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I had chosen a "boyfriend" from among the Miao villagers, as instructed by Wilson, our Chinese guide. We danced, bumping hips, in sort of a Miao conga line, and then he led me by the hand across the courtyard and into a dim hut, a living space shared with chickens. There, he painted a red circle on my forehead.

Later, Wilson gave this explanation: "Only pretty lady has red ink there." Maybe, but more likely the attention from my blue-robed dance partner had to do with yuan — the expected tip.

We were an hour outside of the south-central Chinese city of Guiyang on a 13-day ethnic adventure tour that covered a loop from Guangzhou northwest to Kunming, Dali and Lijiang, east to Guiyang, then back to Guangzhou.

I was drawn here partly because I wanted to be ahead of an expected tourism boom. Guangzhou's Baiyun International Airport, which opened in August 2004, is now the largest in mainland China and the new gateway to the area; heretofore, Hong Kong, about 100 miles south, was the logical point of entry for visitors to Guangdong, Yunnan and Guizhou provinces.

The late-spring tour was not quite the journey to remote and exotic places that I had anticipated. Even in these provinces — largely untrammeled by Americans but awash with Asian visitors — the Chinese are tourist-savvy. Expect tour buses and souvenir shops at every major site, where vendors thrust kitschy trinkets and Mao Tse-tung memorabilia at Westerners. We spent an inordinate amount of time at designated shopping stops; I hope never to see another jade bangle bracelet.

I had e-mailed Times photographer Bryan Chan, who was coming to China a few days after I landed, about my disappointment at not having more authentic experiences, and we devised a plan: He was traveling independently, retracing my tour's route, so I would tell our local guides that a photographer friend would contact them in hopes of capturing off-the-beaten-track places where more adventurous travelers might go. He did this, and some of the results of his travels can be seen on Page 8.

On my tour, we saw mainly the China that has made a great leap toward capitalism — cities with glitzy shopping malls and overly ornate Western-style hotels and must-see tourist stops.

Rural China presents a different face, that of a developing country under communism. Passing through villages, we saw the hardscrabble conditions, the women with weathered faces standing in knee-high water planting rice, the men tilling the fields with water buffalo, men and women carrying backbreaking loads in baskets over their shoulders.

The mountain and lake scenery was memorable, the tour well organized and, at an all-inclusive base cost of about $2,000, it was a bargain. For those who've done Beijing, Shanghai and Xian, it's a logical destination.

The rush is on

WITH the strong demand for China travel — the country has supplanted Italy as the fourth most popular tourist destination, according to a recent World Tourism Organization report — U.S. airlines are scrambling to get routes. I booked my fare independently, taking a $600 tour credit so I could take Northwest's daily service, inaugurated in fall 2004, from L.A. to Guangzhou, with a plane change in Tokyo.

There were eight on our tour, five of whom were Chinese-born Americans revisiting the homeland after decades; one couple had brought their teen and pre-teen granddaughters. Our guides were bilingual and our group was compatible, considering that the adults preferred to speak their native tongue, of which I understood not a word. Mr. Chen, the other single in the group, spoke no English, so we spent a great deal of time grinning at each other.

China Travel Service had booked our first night at Guangzhou's White Swan Hotel, a riverfront oasis of luxury in a big, noisy, congested city, the capital of Guangdong province. It's a traditional stop for Americans who have come to China to adopt a child, and the public rooms swarmed with couples toting baby girls. I was amused to see one hotel shop selling strollers.

After too few hours' sleep, I was awakened by a call from another tour member who informed me, much too chirpily, that it was 5:45 a.m. and our guide would be there soon to take us to the airport for the flight to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province.

We were met at the Kunming airport by our meet-and-greet guide, Johnson (guides tend to adopt Western names), who was wearing a Minnesota Twins T-shirt. Our bus navigated its way carefully through this teeming city of 6 million, sharing the road with aged trucks and cyclists carrying incredible cargoes; one had seven 5-gallon bottles of water balanced over his bike's rear wheel.