I travel a lot - maybe not as much as some, but it seems like a lot to me. It causes a lot of difficulty in our lives, but I get to see a lot of the country (China, I mean) in a way that I never would otherwise - in a way that I haven’t even seen the U.S. Friday morning I found myself in a dingy office in a small tourist town in Hubei province, deep in the Chinese heartland. I had arrived at the Xiangfan airport three days previously - itself a city I had never heard of before, but still an hour and a half’s drive from our destination - and immediately had the sensation of being in the “real” China, the romantic China of the foreigner’s imagination which apparently never fully goes away, no matter how long you are immersed in the actual real China. This is the China of crumbling temples, peasants plowing the rice fields with water buffalo, and misty mountaintops capped with daoist shrines - and indeed I saw all of those during my trip, although I feel compelled to note that the peasants all seemed to have satellite dishes and brand new motorbikes. (I wanted very much to see a peasant plowing his field with water buffalo while talking on his cell phone, and if I had had one more day I’m sure I would have, and I am not joking.)

Side note: the Xiangfan airport is probably the smallest I’ve ever been to - after landing, the plane (a 30 seat regional jet) simply rotates in place and taxis to the terminal on the runway, and you step off the plane and stroll the 50 meters to the one story terminal with the smell of spring grass in the air and swallows darting around in front of you. It was a beautiful spring evening, and that is an arrival experience which is tough to match.

In any event, there I was in the dingy office. One overhead fluorescent bulb, white plaster walls with calendars and a map of China as decor, two messy desks and a bench, upon which I and my young colleague were sitting. This was the office of a local travel agency, and we were there to ask the manager (owner?) about tourism trends in the area. As the representative of a comparatively expensive foreign firm that usually works for locally important clients (and as a foreigner myself,) I am used to the honored guest routine - effusive welcomes, banquets, etc. However, it doesn’t really suit my personality, and so in this case I was delighted to find that my lowest-status interviewee was the least impressed by me. If she was surprised to find a foreigner in her office asking her questions about itineraries and source markets, she didn’t show it, and without being rude it was clear that she was doing us a favor by letting us try to pose her questions between phone calls (she had two cell phones and a land line,) text messages, questions from her staff, and furiously typing booking requests on her computer.

This was one of the experiences that gave me the strong impression that, at least in this corner of the country, there is no worldwide recession apparent. There may be big office vacancies in Shanghai, huge factory layoffs in Guangdong, worried policies issued weekly from Beijing, and sliding home prices in all the big cities, but in Hubei over and over we heard about not enough hotel rooms to fill demand, and everyone appeared to be too busy to pay attention to trouble elsewhere. Maybe that’s because the big wave of growth which has been transforming the coast for ten or fifteen years is just now hitting the hinterland - I saw lots of opportunities for infrastructure improvement, unlike in the Yangtze delta - or maybe it’s because it takes a while for this stuff to filter down, or maybe it’s because the stimulus spending is working. In any case, this part of the heartland is still booming.