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- Maps of China - A great site for maps of all the provinces, cities, tourist maps, etc.
- MDBG Chinese-English Dictionary - Has translation, allows Chinese characters to be entered by pinyin, etc.
Hey dude,
I am really enjoying your photos, it’s almost like traveling without leaving home. Looking forware to more pictures.
Have fun.
Warrren
Dear travelers :
I’m a YiLongWei’s friend .I am a student from huangshan university huangshan city .
I’m so sorry that huangshan and tankou’s business had give to you a so bad travel experience . I’m sorry to hear that .the phenomenons you said are exists reality . but you should ask a guid(who can both understand your language and chinese ) for help or ask a yilongwei’s friend for help(I’m not attract customers for myself).If you did you must get a lot than the money you paid to them .
I think viewyou are a bit one-sided point to huangshan city , things like the Coin have to side .huangshan is a really famous city ,it’s well-know(it’s why you chose to travel here )and clean . Huangshan is develop,it will be better .
Best regards to you !
yours sean
Hello
I’m sean ,you can contact to me at guangshanlong@sina.com
Tell me what you think about me and my words.
thanks
yours
Hi Sean,
When you say “ask a guid(e) (who can understand bother your language and chinese), for help” I hope you realize that this was not the problem. I have studied Chinese for a year and can hold a rudimentary conversation in Chinese, if need be. The problem was simply that there is one hotel in Tankou (the town at the base of Huangshan) whose owner is masquerading as being a member of Hostels International (HI) In fact, he has two large HI signs, that he obviously printed out himself, on closer inspection, since you can see pixelations that you would not see if it was a printing job done for HI.
In other words, I am singling out this one hostel owner, not the whole city. I apologize for writing the following:
“One of them, I found out later, was Mr. Hu, who is a very decent and honest gentleman. (quite possibly the only one in town!)”
You are quite correct that this is a comment that is unfair to the decent merchants and citizens of the town. I have just taken out the part in parentheses from the post. The reason I put that there to begin with is that, in addition to the hostel owner, he seemed to have a network of people he dealt with which were not legitimate. For instance, when he said a bus would take us to Huangshan, the bus never showed, he put us in a taxi that drove up, instead. We were not supposed to be paying for this bus, and therefore, we weren’t alarmed when the taxi driver didn’t put down the meter as he drove off. When we got to Huangshan; however, he demanded that we pay him 40Y each! Of course, I refused and, in the end, we paid him a total of 20Y, but this was another example, all from the same town, of people trying to rip off tourists. Yet another example happened after I came down from Huangshan and wanted to get back to the hotel. I was going to wait for a bus, but a lady was trying to convince me that the bus wouldn’t come and that I should take a taxi. The taxi driver was trying to charge me 30Y. A Chinese gentlemen, who also spoke English, realized they were trying to overcharge me because I was an American and he didn’t like it. he negotiated for three of us to go for 15Y apiece. The taxi driver was fuming mad the entire trip, when he was the one I should be mad at!
So, while I realize that these examples don’t make the entire population of the town of Tankou bad people who are trying to cheat foreigners, I had more incidents like this in that one town than I had in the rest of my six weeks in China, combined!
I think it is good to warn people if you encounter this type of environment to be on their toes for people who are trying to cheat you.
Again, the amount of the rip off is minimal, in American terms. The 30Y taxi ride would have been $4 US. The amount overcharged by the fake “hostel owner” on the dorm reservation at the top of Huanshan was 70Y (almost $10) and on the bus ride to Shanghai was 40Y, or close to $5.
The issue in this case has nothing to do with the amount of money involved, it has to do with the intentions in the person’s heart. Even though they weren’t cheating me out of what I would consider a ton of money, it was clearly the intention of all of these people to get more money from me than they should have for the services they performed. It is this less than honorable intention that I was really mad at. Most all people I have met in China are very good people who have good intentions. I was very disappointed to find such a group of “bad apples” in one place, which happened to be in your college town.
I hope you understand that this is not an indictment of your entire town, but it was behavior that was consistent with bad intentions on the parts of several unconnected people from that town in the span of only three days. That does not speak well of the overall atmosphere that allows this to happen.
You wrote that “it’s well know(n) (it’s why you chose to travel here )” … actually, the travel guides all act as if you have to stay in Tunxi, about 70 km from Huangshan, and barely mention Tankou. I just ordered a bus ticket from Yixing to “Huangshan” and this is where the bus took me. It was not because of the town that I was going to Huangshan, but because of the mountains!
That brings up one more point about the scam artists before I close this already long post: Tourist areas, such as Huangshan, are very big attractions to rip offs and scam artists, since they bring in new people every day who a) don’t know the local area or how much things should cost and b) are traveling with more than the normal amount of pocket money. So, it is not unusual for these people to be in the hotel section of Tankou and it may very well be that the rest of the town, like most of China that I visited, is full of nice, honest, hardworking people.
Take care,
Scott