Village full of delightful surprises

When a group of international visitors to China was invited to attend Hunan Satellite TV's Lunar New Year celebration on Jan 18, a few of them were perplexed. The venue was to be a village called Shibadong and for many the choice seemed strange at best.

The visitors were contestants in Chinese Bridge, a Chinese-language proficiency competition, all of whom have a fairly good understanding of China. Indeed a few had ventured into various rural areas of China and they knew what remote towns and villages look and feel like. But Shibadong?

For one thing, several in the group worried about having no phone signal in the village, in Huayuan county in the Xiangxi Tujia-Miao autonomous prefecture of Hunan.

"If I don't reply to your messages it means there's no signal there," Mohamed Jihad, an Egyptian studying at the Communication University of China, messaged his fiancee.

"Don't worry about me."

It soon turned out that their qualms were ill-placed, because Wi-Fi is accessible in the village, and the hotel they stayed in was much like any other standard hotel in China. In fact the room views were better than one might expect in most city hotels.