Fascination works both ways in China

A temple near the Beishan carvings reflects the serenity of the Buddhist faith.

Step on to the bustling streets of one of southwest China's great cities and you could be forgiven for thinking you have landed after a direct flight from Mars.

It all looks familiar with wide, busy roads, tower blocks and Western brand-name shops. But the stares give away how seldom the people in this area lay eyes on Western tourists. And if that doesn't make it obvious, the language difficulties hotel staff have with visitors will.

The paucity of Western tourists is a shame, because southwest China's attractions are second to none.

New Zealanders' interest in visiting China has rocketed in the past 10 years.

It was the 23rd most popular destination for Kiwis, with 3274 visitors, a decade ago but now it's in fourth place with 33,000.

From historic Buddhist stone carvings to giant pandas and the eerie and ancient stone forest, southwest China has many internationally recognised spots worth visiting.

The food is a delight and a lesson in how real Chinese food should be prepared. Every meal was a gastronomic assault.

Not only are the attractions and food first-class but getting to them can be just as absorbing - from busing hundreds of kilometres on new expressways to cramming on a China Eastern jetliner, while rubbing shoulders with People's Liberation Army officers and loud, pushy domestic Chinese tourists.

To visit the cities of Kunming, Chongqing and Chengdu is to experience first-hand the extraordinary changes sweeping the country. Blazing economic growth of 9 per cent is transforming the landscape.

Chinese people thirst for development and that trend can be seen everywhere. Our Chengdu guide proudly told us the Chinese have two aspirations: a home phone (many have now realised that and also have cellphones) and a car.

The hundreds of construction cranes are another indication of growth.

Chengdu and Chongqing, in particular, are vast and both look like they have been built in only the past 10 years.

The roads in all the cities - including Kunming, the City of Eternal Spring, in Yunnan Province - are chaotic with buses, trucks, cars, taxis, scooters, bicycles and pedestrians with a death-wish all vying for space.

My favourite memory of Kunming is of a cart pulled by a donkey competing at a motorway interchange with every type of vehicle you can imagine.

The Yunnan Stone Forest, 80km from Kunming, was the first stop on our tour.

It is 270 million years old and was once submerged. Erosion has left towering constructs of rock in bizarre shapes.

Guided by a local Sani woman in traditional dress, we negotiated stone stairs through ravines of rock. In some places we could only just squeeze through. The Stone Forest covers 140sq km and would take three or four days to fully explore.

In Kunming's busy areas, stallholders selling souvenirs harassed us, calling out "hollo", the only English they seemed to know. Their hard-sell techniques are off-putting at first but bargaining can be fun.

Throughout the trip we could negotiate prices at almost any store except official outlets and westernised shops. Calculators are used to make offers and counter-offers. Better still, just walk away and they might reduce the price still further.

We took a new expressway to the Stone Forest but returned to Kunming by an old road and stopped at a small village where locals, especially children, readily posed for photographs.

From Kunming we took a China Eastern flight to Chongqing, China's fourth-largest city, home to 30 million people and known as the Mountain City.

Built at the confluence of the mighty Yangtze and Jialing rivers and about 600km upstream from the Three Gorges Dam project, a quarter of the metropolis will disappear under water when the dam is finished in 2009.

The controversial dam will not only generate vast amounts of electricity but help to control deadly floods.

Our next stop was the town of Dazu, 120km away.

The area contains about 10,000 Buddhist stone carvings, created about 800 years ago.

First we visited the Baodin stone carving, which the guide explained was vandalised by extremists during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

The next day we visited the even more impressive Beishan stone carving nearby. An army of 30,000 workers toiled from AD1174 to AD1252 to create a 500m-long work of statues and carvings.

It is a mystical and peaceful place, shrouded in fog and cool because of its high altitude. It is on Unesco's World Heritage List.

People damage the carvings at their peril. A farmer who hacked off the head of a statue to sell was caught and executed.

