China

Let me start off by saying that our trip to China was amazing. It know in a large part this was because we had our entire trip planned and coordinated with an awesome travel company called Sinorama. Vic and I have traveled the world, but we’ve discovered that there are some locations that are best left to the experts. This is due to two very important factors, language barriers and transportation. In Europe, we’ve never had any problems finding someone who speaks English, but this was not the case in China. Having a local tour guide who speaks the language and knows the ins and outs of their city is priceless.

I would never, ever, ever attempt to drive in China. The roadways are so crowded and you’re hard pressed to find traffic signals that work or are followed by the driving populace. We witnessed so many near collisions during our trip that we made the decision then and there to never attempt driving while vacationing in Asia. Having said all that, Sinorama handled everything with expert precision and we were able to see so much during our three weeks. If you’ve ever wanted to go to Asia, I highly suggest you check them out. They do trips all over, not just in China, and their prices are shockingly reasonable. We thought we were being bamboozled when we first visited their website and saw how affordable a trip to China would be. We will definitely consider them when it comes time to visit Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. 

From Denver, we flew to Seattle then on to Vancouver, BC. From Vancouver there was a direct flight to Beijing (about 12 hrs). There’s no way around it, this is a long day of travel. If you can book the long leg as an overnight flight, definitely do it. Sleeping as much as you can helps the time go by faster and if the time changes align, you may be more acclimated when you finally get there. If you travel during the summer, be prepared for the heat. China is hot & humid. Suffice it to say, we did a whole lot of sweating during our trip. Going to China is a once in a lifetime experience. It was so different from all the other places we’d visited. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who loves to travel and experience new cultures. Also, prepare to have your photo taken by complete strangers, I’ll explain this later.

Beijing

The first stop in our journey was the capital city of Beijing. To say that this city is big would be a massive understatement. Beijing is giant, crowded and bustling with activity. Our first stop was at The Temple of Heaven, constructed in 1420, this was the private place of worship for the emperors of the Ming & Qing Dynasties. Our next stop was at Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City. You might remember Tiananmen Square from the student-led demonstrations that took place in 1989. The Forbidden City is a palace complex that served as the home to 24 different emperors from the Ming & Qing Dynasties. It is the world’s largest palace complex and covers 74 hectares, is surrounded by a 52-meter-wide moat and a 10-meter-high wall, and has more than 8,700 rooms. This is a must see in Beijing. The architecture, artifacts and stories you’ll hear about its long history are absolutely fascinating. 

Our next adventure was climbing The Great Wall of China. The first time you lay eyes on the wall, it is quite overwhelming. To see it in person, you truly get a feel for just how enormous it is and how much work went into building it. Its construction began all the way back in 770 BC, and continued for 2,500 years. In the beginning, small sections were built to provide protection and create barriers between warring factions. The wall stretches for more than 13,000 miles. Be prepared to get a workout if you plan to do any climbing. Stairs and ramps can be very, very steep and uneven in some sections. My husband and I were dripping with sweat by the time reached one of the out posts. It’s a good idea to keep everyone’s physical abilities in mind when planning your day. You can make the day as easy or as challenging as you want, come prepared to have your mind blown by this man-made wonder.

Thankfully, our schedule was quite leisurely the following day. We spent the better part of the morning exploring The Summer Palace. Just a short 15 km drive outside of Beijing, it is said to be the best preserved imperial garden in the world. It was originally constructed by the Qing Dynasty back in 1750 as a place of retreat during the hot summers. It was much preferred to the walled-in Forbidden City during the warmer months. Give yourself plenty of time to explore and enjoy feeling like you’ve been transported to another time and place.

