Holiday rainbow offers pots of gold, but doesn't always deliver

It took time, but I have learned my lesson about how to enjoy Chinese holidays: Never, never, never visit a tourist attraction at a time when half a billion people across China are also visiting tourist attractions.

Over the National Day break a couple of years ago, my wife and I took a bus to the newly built Ancient Gubei Water Town north of Beijing with its network of canals and small rivers. It's cool, despite not really being ancient. The only drawback was that the narrow streets and alleys were teeming with people. It was a human anthill.

The heavy crowd was especially hard on my wife. While I'm tall enough to see over heads, she is shorter. Her view for most of the day was a monotonous jungle of bodies as we inched along, dodging barbecued squids on pointed sticks now and then.