You found me at a “very Chinese time of my life.”
You found me at a “very Chinese time of my life.”
We landed in Chengdu mid-afternoon after an overnight Air China flight and within about twenty minutes China had already scanned my face more times than Heathrow has in a lifetime.
Immigration. Security. Airport gates. Baggage reclaim.
At one point I walked up vaguely trying to work out where our luggage was appearing and a screen simply scanned my face and announced:
“Hello Sarah. Please proceed to Belt 12.”
No squinting at screens and cross-referencing with boarding passes. Just facial recognition calmly ushering us through the system like an authoritarian Disneyland.
Meanwhile Joshie (our 6 year-old) had completely stopped walking because he was too busy staring at enormous panda art installations hanging from the ceiling of Chengdu airport like mythical creatures welcoming him into the country.
Which, in fairness, they basically were.
This trip had become something close to legend in our house by this point. An epic sixth birthday present involving: Pandas, Mountains (we are a British/Swiss family and so some deep love for pointy rocks!), Bullet trains, Giant malls (more in the work chat section later), Duck pancakes and enough transport infrastructure to sustain a small nation.
But despite all the planning, I’d arrived in China with a low hum of anxiety running in the background.
Not about the country itself. About the systems.
Would the Chinese SIM work? Would Alipay behave? Would WeChat Pay suddenly reject us? Would Didi download properly? Would translation apps function? Could we connct to airport WiFi (you can’t)? Would Patrick (husband) actually be allowed into the country after deciding not to get a visa after the UK visa-free transit announcement, before eventually realising his Swiss passport meant he didn’t need one anyway?
This is modern independent travel in China: less “Where should we visit?” more: “Have we successfully configured civilisation?”
So, in a rare moment of organisational humility, we’d arranged a hotel driver.
And honestly? The relief of seeing a man standing there calmly holding our name after eleven hours of low-level app paranoia was extraordinary.
Outside, Chengdu glowed. Huge roads. Silent electric cars. Towering buildings lit like sci-fi film sets. And no smog or pollution.
And somewhere between the airport facial recognition system greeting me by name and Joshie standing open-mouthed beneath giant floating pandas, it hit me:
It feels like travelling slightly into the future.
It was China-maxxing, if you will. Which is all over social media right now and broadly seems to mean westerners arriving expecting mild culture shock and leaving as unpaid evangelists for subway infrastructure and soup dumplings.
We went independently. Which sounds like a choice until you’re deep into your fourth translation app and your family WhatsApp has completely collapsed into panda videos, Chengdu food accounts, soft play recommendations from someone’s cousin and me sending the same message on a loop: “Apparently we need another app.”
We planned the whole thing through TikTok, ChatGPT and increasingly frantic app downloads. Guidebooks were decorative. One proudly directed us to Beijing’s “famous kite district”. It was one tiny shop, six dusty kites and a man eating noodles.
Perfect, honestly.
The trip was Chengdu first — pandas, Sichuan food, Himalayan foothills — then Beijing for mountains, duck, impossible tourist sites and as much futuristic urban intensity as we could absorb before returning to Heathrow psychologically dependent on translation software. We did not achieve the Great Wall cycling. Patrick had recently had back surgery which was, while physically sensible, not enough to stop him staring at Chinese mountain roads like a Victorian explorer separated from his destiny.
I understand why. Apparently pro cycling teams are obsessed with China. The roads through the mountains are sensational — endless climbs, immaculate surfaces, huge switchbacks with barely any traffic. Even the infrastructure feels cinematic here.
The bullet train transfer also didn’t happen. Our concierge gently explained our onward plans were “a little ambitious”, which became the defining phrase of the trip. Independent family travel in China follows a reliable pattern: you believe you have designed a slick transport solution, and then a calm hotel professional explains, very quietly, that you would miss three connections and possibly disappear into western Sichuan forever.
Which is, when you think about it, exactly what an adventure is supposed to feel like.
So we took BYD taxis instead. £12 an hour. Enormous, silent, comfortable. I want one.
Everyone — taxi drivers, shop assistants, restaurant staff, the woman selling things halfway up a mountain — has a translation app and is ready to use it. You stand there holding devices up to each other like diplomats exchanging classified information and somehow it works. People are extraordinarily patient.
Even Josh got into the rhythm of it. One night driving back through glowing towers and elevated highways, he decided to properly chat to our driver through the app. The driver asked where we lived.
“London,” Joshie replied, into the phone, with quiet pride.
Inevitable follow-up: “What should I see?”
And suddenly my six year old was unofficial ambassador for Britain. London Eye. Big Ben. Kew Gardens. The phone translated this enthusiastically. The driver nodded until we hit the London Eye, which — when you actually try to explain it — sounds completely mad.
“It’s a very big wheel?”
Blank look.
“For people.”
Joshie is now making large circular motions in the back seat while the app produces what I can only assume was complete nonsense Mandarin about giant humans slowly rotating over the Thames. Eventually the driver understood and burst out laughing.
