Notes from a Traveler: Guidebooks to Amdo

For anyone interested in low-budget travel to Amdo, the cheapest route is not always the cheapest route. To do over, I would not book the cheapest flight to Hong Kong and enter Mainland China through Guangzhou. Southeast China is expensive. Travel in China peaks during the summer months, and not only with foreigners, but with moving migrants and students. When one considers the migrant population, Guangdong Pronvince has China's highest population. Schools usually close in July. As Sander and I discovered, the transportation system becomes strained in the summer. Seats of any kind can be hard to come by. If one can't find a seat then one is stuck, and to be stuck in southeast China is to shell out a lot of money. It got so bad for us that I feared we might not get to Amdo, Qinghai Province, at all.

To do over, I would fly directly and non-stop to Beijing before catching another flight to Xining, Qinghai. This will be quicker, less strenuous, and, in the end, possibly cheaper.

Xining is different world. Prices are lower and get lower the farther one travels into the countryside. The countryside, the great steppes of Qinghai, are worth traveling to. Really, they are amazing! After Sander and I return home to the States I will begin posting photos. Then you can see for yourself.

As far as guidebooks, I brought a small library. I did so because knowledge is power, it can save money, and I wanted to provide Sander with the best experience and education possible. But the books are heavy. Presently, my Chinese is good enough that I could do away with all of them. Nevertheless, they have served as valuable resources. I brought four books. They are as follows:

1) Footprint: Tibet Handbook, 4th Edition, September 2009, by Gyume Dorjie. This is an amazing, informative, well-done book. Anyone traveling anywhere in Greater Tibet would be better off with it. I think it's fantastic!

2) Mapping the Tibetan World, 2000/2004 Reprint, by Osada, Allwrite, & Kanamaru. I love maps and therefore this book even though it is outdated. Nevertheless, it remains a valuable resource.

3) The Rough Guide to China, April 2008. Like maps, guidebooks are outdated as soon as they are printed. Especiially guidebooks on China because China is changing that fast! So it is with Rough Guide to China. But it has been useful. It is packed with loads of information. It is, indeed, a worthwhile puchase and useful tool. I'd always been a fan of The Lonely Planet Series but heard that Lonely Planet was going more middle-class and that Rough Guide was better serving the budget traveler. I don't know. I do know that I was often frustrated with Rough Guide to China.

One reason for my frustration has been the maps. The maps included in Rough Guide to China assume a Republic of China political perspective and not a People's Republic of China one. The maps show Taiwan as a separate nation. Regardless of one's political views, what this does is that it not only risks offending the people of the host country, but it puts the low-budget traveler at risk of having his book (his resource to low-budget travel) confiscated. That would be inconvenient and costly. I'm fine with taking political stances, but we should start at home with: independence for, and returning lands to, all of America's Indigenous Peoples; returning lands to Mexico; forming a new nation-state along America's southeast seaboard and calling it, I don't know, Africa America, and so on, and so on (to say nothing of having these forts around the world). Or we could look at Taiwan and how the government has dealt with its own indigenous population. Putting the low-budget traveler at risk of losing her/his book, and offending one's hosts, are not good ways to begin a journey.

A second reason is the spelling of the place names. It would have been useful to include the pinyin, the tones over the romanization of the Chinese characters, whenever a Chinese place was named. Granted, this was done in colored blocks in the chapters, but the way I used the book I didn't discover this until I realized I didn't need the book anymore. To use the book with the Chinese interpretations, such as finding a hotel and using the book to ask directions, one had to constantly flip back and forth between pages. If one didn't do this, then one was left with the name, for example, of a hotel without the tones or characters. In China, this is dangerous.

For example, when we hosted a Chinese exchange student and I would practice reading narratives in traditional Chinese characters, and she would correct my pronunciation, I once read the character for gan. But gan has four or five tones and each tone means something different. The gan I said was not the gan I meant. The gan I said was, "f**k". Another example: In China, the softdrink, Sprite, is popular especially among foreign travelers. Sometimes the more adventurous foreign travelers ask for Sprite in Chinese. But the second character for the Chinese word for Sprite is bi. Bi, like gan, has different tones and therefore different meanings. A Chinese tour guide once informed me of the frequency in which foreigners ask for Sprite in Chinese but since they don't get the tone right what they end up asking for is some form of vagina. It might be wet vagina, or watery vagina, but a vagina nonetheless. This cannot be found on the menus in Chinese restaurants. Tones matter. Rough Guide to China could to better with the tones and character throughout. To do over, I'd give Lonely Planet: China another chance.

4) Lonely Planet: Mandarin, 6th Edition, September 2006. At this point in our travels and limited language abilities, this is the only book I need to travel through China. Whether one only uses this, or with an actual guidebook, this is a wonderful, useful, light, small, efficient, useful book and I highly recommend it. My only complaint is that the pinyin tones and the Chinese characters are so small that I can hardly make them out, sometimes even with my glasses. Still, it's a wonderful little book!