The tourist trail

8th – 14th August 2026

As we got off the train we were greeted by cool, grey and damp weather. After weeks of either hot dry sun or unbearable humidity it was wonderfully miserable, and we immediately remarked that it was just like home, despite knowing that home was at that point circa 30 degrees and had seen barely any rainfall for two months. Our destination, Shangri-La, was originally called Zhongdian, but was renamed in 2001 as a marketing ploy. This should have given us a very clear indication of what was to come.

We spent our first day exploring the town in the rain. We made our way around the misleadingly named “ancient city”, which was largely rebuilt following a fire in 2014 and is now home to an impressive number of shops where you can pay to play dress up in traditional local clothing with less traditional hair and makeup. The bright lights and constant automated noise that filled the streets was a shock to the system after the relative calm of inner city Chengdu. On every twist and turn of the intricate pattern of streets we encountered the incessant beeping of scooters which did nothing to clear whatever obstruction was blocking the drivers’ way. Out of shot from our photos there was endless copycat tat which we chose very deliberately not to capture. It wasn’t exactly the “authentic” old town experience that we had envisaged, but it seemed to be a fairly authentic representation of how tourism is done in modern China. Whilst it definitely couldn’t be described as to our taste, we tried (and at many points, failed) to take it for what it was.

To get some respite from the crowds, rather than boarding the shuttle bus up to Songzanlin Monastery, we decided to walk along a road with very little pavement whilst thunder rumbled in the distance, reminding us of our time in Türkiye. Thankfully the route turned off the pavementless road and onto a pretty lake path, the thunder subsided, and we had a moment of calm to compose ourselves before we ascended up to one of the most overwhelmingly touristy sites I have ever been to. The complex of buildings was undoubtedly incredible, full to the brim with intricate artwork and vast gold statues, but it was hard to take it all in surrounded by reams of tourists in traditional dress all posing solemnly as their weary looking partners took near identical photos of them all.

The next day brought a break in the rain and an opportunity to escape from the tourist trap on a hike up in the mountains. I was beginning to learn being in China meant a lot of rules about how we could interact with nature, and it seemed we could only do a hike with a guide.

The company offered three different hikes which somehow got cheaper the longer they were, so naturally we went for the cheapest 28km option. I suspect the low cost had something to do with them charging anyone less experienced or suffering from alitude sickness the cost of the hike over again if they needed a lift at any point during the 10 hour journey. What started as a misty morning soon cleared and we were left with expansive views of wooded mountains in all directions. The path took us through forests where lichen was strung between the branches, adorning the trees like jewellery. We learnt that the Chinese have a much better word for hail – bing bao – when the skies opened for not much longer than three and a half minutes, but we were otherwise surprisingly lucky with the weather given it was rainy season.

Away from the intensely choreographed approach to tourism in the ancient city it felt like we could finally breathe, despite us being back up at over 4000m. We walked with two Italian couples, the other “foreigners” on the hike and shared a surprising amount of frustration about how tourism in China is done, which we all found to some extent overwhelming, claustrophobic, and at times incredibly superficial. To me, watching countless people appearing to overtly experience a place by ticking off the same list of photo opportunities as everyone else felt like watching the algorithms which fuel social media feeds acted out in the physical world: it felt extremely uncomfortable but perhaps this is because it’s a very honest representation of how large parts of the world now work. Needless to say, when anyone in our group stopped to take a photo, the rest of us did the same, and I imagine we all came away with an identikit of holiday snaps in a similar fashion to those dressed up in the traditional clothing.

Our quickly emerging theory that touristing was far more exhausting than cycling was further evidenced by us needing a rest day after two days in Shangri-La. We moved hotels out of the ancient city, a decision we immediately wished we’d made sooner. A relaxed day followed where we replenished our energy before discovering how the Chinese could turn a beautiful landscape into nature’s theme park.

We very nearly didn’t make it to Pudacuo National Park. We had been relying on an online bus timetable which turned out to be not so reliable and had directed us to a rather unassuming local bus stop, when it should have taken us to a vast “scenic shuttle bus” terminal. After getting one shuttle bus to the park and passing through an enormous building, which had a lot in common with an airport terminal, we were straight onto another bus, which gave us the choice to disembark at three points around the park to go for a pre determined walk. A surprising number of people decided to remain on the bus. We were just over 3500m above sea level and whilst we sat on the bus it sounded like we were surrounded by a herd of Darth Vaders all sipping on cans of oxygen like their lives depended on it, which I suspect they didn’t.

We felt penned in. Perhaps separating people out from nature in this way is a sensible approach if you have that many people visiting an ecologically important site, but with the numerous opportunities for spending money, whether it be the entrance fee, or the surcharges for taking photos against a particular view or to bypass the short walk and take a bike, it felt like nature was being commodified. There was a short stretch along a river which felt relatively natural, but my overriding memory will be of following a mob of umbrellas along a boardwalk to a bus stop in the rain. It was certainly an interesting experience which illustrated to me a lot of what Ben has been telling me about how China does tourism, and I’m glad we did it, if only not to regret skipping the many tourist sites outside of Chengdu that we opted to bypass.

Our train ride to Shangri-La had teased us with fleeting glimpses of dramatic, never-ending gorges as we passed out of one tunnel and into another, never quite able to readjust the pressure in our ears. Our route from Shangri-La to Dali involved several buses winding their way along these gorges, bookending a two day hike along one of the deepest in the world: Tiger Leaping Gorge. The day started in an alarmingly similar way to our “hike” the previous day: on a bus packed with tourists clutching as many cans of oxygen as they could carry. Thankfully, when the bus driver pulled over at the start of the hike, it was only us who disembarked, and we rose physically (and not metaphorically as we had rather smugly, and incorrectly, told ourselves) far above the queues of tourists waiting to take their snaps at the viewpoint before jumping back on the scenic shuttle bus. Other than a few locals trying to tout pony rides to us we enjoyed a peaceful hike up and along the dramatic gorge on rather precarious footpaths, along cliffs and through forests and waterfalls. We were still at relatively high altitude where the sun proved itself to be more than a match for factor 50, and Ben continued the rest of the walk dressed head to toe in orange to shield himself from the sun, the colour of his clothing matching his sunburn almost perfectly. That evening, after our skin had been soothed with copious amounts of aloe vera, we sat with a beer on our private balcony admiring the sheer rock face ahead of us. It was around this time Ben stopped referring to “the trip” and started to refer to “this holiday”. 

The holiday feeling continued the next day and after a leisurely breakfast we had a short scrambly hike down to a hotel complex from where our bus would depart. It had been decked out to supposedly look like it was at one with the rock but in reality had a lot more in common with a fibreglass haunted house that comes to town with the fair. Inside was far more sophisticated: exposed concrete framed the mountain views, and this along with the minimalist furniture provided the perfect backdrop for those hopping on and off the scenic shuttle bus to hold impromptu photo shoots. We found a corner out of shot to sip overpriced ice coffee in, in an attempt to cool down our bodies and stem a profuse amount of sweating.

We felt a tension on the tourist trail: from our foreign perspective we were finding the engagement with history in many cases fake and superficial but questioned whether it was really our place to judge in a country which is not our own, has its own context which we are unfamiliar with and has undergone a very different development path to our own. Immersed in social conventions which are different to the ones we follow unquestioningly back home made us realise ours were no better or worse than the ones we were experiencing on the tourist trail – and perhaps needed to interrogate our own with the same rigour as those at play here.