There were few Westerners touring the carvings, but at the next stop, the Chengdu Panda Research Centre, there were Germans, Americans, and Britons - although they were far outnumbered by Asian tourists.

The centre's 30 giant pandas are accustomed to human contact and visitors can get very close to these fascinating, docile creatures as they chomp happily on their staple diet of bamboo.

Only about 1000 giant pandas remain in the world. They are slow breeders and prefer to eat and sleep rather than mate so the centre and other researchers around the world are using artificial insemination techniques to sustain the population.

There are plans for the centre to increase from 35ha to 200ha and expand its research facilities.

Our last attraction was the Du Jiang Yan river project near Chengdu.

This makes visitors appreciate just how ancient Chinese society is. It was built about 250BC under the direction of governor Li Bing, who is immortalised at a nearby temple.

Workers took 40 to 50 years to build a dyke in the Minjiang River - a tributary of the Yangtze - to control flooding and provide irrigation water for the adjacent Chengdu plain.

Li Bing also had a channel cut through a hill to supply the plain. The dyke divides the river channel into two and alters the proportion of water going down each branch to control flooding at certain times of the year and provide enough irrigation water at other times.

The marvel is that this structure is still being used after 2200 years.

Our guides had a long itinerary of sights organised, but we still had some freedom to see other places.

In one case we asked to see a "real" rural village and were taken to place near the stone carvings of Dazu. It has been hosting tourists since the early 1980s.

Despite the seemingly primitive condition of the homes, some had television and internet.

These days in China you have to go quite a distance to really get off the beaten track. And a basic grasp of Mandarin is essential because few locals speak English.

We walked from our hotels at nights to see the local sights in each city, meet the locals, buy their goods - and be stared at.

For less confident traveller the guides are excellent.

Our guides also took us to visit a bustling Chinese market in Chengdu that wasn't part of the itinerary.

They were charming, knowledgeable, accommodating, and - in the case of a Buddhist who was also a the card-carrying Communist - told very amusing jokes.

Other highlights of the trip included Chengdu's central shopping mall, near the Prime Hotel, and Senditosa restaurant in Kunming, which served decent cocktails - a pleasant change from our hotel - and where we were served by a bubbly English-speaking staff member named "Cute Lemon".

There was also the superb Chinese Sichuan Opera in Chengdu's Culture Park, Qintai Rd, and the Shu Brocade shop in Chengdu, which sells the best of local silk products.

It is often said China is a country of contradictions and, although that's an overused term, in this case it's particularly fitting.

We certainly did see plenty of contradictions on our trip. There's one that really sums it up for me.

Departing Chongqing by bus we drove on an expressway through a 7km tunnel, one of 300 drilled through the hills surrounding the city. Halfway through the tunnel an elderly woman, a traditional basket hefted on her back, was struggling along the footpath.

Surrounded by the choking fumes of the traffic, she seemed to epitomise how much China is changing, and the mixed impact that is having on its people. That's as good a reason as any to go.

* Kevin Taylor travelled to China courtesy of Singapore Airlines, SilkAir and Wendy Wu Tours. 

Visas

Must be obtained before travel.

Money

The currency is the yuan. Exchange rates are fixed and NZ$1 buys 5.7 yuan. Credit cards are not widely accepted but travellers' cheques can be useful. ATMs will usually accept local cards only.

Getting there

Singapore Airlines and regional arm SilkAir fly to Chengdu, Kunming and Chongqing in southwest China, with fares starting from $1759 return. Contact Singapore Airlines on 0800 808 909, or on the web (see link below).

Wendy Wu Tours offer guided journeys to various parts of China. Contact the company on 0061 2 9224 8888.

Dos and don'ts

* Do get out of the hotel to shop and dine but avoid food from street vendors.
* Don't expect the best of service at some hotels. Despite a veneer of modernity, things sometimes don't work and language barriers don't help.
* Do use hotel safes and keep money and passports secure.
* Don't drink the tap water. Drink only bottled water.