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Old August 13th, 2012, 06:51 PM posted to rec.travel.asia
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Default Beijing China Tours

On 8/12/2012 3:10 PM, jacquey wrote:
We will be going on a cruise in April 2013. One of our ports is Beijing for 2 nights. What tours are available beside the ships tours? Do you have to stay in a hotel in Beijing overnight rather than coming back & forth to the ship? Thank You


Since there's no port in Beijing, this will be an interesting trip! I
think that cruise ships dock in Tianjin. You can take the high speed
train to Beijing (Beijing South station), it's about a 35 minute ride.
From the train station, you can take the subway all over Beijing, it's
very easy to use, and there is English signage and announcements. Of
course there are taxis as well, just be sure you have your destination
printed out in Chinese characters.

You probably don't want to go back to Tianjin every night, so you should
get a hotel in Beijing.

Without knowing what you like to do it's hard to make recommendations.

We were in Beijing in June 2012. The highlight of the trip was the trip
to the Great Wall, but not the Disneyland-like, hugely overcrowded,
completely renovated sections of the wall at Badaling or Mutianyou. We
went he
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/china_great_wall/scene/beijing/jinshanling.htm.
I'd been to China many times and only been to the Badaling section of
wall. Jinshanling was incredible.

I'm sure you want to go to the Forbidden City as well, though I think if
I had to choose one or the other I'd go to the Summer Palace. You could
do both in one day since the subway goes out to the Summer Palace now,
but it'd be a long day with a lot of walking.

I would recommend that you eschew the fancy hotels in Beijing and stay
in a hutong. We stayed he http://www.beijingcitywalls.com/. Reserve
well in advance as it's extremely popular. Not only will you spend a lot
less money, you'll have an experience that few tourists to Beijing enjoy.

I was with my family and we got the four person room, but there are two
person rooms as well, and they have bathrooms in the room. They sell
meals which were pretty good and not expensive, they have free Wi-Fi as
well as computers to use (no Facebook though, unless you have VPN
service back to another country). You can walk to an area with a bunch
of good restaurants (including of course Peking Duck) as well as the
ubiquitous KFC.

Reviews:

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g294212-d1014228-Reviews-Sitting_on_the_City_Walls_Beijing_Courtyard_House-Beijing.html

http://www.hostelworld.com/hosteldetails.php/Sitting-On-The-City-Walls-Courtyard-House/Beijing/24225

You can walk to the Forbidden City from there. We took the tour they
sell out to Jinshanling Great Wall. The tour company picks you up at
6:15 am, you sit sardine-packed into a minivan where they serve you a
delicious breakfast of a cold McDonald's sausage muffin and a Coke, and
they drive you to Jinshanling, where you have about five hours to walk
around the wall. They include a mediocre lunch at a nearby restaurant.
But aside from the inconveniences of the tour company, it's an amazing
trip. There's a cable car up to the wall which saves time (we walked
back down though), and there are a few touts that will follow you trying
to sell you stuff, but nothing like Badaling.

You don't need an organized tour for the Forbidden City or the Summer
Palace, just go. The subway goes to both places, and it's much faster
than a taxi since Beijing traffic is horrendous.

April is a good time to go since it's not so hot.

If I had to guess, the cruise ship excursions to Beijing are enormously
expensive and take you to the most touristy places.

Be sure to pack very light for the trip to Beijing. We had four
rollerboard type suitcases, considered carry-on in the U.S., and we
could not get all four into the trunk of a taxi.

The spousal unit had wanted to go on an organized tour to China, but I
would not do that. We did just fine on our own. Probably no cheaper, but
we went to places that an organized tour would not go.

Final thing is to watch out for tours with forced shopping where they
take you to a "xxxx factory" (xxxx=jade, silk, etc) and pressure you to
buy things so the tour guide can get a commission. This is a huge
problem in China. We experienced it on the Li River tour we signed up
for in Guilin, even though they told us that there would be no shopping
stops.