Tours, Trains and Planes in China

This site:

http://wacts.com/

has quite a bit of information about travelling by air, train and daily english speaking guides within China. Has anyone booked with them before?:confused:

This is their response to train transfers from Beijing to Xingang:

Kindly note that Xingang is a harbor in Tianjin, in Chinese meaning :"New Harbor", there are ships departue from this harbor to many cities within China.

You can take train from Beijing to Tianjin and then take a taxi from Tianjin train station to the harbor.

There are many trains from Beijing to Tianjin daily and it cost only USD 5 dollar or in Chinese Yuan: 34/ticket for a seat

The duration of the train journey is: 1 hour and 20 minutes.

For the long-distance train, like from Beijing to Xi'an, the train have soft sleepr, 4-pax private compartment. Should you only have two passengers, you will shared the compartment with the other two Chinese passenger, maybe. Should you feel un-comfortable to share the compartment with strangers, you might consider buy 4 tickets, the fare is: USD 63/ticket, we can buy the ticket and have the ticket delivery to your hotel in Beijing before you check-in your hotel.

China train tickets always in good demand all year around, as most of Chinese get used to train travel, which is economical than air travel, so some times, train tickets is not so easy to buy by yourself, you have to wait in a long line outside of the train station to do the purchase, or you can pay some extra money to the ticketing center in your hotel and let them try to help you.

However, from Beijing -Xi'an-Three gorges -Wuhan, we can get you very good discount fares, should you interest about this, kindly let us know.

If possible, I recommend you send me your travel plans, and your ideas about your China travel plans, I will try my best give you the best transportation suggestions based on my experience.

They have an office in Chicago, I am working with Lixia Liu to develop pretty much a custom itinerary to tour China.

Their fees appear to be very reasonable.

Also, we contacted Marriott, they said we could leave our excess luggage with them while we tour the country. So we plan to stay there the first and last night and tour in between.

:confused: I have a question about dress code while traveling.... does anyone have suggestions for the right clothes for the weather and appropriate apparel in China. We're hoping to pack 1-2 small bag to tour with.

:confused: Has anyone cruised with the Yangtze River companies such as Victoria?

Cruisinlivin,

I'm researching our China land trip + Yangtze river cruise now, too.

You will find a few helpful Yangtze river cruise reviews/discussions in the archives here and then many others all over the 'net via Google. Several of the river cruise reviews are a small part of a trip review covering the land touring of Beijing, Shanghai, XiAn, etc. It's been well worth my time to read as many reviews as possible to learn the "in's and out's" of planning this trip.

From what I've read, Victoria is definitely one of the top lines. I gather you simply need to go with slightly lower expectations--while very nice, a 5* cruise ship on the Yangtze is not comparable to a 5* hotel in a Chinese city. A couple of other cruise lines that market heavily to Americans are Viking River Cruises (relatively new to the Chinese market, well-established with a very good reputation in Europe) and Orient Royal (the East King/Queen ships).

The price to fly between cities is so reasonable, I ruled out train connections (too time consuming for modest price savings). For example, you can see on the WACTS homepage in the airfare block they advertise Beijing-XiAn for $73USD vs. the price you quoted below of $63USD for a soft train ticket in a shared compartment.

Good luck! It's somewhat more challenging to research and plan a China trip than a trip to, say, Europe, but I'm very excited as every reviewer gives this adventure a big thumbs up!

Thanks for your info.

We've decided to train it! If nothing else I'm sure it will add to the stories we bring back.

What fun it is to travel!

We did a AAA tour of China in Oct, 2002. Part of the tour was 5 nights on the Yangtze on a Victoria ship. We would recommend them to anyone. The food and service was very good. Breakfast & lunch buffet and a sit down dinner every day. The ship we were on is no longer in service and it looks like they have all fairly new ships on their web site.

We took 3 flights in China and the airports and planes were all very clean. The planes we were on were generally newer and better maintained than some we have been on in the states. Didn't take any trains, so can't comment on them.