That was the whole trip, really. Not luxury travel. Not seamless tourism. Just people trying to connect through humour and goodwill and whatever the translation app decided to say.
The scale is hard to describe without sounding like you’re exaggerating. Every city feels like someone turned the density slider past maximum. Apartment towers in every direction. Underground shopping districts. Subway lines that simply didn’t exist in our guidebook because they’d been built after printing — not planned, built, operational, full of commuters staring at us. If you arrive at a tourist site less than an hour before opening you are essentially finished. Entire populations materialise simultaneously.
Which made one particular day feel almost surreal.
We’d gone deep into the mountains to Shenshuping, one of the bases involved in releasing pandas back into the wild. Mist in the valleys. Bamboo forests. The kind of silence you forget exists. And almost nobody there.
Just us, watching pandas eat bamboo in the mist.
All three of us had tears in our eyes — properly — and I’m not particularly sentimental about wildlife. But there’s something about seeing them in that landscape, after the sensory overload of the cities, that just gets you. Not cartoon mascots. Real animals in mountains that make total sense as panda country.
Then sixty Chinese twelve year olds arrived on a school trip and spotted Josh on Patrick’s shoulders.
Blond child. Blond father. Blue eyes. Towering above the crowd like a Nordic beacon.
“The WHITE BOYS!” they screamed, with enormous joy, before descending into hysterics and taking approximately eleven million photographs.
Patrick and Josh were now the main attraction. Not the pandas. The pandas had lost.
Outside the main tourist hotspots, western visitors are unusual enough — especially fair colouring — that you attract genuine curiosity. Warm, funny, not remotely hostile. Josh thought it was hilarious at first. Then was a little freaked out tbh.
The whole trip had been built partly around the pandas. It was Josh’s 6th birthday present — Chengdu, ancient Dujiangyan bridges and temples, homestays with futons in panda tents, misty mountains, early morning visits to panda bases that somehow manage to feel both deeply commercial and genuinely magical. Watching them turns even cynical adults into toddlers. One minute you’re thinking about something serious, the next you’re emotionally invested in whether Fubao manages to sit on a branch without falling off.
Which, statistically, he won’t.
Travelling with a six year old strips away the performative competence of adult tourism. You stop pretending to be culturally assured. Joshie just openly marvelled at everything and China, it turns out, rewards marvelling.
The soft plays alone. Absolutely deranged. Entire fluorescent empires inside shopping centres — rock pools with real waders and nets, rope bridges over food courts, ziplines, gladiator style obstacle runs, contraptions that let you cycle in a loop upside down, slides that appear to exit into different postcodes.
The food situation is slightly less romantic than travel writers suggest. Adults “embrace local culinary surprises”. Children want beige carbs and will not be moved. Even the McDonald’s nuggets had a level of spice that had me twitching. Emergency snacks: essential.
The hotels were absurdly good value. Proper service. Huge rooms. Our Fairmont Beijing suite after an upgrade was larger than a small London flat and cost £145 a night. China still understands hospitality in a way much of Europe has quietly abandoned.
One evening the boys were swimming in an entirely empty hotel pool and I was in the suite attempting to order Peking duck delivery through a Chinese app on one phone while translating it on a second phone. Eventually the concierge came upstairs, sat down in the lounge like a patient digital therapist and just sorted it. Three ducks, pancakes, sauce, extra cucumber “for the boy”. Delivered for about £12.
China is also, professionally, the most interesting place I’ve been in years. As someone who thinks a lot about commerce and digital ecosystems, it feels less like another market and more like a live prototype. The blending of payments, entertainment, logistics, retail, content and physical space is just further along. The Silk Market in Beijing is famous for fakes — and yes, I was quietly invited to view a Chanel bag in a secret room, which felt almost nostalgic — but far more interesting were the livestream commerce setups in the back of stores. Beautifully lit displays. Sales assistants serving physical shoppers and livestream audiences simultaneously. Part shop, part content studio, not quite either.
The west still thinks in channels. China increasingly operates in behaviours.
None of this would have been possible ten years ago. Honestly, probably not five.
Without the apps running quietly in the background, China with a six year old would have tipped from adventure into administrative collapse. The translation, the navigation, the payment systems, the delivery apps, the real-time problem solving through a country evolving faster than most western infrastructure can follow — that’s what made independent travel possible.
The tech didn’t remove the adventure. It enabled it.
Without it, we wouldn’t have gone. With it, we ended up deep in panda sanctuaries in misty mountains, ordering midnight duck deliveries through translation apps, and explaining the concept of a large wheel to a Chengdu taxi driver via two phones and a lot of mime.
China is exhausting in the way only genuinely stimulating places are. Your brain never stops. Every day has friction. Every interaction is a small act of problem solving.
China doesn’t bend itself around you. You adapt — to the apps, the scale, the speed, the crowds, the language, the rhythms. There’s a quiet expectation that you’ll do the work.
And because of that, it feels like actual travel again.
Not frictionless. Not smoothed into global sameness.
Alive.
The future, with mountains and dumplings and pandas. China-maxxing.
By Sarah Lambert Oetiker
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