Sleep in the car

Jiang said her group waited in line for 10 hours to visit Yulong Mountain, the most famous tourist spot in Yunnan. "They waited so long, but in the end they didn't have the time or space to stop to take a good look at the snowcapped peak. Crowd surges forced them to move on," she said.

The massive influx of visitors prompted hoteliers to hike their room prices, from the usual 70 yuan ($11) per night to 1,100 yuan, she said. Many people had to sleep in their cars.

Yu Haijun, a 55-year-old from Heilongjiang province, complained that her trip to Beijing had been a mistake: "I could barely move for the crowds at Tian'anmen Square. I had to wait 30 minutes to use the bathroom or to buy overpriced drinking water," she said. "I gave up on visiting the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. It wasn't sightseeing it was people-seeing."

Visitor numbers to the Forbidden City reached a record 182,000 on Oct 2. The same day saw thousands of tourists stranded at a cable car station on Huashan Mountain in Shaanxi province. Many visitors demanded a refund after waiting in line for more than three hours to no avail.

The wave of tourists left civic administrators under huge pressure, and by the end of Sept 30 about 50 metric tons of garbage had been left on a 3-km-long beach in Sanya, Hainan province.

Road to nowhere

Because of previous problems buying train tickets for his trip home, Cai Zhigang, a 36-year-old travel agency manager in Shanghai, was excited about the toll-free policy that would save him about 500 yuan in fees.

Hundreds of cars were already in line when Cai and his wife arrived at a tollgate for the expressway to his hometown of Anqing, Anhui province, at 11 pm on Sept 29, one hour before the toll-free policy came into force. It was slow going and he only moved around 20 km in two hours. Finally, after five hours in the queue, they got through the tollgate.

By dusk the following day, Cai and his wife were only halfway to their destination and the traffic was still moving at a snail's pace. Cai decided to leave the expressway and turned on to the nearest national highway, but soon realized that repair work was underway and was forced to make a detour and use yet another highway. However, the journey still took another 10 hours and the couple finally arrived in Anqing a day later than planned.

"It was a nightmare. I underestimated how many cars would be out there," said Cai, who was so unnerved by the experience that he and his wife returned to Shanghai two days earlier than scheduled.