Getting in a big hurry to avoid the rush

Once a year, almost like clockwork, more than half the population of China uproots en masse to journey home or head elsewhere. It’s the greatest annual human migration the world has ever known, and perhaps understandably, it can cause quite a bit of upheaval on the country’s transport networks.

This year’s Spring Festival travel rush, or chunyun, has been ongoing since Feb 1 and won’t be officially over until the second Monday of this month.

For millions of Chinese, it’s one of the few opportunities they’ll have all year to go back home and reunite with their families — but others see it as a prime time to head overseas, and maybe even take their family with them.

This year, for the first time in three years, my wife and I decided to join the rush. We’d spent the past two Spring Festivals in Beijing and although we’d enjoyed them, after getting married in November we were really due a honeymoon.

So we booked our tickets and prepared to join the 6.5 million Chinese who were also headed abroad this Spring Festival, according to a report released by the China Tourism Academy and popular online travel agency Ctrip in February.

Our first surprise came at the airport, where we were expecting things to be — shall we say — a tad chaotic. But that’s before we realized that the vast majority of people traveling at this time of year would be taking domestic flights, not international ones.

Perhaps it had more to do with the ungodly hour we’d chosen to travel, but neither the airport terminal nor our flight to the Philippines seemed particularly packed and, with a little help from the complimentary booze on board, the time to our destination simply flew by.

As I say, this was our first time leaving the country during Spring Festival, and I think a part of me expected it to be a real chore — I’d heard that tourist hot spots in surrounding countries were bound to be busy too, and although lots of hotels and resorts were fully booked, we were surprised again to see that nowhere seemed nearly as hectic as we’d been led to believe.

Maybe all this can be chalked up to misinformation, or maybe we just got lucky and chose a place far enough off the beaten track that we managed to escape the crowds, but whatever the cause we had a wonderful honeymoon — and learned a thing or two about not believing everything you hear.

Of course, none of what we experienced speaks of how much of a hassle traveling around China during chunyun must be, though having seen some of the pictures, I think I’m glad we went overseas.