The Road Ahead
December 2002/ January 2003

Touring through China can be a rewarding experience for Australians

Story by Lee Mylne

Driving Miss Daisy takes on a new dimension in the back streets of Beijing. We’re in rickshaws for a start, and Miss Daisy is an ebullient 20-something tour guide in a long brown cheong sam.

“You know this movie, Driving Miss Daisy?” she demands. We do.

“Well, that’s me, I’m Miss Daisy, and today it will be `follow Miss Daisy’!”

And with that, we’re off on a tour of just a few of the city’s 6000 hutongs or alleys, the traditional neighbourhoods where about 30 per cent of the population still lives.

Miss Daisy, whose Chinese name is Han, lives in a high-rise apartment. So do many of the young Chinese we met during a week there. Another guide, Kent - who has taken his English name from a cigarette brand - tells us he’s an economist but can’t get a job in the business world so is working in tourism until he gets a break. Kent lives with his wife and baby in a room about the size of my daughter’s smallish bedroom.

The hutong tour is an eye-opener. We’re taken in rickshaw convoy - with jaunty matching bright blue canopies emblazoned Hello Peking - on a winding trail through narrow streets where there’s barely room to pass. Children run along beside us, smiling and waving. It’s touristy, but fun.

The tour gives visitors a chance to see inside a kindergarten - the children are obviously used to the interruptions and play up to the clicking cameras - and a private home. Our hostess is Madam Zao, a retired accountant who has what we guess is relative luxury, two rooms and a kitchen. Her eight-year-old grandson is staying for the holidays; he lazes on the bed under a ceiling fan while lunch boils away on the stove. Outside it is hot and humid.

About 80 per cent of the hutong houses are government-owned. Madam Zao’s rooms open onto a courtyard which is shared by 20 families, but she has all mod-cons - television, computer, microwave.

The one-child policy, introduced in 1979, prevails in urban China. Miss Daisy confides that she is from a family of four children, and that children today are spoiled and selfish because they have no siblings to share with. She may be right, but the children in the street play with each other happily enough.

We also stop at a local market and browse among the exotic offerings. In a corner, a chicken is plucked from its cage, its throat efficiently slit to the groans of the foreigners and sold for the cooking pot.

These alleys are not far from the bustling boulevards of Beijing and the tour has started within walking distance of Tiananmen Square, which will see even more crowds in 2008 when the city hosts the Olympic Games. This, along with the Forbidden City, is top of the list of many “must-do” places on any visit to this 3000-year-old city.

From Beijing it is not far by bus to the imperative on all tourists’ visits to China: the Great Wall. It is impossible to be disappointed, so impressive and imposing is this man-made wonder. It is crowded, but nevertheless the “pinch me” effect still takes over.

Walking on the Great Wall of China is strenuous. The inclines are steep, but the views are magnificent and if you take the steeper, less trodden path to the left after passing through the entrance way, you’ll be rewarded by a quieter experience.