The Tour of Hunan - From Zhangjiajie to Changsha - dispatches from the frontline of tourism in China

The Tour of Hunan was a four-day coach trip that was run by a local tour operator designed to show foreigners the highlights of the province. The coach became our second home, my back slowly locked itself into the shape of seat. They managed to turn a holiday into the chore by packing in as many iconic sites scattered across the four corners of Hunan as possible. Each day we seemed to drive for around six hours, starting in the early morning with shorter rides later in the day. With a 6.30 AM wake up call each day, it felt like work.

By submitting to this gruelling timetable we were able to catch attractions like this bed that Mao once slept in. This is a tricky exhibit as it has to ride a fine line between looking both stately enough for the Great Helmsman and yet humble enough for a junior scholar in a backward province. I must have taken a lot of effort to find that sweet spot in the middle!

And here he is again leading the coach through his home province. His presence seemed strangely apolitical, he seemed to function more by offering an, albeit premature, celebrity endorsement of the sites.  

The historic towns we visited were the homogenised type that had been given the tourist makeover. Coach after coach spilled out tourists who raided the streets buying up souvenirs and fake luxury brands. While this scene of consumption could be anywhere in China, the tourists themselves add some local colour. Buddhist monks were even getting in on the act, I like very much the disciple, here sporting a red Hello Kitty bag that almost matches his robes.

The drum shops reminded me of Lijiang in Yunnan, a tourist town that has been similarly transformed and which sports an unlikely number of them. These shops seem, at first, completely arbitrary and it remains a mystery to me who actually buys these drums. What I do see in them now, however, is that they evince the growing contact between China and Africa which they frame within the field of leisure. I should like to better understand what Africa currently represents in the tourist mindset here, this is something very much in flux.

We had a rotating cast of tour guides. Our primary guide had a habit of talking too much about stuff of no relevance. For example, when she was telling us what the dinner would be one evening, she launched into a story about fish, which we weren't going to have, and how her daughter had got a fishbone stuck in her throat and had to go to the doctor to get it removed only to be told there was no bone there. Well meaning but not informed about the sites at all, she went on extended improvisations with the microphone at the front of the bus. Alongside her was a local guide who spoke no English but who took care of the restaurant and hotel bookings.

At most of the sites we visited we there were then guides specific to the attractions we were being wheeled in front of so we'd sometimes have three levels of simultaneous guides, none of whom really made the place any the more interesting but who did at least keep up some sense of momentum.

I had recently come across a tongue in cheek article on cocktails you can make with ingredients from a Chinese convenience store. Over the four days I tested them all. This Baileys style drink was probably the most palatable. 

The interminable coach rides between sites were, on one of the days, augmented by the driver adding in some private business of his own. We made a stop to pick up some boxes and bags at a petrol station the the edge of one of the towns and then made a large swooping detour for him to go to his home town where the coach pulled and his wife ran to meet us and take a sack of pomelos from the bottom of the coach. Cocktail time.

One of the parks was full of monkeys. They seemed like used to the tourists and this one was not in the least phased by the circle of phones that surrounded it.

The cable car ride to the higher peak was not for those with vertigo. 

Zhangjiajie is stunning, an unreal assemblage of oversized toothpicks bound together with lush tree cover. We were given fifteen minutes to take pictures before it was time to move on.

One of the more absurd things the guide kept on stressing was that the mountains featured in the film Avatar. Even though this blockbuster movies was meant to lend the site greater kudos, it only brought it down in my mind to the world of aspirational CGI and middle of the road acting.

There was even a video machine there which could film you and then stick you on top of a dodgy animated bird flying high over peaks of Zhangjiajie. They had a special talent for making something very ordinary and kitsch out of an absolutely stunning natural location. 

We were vastly outnumbered by the domestic tourists who had a much clearer idea of what to do with a site like this. Their's was a near military style sweep: go to prime photo spot, selfie sticks out, take turns with group shot, break into solo and duet shots then move on the next site. Our tour was a pale, self-conscious imitation of theirs: we have the photos too but ours are not as cleanly composed, are far fewer in number and we never managed smiles like theirs. Being a tourist requires practice.

Dubrovnik tours: busy as ever

I have the good fortune to return to the place where the idea for The Tour of All Tours first came to me: Dubrovnik. What's more, I'm here to assist making a performance that will involve some touring around the city, but more on that in a later post.

