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Looking at some of the earlier posts here, I think people use the words ‘ independent travel’ differently. As an (oldish) Aussie, if I say independent travel, I mean ‘making all my own arrangements’, or doing all my own bookings direct with trains, planes, hotels, etc. This has worked well for me in a lot of different countries, UK, Europe, USA etc.
But when I came to China, I found two things: first, that it was really hard to do all my own bookings direct, and second, that ‘independent travel’ usually meant ‘not with a group, but as an individual client (person, family or whatever), still taking some help from a travel agent. Things work differently here.
Language is one of the reasons it’s hard to do things completely by yourself here. I mean, it’s not as if you can use a phrase book to recognize written words, even. Believe me, recognizing Chinese characters is challenging.
My own experience was that although a lot of people speak English on the east coast, the further west you go, the less English is spoken. Also, I learned in Lijiang (a seriously beautiful place in a gorgeous area, by the way) that English-speakers are only a small percent of the market compared to Chinese, Korean, Japanese, other Asian etc. I met a few people (mostly young couples) who’d make their way to Lijiang OK by plane and booked their own hotel on the net. They expected to find local tours when they got there, or arrange to get round the sights, and were horrified to discover that this was hard. I mean, REALLY hard. The local tour offices, although they had the odd notice in English (sometimes comprehensible), basically didn’t speak English. There are only a few English-speaking tour guides in that area, and even fewer French-speaking. Mostly they ended up