In 2005 we decided that we wanted to see China since we’d missed it during our backpacking trip. We knew it would be very difficult to put this one together ourselves, so our initial thoughts were to go with Exodus. However, we found a 3-week trip that was just as in-depth as the ones offered by Exodus but better value for money (at the time) with Voyages Jules Verne (the trip the link goes to was almost identical to the one we did).
This trip pretty much covered everywhere we wanted to go and in comfort – Beijing (for the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall), Xian (for the Terracotta Warriors), Chengdu (for the giant pandas), a cruise on the Yangtze River for 4 days, Shanghai, Guilin (for a trip on the Li River), Hong Kong and more places besides that we hadn’t yet heard of.
VJV proved to be a fabulous tour company. We had a super helpful UK guide who stayed with us for the full trip and looked after everyone, plus excellent local guides at each location.
We couldn’t get over how clean everywhere was; there always seemed to be street cleaners out sweeping up. We felt it put our own country to shame. The Chinese people, particularly the young ones, were very friendly and often approached us for a chat (in English), but a lot of the older ones didn’t speak much English. We did manage to learn a few Chinese words and phrases which helped.
Everywhere there was a mix of old and new, but I must say that I was so disappointed when we got to Shanghai as I stupidly expected it to be much like it was in the Indian Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark – doh!
In Beijing we found travel quite awful – so much traffic on the roads and so much pollution. Most of the cities were bad for traffic congestion, however despite this, we did like some of the other smaller cities – Guilin, Xian, Suzhou and Hangzhou were all nice (well, the parts of them that we saw and the areas we stayed in were). Our favourite city was Guilin, it is so pretty lit up at night.
While Paul liked Hong Kong, I just couldn’t warm to it. With all the high rise buildings crammed together and (at the time) a population approaching 7 million, it was very hard to walk around. You had to make use of the subway system, so I found it all quite claustrophobic.
All in all, we had a fantastic trip and the tour had so much crammed into it – not just sightseeing, but dinners including a special Peking Duck meal, a visit to the Chinese Opera, an acrobatic show, etc. If you are short of time and want to see as much of the highlights of China as possible, then we would highly recommend this tour.
Below is a selection of our favourite photos…
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