wide open, straining very publicly in search of what was clearly an elusive bowel movement. It's an image that would have lingered anyway, but then his mobile rang, and he answered. God knows what the person on the other end made of the constipated howl that greeted him.
I wasn't sorry to leave Beijing, and things picked up a bit when I moved on to Xian, to see the Terracotta Army. The food was better for a start. Soup-filled dumplings were spectacular, chicken on a stick became a lunchtime favourite, and bread (sorely missed in Beijing) was, happily, an important element of Xian's cuisine, courtesy of the city's large Muslim population.
Xian also offered a rare example of someone offering unprompted assistance, when a man outside the railway station helped me to find the bus that would take me to see the Terracotta Army; these 6,000 statues, which guard the mausoleum of Shi Huangdi, China's first emperor, were some of the most impressive things I have ever seen, and worth the trip to China on their own.
There were many tourist buses, but I had decided to take the public bus with the locals. When in Rome and all that. I'm glad I found the 306, but nothing could have prepared me for what it entailed. The journey itself was uneventful, but the havoc involved in getting on the bus in the first place was one of the most shocking experiences I have had anywhere. When the bus arrived a frantic scrum formed and surged at its doors. Dozens of people fought to get on, and at one stage out of the middle of the crowd came a scream from a girl who had become separated from her father and was being crushed. Nobody stepped back to let her out of the scrum; her father had to force his way back in and lift her out. I missed the bus. I was too busy standing with a few other tourists at the side of the large car park that doubled as the bus stop, staring in disbelief.
I had learned my lesson by the time the next busarrived. The drivers seemed to be playing a version of chicken with the people waiting for the bus, snaking unpredictably around the car park, slowing down and accelerating, in an effort to confuse the group and break it up before it descended on the vehicle. I managed to spot early on that the bus was going to speed past us and stop in the far corner. So I ran in that direction and was among the first 10 or 15 people trying to cram through the doors as they opened.
It all would have been slightly more understandable if there were only one bus a day, or if people's lives or livelihoods depended on catching it. But it was an ordinary suburban route, and the buses seemed to leave every 10 or 15 minutes.
After four days in Xian I travelled south to Hong Kong, for a return visit to China's little corner of un-China. You'd need to be slightly disturbed, or an investment banker, for Hong Kong to melt your heart, but after the oddness of the previous 10 days it was a joy to spend some time with friends there. The city was clean. The toilets were clean. The food was prepared hygienically and made with ingredients you could trust. People didn't stare or grab, and sometimes they even held doors open for each other.
I'll return to Asia at the drop of a hat, but China will take a while. When I do make it back, I'll spend less time in the cities and more time travelling between them. And I'll enjoy it more next time round. You can only have your expectations of a country dashed once.