Xi’an

After exploring Beijing, we headed to Xi’an, which is famous for the Terra-Cotta Warriors. This massive collection of sculptures wasn’t discovered until 1974, when a group of peasants happened upon it while digging a well. To date, nearly 8,000 warriors, 100 chariots, 400 horses, and more than 100,000 weapons have been unearthed from the three pits. Construction dates back over 2,200 years. It was built from 246BC to 208BC for the purpose of protecting Emperor Qin Shi Huang in his afterlife. Seeing the attention to detail put into all these sculptures is remarkable, and the fact that it was created as protection for a burial tomb is just crazy. Even crazier, the painstaking task that still continues to this day of unearthing the sculptures and piecing them back together again. This is definitely a place I would recommend visiting. Try to come as soon as it opens to avoid massive crowds & heat in the crowded pit areas.

Yangtze River

From Xi’an we headed south to the Yangtze River. Here we boarded a small cruise ship that would take us east to Shanghai. While cruising for five days, we made stops at the Three Gorges Dam, Chongqing Harbor, The Red Pagoda, The Goddess Stream, and the three gorges themselves (Qutang, Wu and Xiling). We were lucky enough to book the penthouse on the boat, which boasted a gigantic terrace where we were able to host a party for our entire tour group. That night we got to experience the Ship Locks system firsthand. I’ll just call this a boat moving elevator. If you’re curious, I suggest looking it up to find out more. All in all, our river cruise was a great experience. It was really interesting to get far outside the city and see how people really live in the rural areas in China.

Shanghai

We were back to the big city when we reached Shanghai. Truth be told, Shanghai is known best for its amazing skyline. The architecture is really incredible and the city is filled with so many interesting buildings. We enjoyed a harbor cruise, visited several museums, one where we saw a 2,000 year old preserved body, and we also visited a place that showed us how silk is made, all the way down to extracting the silk strings out of the silk worm. We also got to see the incredible tapestries they make using silk. This is also a place where we found some fantastic shopping areas, oh yeah, and I ate a  chicken head. When in Rome!

Yangshuo Countryside

After spending a couple days in Shanghai, we headed back out to the countryside. This area was so beautiful, with rolling green hills as far as the eye could see. We took a cruise on the River Li, and I swear I felt like I was on the set of a movie. The scenery was just too stunning to believe. We also had the opportunity to visit a tea plantation, which was super interesting. It definitely gave me a much greater appreciation for tea. The time, effort and traditions that go into making just one batch is incredible. We also got to take part in a tea ceremony which made me really happy that we don’t typically drink tea in such a formal way. We also attended an evening outdoor show that was one of the biggest entertainment productions I’ve ever seen. Using a river as one of your stages is pretty amazing. 

Macau

After our countryside excursions we headed to bustling Macau. Macau is a bit of an oddity. It is an autonomous region, but if you ask someone in China, they’d probably disagree. It was a territory of Portuguese all the way up until 1999. It was strange seeing all the street signs in Portuguese after seeing everything in Chinese for the previous couple of weeks. Macau is called the Las Vegas of Asia due to its many towering casinos. We stopped in at the MGM Casino and it was one of the prettiest places I’ve ever seen, just beautiful. My husband had to do a little gambling while we were there, and he actually won, so I was happy.

A couple people from our tour group elected to try the “Elephant Dung” coffee or as it is also known, Black Ivory. This is rumored to be the most expensive coffee in the world. The MGM is the only place that serves it in Macau. The process to harvest the coffee beans is insane and a little gross, look it up to find out more. Another hi-light of Macau are the St. Paul’s Ruins. Only the facade remains of this Portuguese church that burned to the ground on multiple occasions. During a city tour, we definitely had a laugh when we saw the old canons pointing directly at the casinos.

Hong Kong

For the final leg of our journey, we traveled by ferry to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is another one of those autonomous regions, depending on who you ask, you’ll get a different answer as to whether they’re part of China or not. This city isn’t large geographically but boy do they have a super tall skyscraper jammed into every nook and cranny. To give you an idea of just how tall the buildings are, we stayed on the 87th floor of our hotel. Kinda scary, but cool. I felt like I was going to the top of the Empire State Building every time we went to our room.

