The Best:
- Ligjiang
- Tiger Leaping Gorge
- Dong Farmers
- T-5 Express Train
- Great Wall Simitai
- Kunming spicy noodles
- Chengyang waterwheels
The Worst:
- Customer "service"
- Throat clearing
- Guilin
- Public toilets
- Tour groups
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China
China is over-the-top big. Sure it's loud and obnoxious, but where else can you find such a clash of old and new, of
sublime and surreal?
Dispatches
Photos
(To come)
Links
Lu Song Yuan Hotel: A mid-priced ($50) hotel north of
the Forbidden City. It's a traditional Chinese building set off the main street, on a little alley in the hutongs. The staff
is a bit brusk, but we found our room to be clean, the location is nice, and it has a lot more atmosphere than the larger chain
hotels. It costs more than the backpacker hotels, but most of the backpacker hotels in Beijing were rotting concrete gettos.
Passplanet.com: This is a great web site for all Asian destinations, but we found it particularly insightful for China. It helped us find some out of the way (aka, not featured in Lonely Planet!) places, such as Chengyang.
Random Thoughts and Tips
- Go West! Skip Shanghai and check out some of the real China. Yunnan province is gorgeous and warrants an entire trip. Chengdu and environs got good reviews from fellow travelers (though we didn't make it there ourselves).
- Chinese trains are nice, clean, and comfortable. "Hard sleeper" class is just fine, with the main drawback being that the cabins don't have doors so noise from the hallways can keep you up.
- We highly recommend the Fawlty Towers hotel/guesthouse in Yangshou. It's extremely clean, very friendly, and only $8-$10/night for a double.
- If you can spare a few extra bucks, take advantage of the domestic airlines. A flight from Kunming to Guilin takes 1 1/2. A train take more than 24.
- If you do the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek, definitely take the "high track". The "low track" is just a dusty gravel road, and the high track is far more scenic.
- When in Xi'an, be sure to spend some time wandering through the Muslim quarter.
- To order food, just point to the dishes you want in the back of the Lonely Planet (which has the Chinese characters).
Books
Riding the Iron Rooster: Paul Theroux's classic about riding the trains in China. The politics may be a bit dated now, but his observations about China are still relevant and fascinating.
Lonely Planet China: This guidebook deserves special mention. Yes, every traveler has it; and, yes, it has some inaccuracies; but without it I don't know how we would have survived. Its maps and its dictionary (with Chinese characters) were indespensible, and it does a pretty good job of evaluating whether a town is worth visiting.
Our Route
Other Countries:
Egypt
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China
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Jordan
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Laos
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Syria
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Thailand
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Turkey
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Vietnam
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