China Travel Forum

[Maria]

I am wondering if anyone has done China independently? Or is it still one of those countries you need to travel in a small group tour?
I am looking at a tour something like this - Hong Kong>Yangsho>Yangtze River Cruise>Chengdu (large carved Buddha) & the Panda Breeding Base>Xian(Terracotta Warriors)>Beijing.
Is this the pick of the many fascinating cities?
Has anyone ever gone by train or flown from Beijing back to Hong Kong? Is it easy?

[John]

Really possible.
I did it alone and by my own.
You ever find friends on the way, you know!.
I did something similar: HKG, yangshuo, kunming, dali, lijiang, leshan, chongqing, the YangTze river to Wuhan, the yellow mountains, Hangzhou, Shanghai, the Shaolin temple, Xi'An, Beijing.
Fascinating!!!
I love this country.
What I liked was that only about one third of the time is organised (mostly the basic stuff like transportation and obvious sightseeing) the rest is up to you.
The language barrier in China is quite high so you really need a lot of time to get what you want. And there is the problem of loosing your face for Chinese people. You could have been standing in a line in front of a ticket counter and when it's your turn the counter closes, because staff possibly doesn't know any english and doesn't want to loose their face.
Train travel in China is great and a very good experience.
China has very big cities, when looking at your list I see only yangsuho as a smaller place. (And yangshuo is very touristy) When we toured china we did Bejing, Shanghai, Xian, Chengdu, Yangshuo and Hong Kong. After nearly three weeks of big cities I really had enough.