We took a drive up to Victoria Point to see the famed views of the harbor, followed by a city tour. We also got to experience lunch on the Jumbo Kingdom Floating Restaurant, which seats up to 2,000 diners at a time. My favorite part of Hong Kong was our visit to Lantau Island where we got to see the Tian Tan Buddha up close. It was so cool to be able to see the buddha from miles away as we rode the gondola over to the island. Hong Kong was a great place to wrap up an incredible three week trip.

Of course, no trip would be complete without a rundown of what the food & culture was like. I’ve always been a huge fan of Asian cuisine, doesn’t matter if its Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, etc., you get the idea. After eating nothing but Chinese food for three weeks, I never wanted to look at rice, chicken or stir-fried vegetables ever again. Even our breakfasts had a majority of Asian dishes. Our meals were almost all the same, there would be rice, noodles of some kind then a variety of meats and vegetables (see photo below).

Keep in mind that they don’t serve big portions of meat either, and they’re big fans of very fatty, grisly cuts of meat. My poor husband was about ready to lose his mind by the end of our trip. We had two meals out on our own that were fantastic, burgers and pizza. We were a couple weeks in and were craving “American” food. I don’t think anything had ever tasted so good in my life. We also tried some strange food, you’ll probably remember me mentioning eating a chicken head. I enjoy trying strange and new cuisines when we travel.

One of the best parts of travel for me, is the strange and often funny things you see. People do things differently every place you go, so it’s interesting to see their approach. The Chinese take their sun protection very seriously. The picture below was something we saw A LOT, and I thought I was a little overzealous about sunscreen. They also take their transporting of goods and people very seriously. I’m the type of person who will carry in twelve bags of groceries at once just so I don’t have to make a second trip. It looked like they would move entire families and houses all in one trip, and on a moped no less. You might have to look closely to notice, but there are four people on the tiny moped.

And finally, I need to write a little bit about something that I mentioned at the beginning of all this. I said you should prepare yourself to have your photo taken if you aren’t of Asian descent. I say this because every place we went, someone took my photo. I understand that I look a little different than the average Joe (red hair, lots of freckles and green eyes, oh yeah, I’m also taller than the average woman), but it was crazy. I had people walk right up to me and take a photo of my face, and of course lots of others that tried to be a little sneakier. It finally got to the point where I asked our tour guide what was going on. Her explanation actually made a lot of sense. We were visiting some of the most famous places in China. These places are also very popular for the Chinese people who live outside the cities in tiny villages to visit as well. Many of the Chinese tourists have never seen a person who wasn’t Chinese. Ahhh haaaa…it all made sense. It also didn’t help that at one of our stops, a lady in our tour group told a bunch of tourists that I was a movie star from America. I felt like I was being followed by the paparazzi after that. We all had a good laugh when we got back on the tour bus.

On a side note, our tour guides throughout the entire trip were top notch, we seriously couldn’t have asked for better. Overall, our travels in China were amazing. We got to see so many wonderful sites and meet tons of incredible people. Friendships were built that I hope to have for the rest of my life. 

One last note, on a trip this length, we had many opportunities to attend all sorts of shows. We saw acrobats, contortionists, musicians and yes, even opera singers. There was one show in particular that I have to mention. It was a musical of sorts with a variety of musical instrumentals and opera singers. I have never heard anything like it in my entire life. The musicians sounded like a group of children that had never touched an instrument before that moment. It was bizarre, everyone sounded like they were playing something different, it all clashed.

If that wasn’t strange enough, the opera singer was downright comical. We had to keep ourselves from laughing out loud the entire show. Do your self a favor and Google Chinese Opera singing and you’ll see what I am talking about. It sounds like someone sipping on helium, who has the voice of a baby and a meowing cat combined. It is insane. It may have not been our cup of tea but it was definitely entertaining, and though not pleasurable to me, I know there are thousands who think it is fantastic. China was definitely eye opening, fun, totally different from any other place I’ve visited and just special. I would highly recommend traveling to China to anyone who is even slightly interested, I promise it will be well worth it!