Travel tips for China?

[1990C4S]

[Rick Lee]

The high speed train IS awesome, but they don't have them everywhere and they're still a lot slower than jets. And train stations in China can be unpleasant. The new ones are great. But the old ones are frightening and can look like shanty towns with many thousands of people camping in fromt of them for days while waiting for tix. I would never a non-high-speed for any kind of serious distance there.

[RWebb]

Where is that gas mask & particle mask thread?

Just recently James Hanson said he was in China and had to go to the ER because of the air quality. Ironic, eh?

'nuff said?

[motion]

I'm leaning towards Xi'an, and the trains are mostly at night, so not really feeling that. I want to see the country, but it might be better using a private car hire for a day trip. Its looking like I'll be flying from Shanghai to Xi'an. Thanks all for the great info

[Rick Lee]

They have tours to the countryside, but they'd be hard for foreigners to arrange or even understand, as there are few English speakers out there. A really cool tour I did was to stay in a Tibetan village in far western Sichuan. It was about four hours by car from Chengdu and really out in the middle of nowhere. The guy who ran th tour was from that village. He had left to join the army, which then sent him to university, where he married a rich girl and she bankrolled making his village into a tourist attraction. Otherwise, no one in the outside world would ever know that place existed. We slept on boards with blankets, had an outhouse, an ice cold shower and decent meals cooked for large groups. Everyone else in our group were city slicker kids from the university in Chengdu. My friend was also a student at that time and she figured I'd get a kick out of it. You really feel like you're going back 500 yrs. And I don't think you'd see anything like it from a train window.

Unfortunately, I think that village was probably destroyed in the 2008 earthquake, as it was pretty close to the epicenter and everything was made out of pretty primitive building tech.

We passed through some other cool places on the way there that seemed like modern metropolises by comparison.









The guy on the left is the guy who, with his wife, started this tour company and is from this village.



My friend told me it's not uncommon in Tibetan culture to knock on a stranger's door and offer to pay them to make you a homecooked meal for $$. That was a pretty cook experience. Really enjoyed that one - dirt floor kitchen, yak meat with some greens, rice and a beer from Chengdu. I think we paid around $3 for the both of us and I really argued to pay more, but $3 is what I was allowed to pay.

[imcarthur]

Just a few Xi’an tips:

We stayed at the 5* Western-style Howard Johnson’s just outside the South Gate. Great views of the South Gate & the city walls. There are a lot of hotels in this vicinity. There is a night market on Dongxin Street that I wanted to go to for food but we ran out of time & energy. The Qin tomb (the main event) is ˝ - 1 hour east of the city center. The big sheds with the warriors are further east of the mound. Pit 1 is the picture above. There are also several smaller burial mounds northwest of the city (across the river near the airport) with a small museum at the Mausoleum of Liu Qi.

We managed to avoid a Dinner Theater which the Internets say is touristic & annoying with bad food. Assuming you will hire a guide or driver, you will undoubtedly see the terracotta factory & probably a silk factory – avoid both if you can. You could probably arrange a drive into the countryside to see some rural Shaanxi although the roads to/from the tombs will give you a glimpse.

Fwiw here is my Trip Report.

Ian

[Rick Lee]

My last time in Xi'an, Mrs. Lee found a taxi driver to be our driver and guide for the whole day and it cost next to nothing. They guy was really cool and knew a lot. He even quizzed us later in the day on the stuff he had told us earlier to make sure we were getting it all. Part of the tour I did both times in Xi'an was an amazing museum that explained how they made the terra cotta soldiers and built the Qin tomb. The tomb was discovered around 1974 and still has not been opened, as they're not sure how to do it without destroying it. Legend has it that the whole thing is surrounded by a moat full of mercury. The museum has a huge mock-up of what they think the tomb looks like. It's sort of like the most amazing model train set you ever saw. The murals on the walls show that they eventually killed all the workers who worked on the terra cotta soldiers. I have no idea what this place is called, but I was really happy we came upon it the second time, so my folks could see it. And read up on the Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Amazing story.