Today I caught the early shift of the tourists. As it is very hot during Summer it is best to start before it gets too oppressive or else wait till later in the day. I rather like the way she holds the number 1 so that people can identify her. When the tourist are dispatched to the guides they are given numbers depending on their language and route. Number 1 turned out to be an English speaking guide.

Here's a Chinese group and the thing that was most charming about them is how they have their translator and tour leader who wears a sailor's cap. The guide gives the explanation to him (I didn't catch whether this was in English or Croatian) and he then relays the information to the group. 

This is a Turkish group and I'd be very curious to see how their tour differed from those of say the Italians. Dubrovnik was under the Ottoman Empire's protection for a long and important period of time in its history so there must be some special information relating to this history that the Turkish group would hear. The Italians would hear a different history I imagine as they, or more specifically Venice, were another major power who exercised control over Dubrovnik for a period of time and who remained competitors for centuries to come. These colonial or historical ties are rich material for highly specific tours.

Finally, I saw a number of tours advertised that could take you out of the city and to some exotic locations. This was a typical offer: Montenegro, Mostar and Korcula. Albania is also popular and Sarajevo an option. With these tours some of them go to places known to most visitors from the wars of the 90s. The visits to Bosnia in particular can be a form of battlefield tourism. I also get a slight feeling that these tours play the angle of taking you from a reassuringly safe place to a slightly less safe place but in the company of a dependable guide. How true that is, is another question entirely: Albania may well be completely fine for all I know. 

I did hear today of a very extreme sort of tourism that took place during the war itself. Apparently there were people who paid to be able to participate in the war. Rather than mercenaries who are paid to fight, these were men who wanted a taste of the action and were willing to pay for the experience of being in a battle zone. Needless to say, I won't be taking those sort of tours myself for this blog!  

The Stuttgart Kunstmuseum Tour

The Kunstmuseum is one of the more important buildings in central Stuttgart: it's been dropped bang in the middle of the city, has a self-consciously contemporary design and a great viewing platform that looks out over the main square from its top floor. As I have been toying with using their viewing platform, I felt I really should take their tour, even if it was only offered in German, which I understand shockingly little of. Actually, to tell the truth, my German is basically a smattering gleamed from ordering drinks and food whilst do shows here or else it's derived from watching too many B-list war movies as a kid. It is certainly nowhere near sufficient to take a contemporary art tour. 

Luck, however, was with me today. I turned out to be the only person on the tour and my guide, Lilian, was able to give me a tour in English. The tour took us through the museum's collection stopping to talk about a number of the works. The style of the tour was more interactive than previous ones with questions like "what do you see in the painting" acting as starters. Information about the work did follow but I think this style of tour was used in order to engage people in the process of the work and not just in appreciating masterworks. We had to find the right words to put to some of the concepts, as this was probably the first time she had ever given the tour in English, but it went fine. 

The tour began with early 20th Century paintings from the Swabian Impressionism school, which I'd never heard of, to contemporary sculpture pieces and it lasted a little over an hour. While we were being encouraged to say what we say and thought when looking at the work, I also got the feeling that this information was then being railroaded into the correct interpretation, which the guide was always going to get me to arrive at in the end. She told me that the majority of people who take this tour are usually 50+ and there is often some hostility to the more conceptual works, which comes as little surprise.

I noticed that they had an upmarket cafe downstairs and a good restaurant upstairs and this got me thinking about yesterday's tour. If the sex tour were to extend into the Kunstmuseum the cafe would be the prime pick-up spot, or else the art itself, like in Woody Allen's droll Play it Again Sam.

This evening ended with overhearing a remark about English tourists. I was standing outside a rather hip bar where an Icelandic singer songwriter was playing. He introduced most of his songs with a short story or observation and with one he began by saying how terrible English tourists are. He then asked, "are there any English tourists here?" I said nothing as I am technically neither English nor a tourist, even though I share certain qualities of both. He then proceeded to say what assholes English tourists are, how they are the loudest and most stupid tourists, how he was in a hostel and trying to sleep and some English tourists burst in shouting "where's my kebab!" and when he asked them to be quiet, "fuck off Frankie". I doubt very much that those chaps will make it along to the Kunstmuseum Tour.