Reminds me of a birding holiday to China I went on some years ago. We were based at a coastal resort called Beidaihe. This was the area that Mao Zedong did his infamous swim. One morning our group went along the peninsula jutting out from Beidaihe where there were interesting migrant birds to be seen. Above us, on the cliffs, was the ruling Politburo's summer retreat, which was constantly patrolled by guards. Unfortunately they saw us and two of them came down the cliffs to approach us. We were all carrying binocs, scopes and cameras, remember. We stopped and waited and our leader said the infamous words, "Pretend you don't know the language at all" to which we all happily agreed. The situation wasn't made any better by one of the guards slipping and he actually slid towards us on his arse. None of us laughed. A heated conversation took place between the guards and our leader(English, but married to a Chinese lady), the result of which we quickly hurried away. Luckily we were already slowly making our way back having seen some of the birds we wanted so no problems. We actually had a superb 3 weeks birding, meeting some very pleasant Chinese people as we wandered around paddy fields, estuaries and various pieces of woodland.
