Utter Vanity: I have finished China!!! Yay!

[politicat]

I'm writing sales copy for a travel agency right now, and I've been re-writing their China stuff recently. Ugh. The Chinese tourism industry wants tourist money, but they don't know how to market their way out of a paper bag. The copy that they provide to us had to have gone through a government censor of some sort - it all reads the same. (1000 travel pros can't all write alike.... I kept finding the same phrases and formats over and over and over again.)

India was tough, but at least it was tough because I had too much information. Google an obscure place in India and you'll get 5,000 hits with substantially different text and pictures. Google a similar place in China and you'll read the same text at least 25 times and see the same pictures. Getting enough information on China was actually harder than condensing it down.

But I'm done. I can ignore China for the rest of the week while my boss reads my copy and I do something else.

[NewJeffCT]

1. Did you focus on any places in particular?

We went in Sept of 2004 and may go again this September.

[politicat]

2. Beijing, Sichuan, the Dragon Spine, Xi'an, Shanghai and the Gobi.

It's an adventure travel service (Tibet is it's own) so most of the people going are looking to climb mountains, raft, hike the Wall ... and since they're rich, too, they want to fall into a nice comfy bed with a 24 hour masseuse on call.

I actually am fascinated by the place, but you can tell their marketing copy goes through some sort of state filter. It's ALL written in the same voice, and Sichuan shouldn't sound like Shanghai, but the copy does. (I envision a very small, tightass of an editor - my evil twin, sort of - making these decisions.) I wish we could just send images, since China is so utterly beautiful.

If you do end up going, try to hit the Victoria going down the Yangzi. With Three Gorges getting the go-ahead, it looks like there's not a lot of time to see the wild Yangzi.