It’s a sin when you have to get up early and leave a comfy, warm hotel room. But that’s what we did. Our plan was to get to the ‘Window on the World’ in Shenzhen early and spend the day there.

 

The idea is simple, much like the quaint miniature villages of merry England, but being in China, it’s on a huge site with scale models of hundreds of famous places throughout the world. Visited by 7 million people in its first year, it’s become one of China’s most successful mainland tourist attractions.

 

Look! – There’s the Eiffel Tower, and the Coliseum, and the Pyramids, and the Leaning Tower of Pizza, and Manhattan Island, complete with six foot twin towers – and there’s a plastic life-size dinosaur! All these sights look just a little bit tatty and worn. A sad reflection of the reality – but good enough, it seemed, for the snap-happy visitors that swarm around this most Chinese of tourist destinations.

 

The irony of it all was quite breathtaking. The outside world, shut off from the people of China for so long, miniaturised and neatly signposted. It’s perfect for photo opportunities and an ideal way of avoiding all the horrors (and cost) of real travel. You can see the whole world in one afternoon and still get home in time for tea. But that’s not where the true irony lies. With a one day ticket priced at 120 Yuan, even this counterfeit world is, for many, still as far out of reach as the real thing.

 

We blended in with the crowds and tramped from Europe to the Americas, to Australia and back again. I was pooped by lunchtime. The trip up the Eiffel Tower was our last stop before leaving. Although, at 100 meters tall, it’s only one third the height of the real thing, it was still tall enough to get a great view of the surrounding city, and the way that the tower was slightly swaying in a light breeze made it just that little bit more exciting. Take a look at the photos in my album.

 

I’m not saying I didn’t have a good day, because I did. It was just not what I was expecting.

 

It never is.