The hotels we were in in Beijing, Xian and Shanghai were all 5 star. Very large, comfortable rooms with lots of supplies. The first day in Beijing, I was watching a golf tournament from the U.S. on TV in English with Chinese subtitles. Couldn't believe it.

if anyone is still checking out this page, i'd just like to say a big thank you for the info - I'm going to do a tour of china and a cruise on the Yangtze in July 2005 and the website mentioned was absolutely fantastic and much better prices than the ones I have been using.

thanks again

Hi Raringtogo,

I keep an eye out on all the threads I post to with email subscriptions. I find the info and feedback I get is terrific.

We created a custom itinerary from Oct. 9th-23rd with Lixia Liu at rail@wacts.com located in the Chicago office. We were able to make all of the arrangements with reasonable hotels( just for sleeping because we are on the move so much), trains, cruise, flights and guides in most cities. We are doing it all for about the price of the 3-4 day tour for two listed on most of the sites. We will visit Beijing, Xi'an, Yichang, Yangtze cruise(4 days), Chungquing, Chengdu, Guilin, Li river cruise(day), Yangshou and back to Beijing for a cuuple of days before boarding the ship.

Needless to say we are raring to go too! :D

Please post feedback of your trip, I am very interested in hearing about it. :)

Artemis,

Board messed up and posted msg twice! :rolleyes:

Artemis,

Hi.... sorry I must not have been subscribed when you posted your msg.:o

It looks like you have done much of the research that I did too. You are right about the Yangtze cruise * rating from what I have read. We are interested in seeing as much as we can of China in the time we have to visit. We know we spend little time in hotels so we are staying at 2 & 3 * hotels recommended by Bootsnall.com and wacts.com. All are on the web and from what I can see they look much like our Choice Hotels(Comfort Inns, Suites etc). We have stayed at 5* Hotels all of our careers which was great but now we are retired the choice of seeing the world vs 5* hotels is easy to make. We very much enjoy seeing a country more like a local than a tourist, I am hoping that staying with some of the family owned establishments we will get to do this. I know by taking this approach we will possibly have many experiences that will result in long stories some day but that too adds to the experience... hopefully with a few giggles. :rolleyes:

You are also right about the air fare vs train fare, also part of our experience. I was originally thinking we would see something of the country side as we took the train, much like Eurorail travel through Europe, but we will be on an overnight train so that won't happen but it replaces a hotel stay. So air travel would be a hotel fee plus the air vs just the train fee.... since you are sleeping(supposedly) that is a savings. LOL.

I think the bottom line is I missed the experience of a vagabond trek that I should have experienced as a youth..... that want to be young again experience. :D LOL

When are you taking your trip?

Check out official china train schedules

hi cruisinlivin

wow - you are covering some huge amount of territory - you will get home and need a holiday LOL

we've done a little more reasearch and have decided not to see so many places this time - but will spend longer in each city. Shopping is a priority :) because i'm going with my 26 year old daughter so, shanghai for 6 full days, onto X'Ian for a couple of days, then we were supposed to take the cruise down the Yangtze but my daughter is not showing much enthusiasm about that. I'm hoping when we finish in shanghai she will be so exhausted (from all her shopping) that she will want to relax on the cruise after all. Then we fly to Beijing and we will spend 6 days seeing all the sights there. We have booked our tickets from Melbourne Australia into shanghai and out of beijing so anything we decide to do within china we can decide on the spot. I am finding hotels in shanghai to be very expensive. from all the different forums I've checked out, the beds can be very hard which is a worry. I need my sleep.

I would love to do the Yangtze cruise but may have to content myself with our end-of-year cruise on the Diamond Princess (booked) from Singapore to Sydney. Very excited about that! I notice that most Americans seem to book with Victoria - but from what I gather the Regal is excellent also. have you checked out the chinahighlights website re: yangtze?

I will definitely post on here as soon as I get back from China on the 29th July and let you know about the hotels and the train (if we decide to catch the overnighter from shanghai to xian, although we will probably end up flying) and everything else of interest.

I found a great website with a very informative forum called www.tripadvisor.com. everyone is very helpful so you might like to check it out. also, www.virtualtourist.com was quite helpful.

sorry I took so long to reply to your posting - I have been spending every day (belive it or not) trying to decide on hotels, tours etc - I'm going cross-eyed from spending so much time staring at the computer screen!:eek: