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Published: October 14th 2007
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Some basic tips for booking your trip to China:
1. Hotels can be securely arranged through the website - www.sinohotel.com (these guys have the best rates around)
2. Website for booking train & flight tickets - http://www.chinatripadvisor.com/english/ (excellent service)
Day 1: Beijing
We landed in Beijing around 10 PM. The first thing that hit us as soon as we got out of the airport was the heat & dust! We were met by our cab driver (pre-arranged via a local travel agent) and were transferred to our city hotel (Chong Wen Men hotel) that took us around 1 hr from the airport. The roads in Beijing looked great! It must be the effect of Beijing Olympics due in Aug'08. The hotel was as we'd expected. Small but neat - value for money. Sixteen hours, two flights and a long cab ride later, it finally dawned upon us that we were in China!!
Day 2: Beijing (Ming Tombs, Great Wall at Badaling & Jade factory - pre-arranged tour via www.chinatripadvisor.com - USD30 pp)
We woke up to our tour guide's phone call. He said he would pick us up at 7.30am. We quickly got ready and gobbled down
some free breakkie and ran out just in time to meet our tour guide. Our first stop was at the Ming Tombs. This is where the rulers of the Ming dynasty rest in peace. We drove past Beijing's biggest peach farms where peaches were sold for as little as 10 cents! The Ming Tombs area as such was not very impressive more so because we were roaming the grounds when the sun was at its highest! There were tour guides walking around with flags (so their group can identify their guide) and blaring speakers - our first glimpse of local toursim! Unfortunately for us it was a Sunday - the place was packed with locals!
Our second stop - jade factory. An appointed person working in the jade factory tells you everything you need to know about jade. People at the jade factory were trying to sell us jade ornaments in the name of good luck, health, longevity, wealth, love or a good afterlife! Jade pieces were a bit pricey here and it just didn’t make sense to buy anything the first day we were in China! We passed the shopping bit. Our tour guide had arranged lunch for
us in the jade factory itself. The food was yummy! We stuck to vegetarian food since we'd read blogs describing some nasty after effects of going on a food binge here. We played it safe.
Post lunch we were taken to the great wall at badaling. It took us approx 1.5 hrs from the jade factory. From the base of the wall, we took the easy option of riding in the cable car (60 RMB for a return trip) up to the wall itself. Else we were warned it could be a grueling 1 hr steep walk in the heat. It was a warm afternoon. We walked up & down the wall for sometime. The view from top was great - we could see the wall snaking in different directions! The experience could have been more worthwhile if the place wasn’t so crowded. On top of the wall we had plenty of photo op and we bonded a bit with some fellow tourists. After some two hours, we slowly made our way back to the parking lot from where we were driven to our respective hotels. We were back in city center by 6pm.
We walked around our
hotel to check out a few places to eat - and where did we eat? The pizza company! We were impressed with the pizza quality and it didn’t cost much either! We were so tried after dinner that we both fell asleep by 8pm!
Day 3: Beijing (Tiananmen Sq, Forbidden City)
Armed with our lonely planet, we decided to visit the Tiananmen Sq (T Sq) and Forbidden City. We had some difficulty communicating where we wanted to go to our cab driver. Luckily, lonely planet maps were bilingual. The cab driver finally understood we wanted to get to T Sq. We were taken for a ride - some cabbies do take advantage of the fact that you are a tourist. One bit of advice - get your hotel receptionist to write down the place you want to go to (with address) in Chinese and show this peace of slip to the cabbie.
T Sq was a bit intimidating. Its this huge piece of land where you really realize how big China is! Right across the T Sq is the entrance to the Forbidden City. Entrance tickets cost about RMB 60 pp. A tour guide who speaks English
will charge you RMB 300+. An English radio guide costs RMB 40 pp. We didn’t opt for any English guides. We took off on our own. Forbidden city is huge. You can spend a whole day there - we did. The place closes around 5pm during summer. We got overcharged for the cab ride back to the hotel (We smartened up after that!). We had dinner in this really busy restaurant called 'Ajisen Ramen'. Quite economical and tasty food. They accept only cash though.
After dinner, we checked out of the hotel and took a cab to Beijing West Railway station for our train to Xi'an. We arrived early for our 10pm train, but didn’t want to take a chance with the Beijing traffic. Beijing Railway station itself is very impressive! The whole place is air-conditioned and quite organized. We had to wait in this common area before boarding the train. The common area itself looked like the waiting lounge in an airport. We didn’t have any problem knowing which one was our train because there announcement board in Beijing is bilingual.
We boarded our train to Xi'an without any hiccup.
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