The roller coaster with the world’s most inversions, or loops, happens to be in Guangzhou China. So the Ramsey family of Slave Lake discovered on a visit there this past summer. It’s not why the made the trip, but when in China, do as the Chinese do.
Especially when it’s what your kids want. “The kids wanted to go to a theme park,” says Nicola Ramsey. “I did not go on that rollercoaster, but the kids liked it.”
Guangzhou is a city of about 10 million, not far from Hong Kong. It’s a far cry from the town of Deqin (pronounced something like ‘Dejin’, located in the mountains in an autonomous region of Yunnan province just a few miles from Tibet. That was another stop on the Ramsey itinerary, which took them also to Chengdu, Lijiang, Shangri-La, Kunming and Hainan island, among other cities and towns. Most of those cities are in south and south-western China, in the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, and Guangdong.
Some they had visited 20 years ago, when China was a very different place.
“We were quite surprised by how much it had advanced in 20 as examples. Clothing fashions have also changed tremen-dously.
“They aren’t going in their Mao suits any-more,” says Nicola.
And, she notes, electronic gadgets - largely absent two decades ago – are everywhere. Signs of Olympic preparations are everywhere too. The Ramseys came nowhere near Beijing, the site of the 2008 Summer Games, but were constantly reminded of them.
For example, signs exhorting the people to ‘Stop Spitting!’ and ‘Be Friendly to the Tourists!’, and large feature stories daily in the papers.
“They’re very excited about it,” says Len. Of western tourists, the Ramseys didn’t see that many, except at Yangshou (sic), one of the better-known Chinese tourist attractions.
Otherwise, they were five foreign faces in a sea of Chinese people – many of them tourists themselves, part of the burgeoning internal tourism market. Most of the places they went, the locals did not make a fuss about them, not having to rely on western tourists for their bread and butter.
“We didn’t feel unwelcome,” says Nicola, noting also that they never felt unsafe.
The two Ramsey daughters, Jordan and Elizabeth, did find that people wanted to take their pictures quite a lot, which took some getting used to.

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