eyeski

I'm in the early planning stages of a 20th anniversary trip. Have been considering China, India or possibly Italy.





I really love Chinese food and have been to Thailand and Cambodia without using a tour group so I feel comfortable planning independent travel.





I may hire a private guide in some areas, especially to help with language issues. We're adventurous, but don't want to end up eating seahorses or various animal penises.





A coworker of mine is from Yunnan province, so I have some help in planning an itinerary. We're thinking about two weeks, hitting Beijing, Xian, Chongqing (we especially love spicy food) , Shenzena and Shanghai (flying between locations). From what I hear the Yantzee river trip may be a waste of time.





My preliminary research is telling me that hotels are still relatively inexpensive in China (especially compared with India). It seems we can stay in the best hotels like The Peninsula in Beijing for a good price.





It seems to me that food and entertainment costs should be very low as well. We love eating in markets, food courts etc. that are frequented by the locals.





Am I off base here, or will our daily costs be very inexpensive?




Any comments on the itinerary? Too many places for a two week trip?

quimbymoy

food is definitely inexpensive, so as long as you stick to local places. for ex. at a noodle place in xi'an, we got 9 bowls of soup, beers and sodas for under US$6 total. most of the time the 8 of us ate chinese style and never paid more than $6-7 each for a meal.

hotels can also be inexpensive as well. most of the western owned hotels will probably have better english speaking staff. oddly enough our hotels never had chinese tea at breakfast! i ended up buying some at a market & bringing it to breakfast every morning!

as for your itinerary, it does seem a bit tight. i would take a place out and save for the next trip. haven't been to chonqing or shenzhen so i can't comment, but i would do a minimum of 3 days in beijing, 2 days in xi'an and 3 in shanghai, then the balance with your 4th city.

you'll love china!

ekscrunchy

I think you are right on track, but why Shenzhen? To access Hong Kong?

thursdaysd

I would suggest Chengdu rather than Chongqing for your western city. Not as polluted, more to see, and a good base for visiting pandas, the Leshan Buddha and Emei Shan.

How cheap do you want to go? In Chengdu I paid $100/night for the Sofitel, and $15/night for a clean en-suite double in a guest house.

You'll do fine, provided you take a guide book with place names in Chinese characters, and a phrase book ditto - not just pinyin. Make sure you don't leave your hotel without their card, you'll need it to get back.

I would cut back on Shanghai, unless you're a real fan of big, busy cities, or want to do a day trip to Suzhou. I would also suggest at least one overnight train, for the experience.

PeterN_H

> I may hire a private guide in some areas, especially to help with language issues. We're adventurous, but don't want to end up eating seahorses or various animal penises.

A high price to pay for a potentially small benefit, and with potentially many downsides--in general local guides should be avoided. There really isn't any danger of eating bizarre dishes, and when they do appear on menus (which would be rare in the examples quoted) they come on a page of specialities near the front of the menu with much higher prices than the rest.

You can get by with either a sensibly organised phrase book that gives the characters for key meats and vegetables (most, although by no means all, dish names are made up of the key ingredients plus a cooking verb), with a decent guide book that gives the characters for recommended dishes, and/or by taking along the bi-lingual menu from your local Chinese take-away. Mid-range restaurants in China now very commonly have picture menus, and there's always the option to point at what someone else is eating.

In short, this isn't hard at all.

Note that there are good Sichuan restaurants throughout China, and particularly in Beijing (names can be supplied, if desired), so don't feel obliged to visit Sichuan if you're only doing so for the food, although there are of course many other reasons to go, good restaurants amongst them.

Peter N-H

eyeski

My chinese friend recommended Chongqing, primarily for the hot pots and access to the Yangtze, but if we decide to skip the river cruise, maybe we could go somewhere else like Chongdu.

He recommended going to Shenzen from Hong Kong because it's less westernized and has great, varied cuisine. I was going to skip HK altogether because it seems too westernized, but maybe we should go anyway.

I'm thinking 3-5 days in Beijing, 2 in Xian and 2-3 days in Shanghai. I was going to fly out from there, it looks like the shortest flights back to the US. That leaves us 5-7 days to do one or two more places.

Can we do an overnight train from Beijing to Xian? Beijing is the shortest trip from the US, so we were thinking of starting there.

I can afford to stay in the nicest hotels in each city, if it's worth it. India is just ridiculous, I'm not paying $600 a night. I don't like wasting money, but I want a nice, clean hotel. I've stayed at The Oriental in Bangkok among other places and really enjoyed the service and luxury.

Suggestions?

eyeski

Oh, Peter thanks for your comments on the guide and food situation. It sounds like we should have no problem doing it on our own. At worst, if something is not good, we can always get something else.

marksfour

Spent 10 nights at the Pen and would not do so again. The Park Plaza Beijing (Wangfujing) IMHO would be a better choice. Not only is the price considerably less but after comparing notes with friends who have stayed at the Park Plaza, their customer service far surpasses the Peninsula. Location is the same.

thursdaysd

Yes, you can definitely take the train from Beijing to Xi'an. See www.seat61.com/China.htm for info on trains in China. Or do a search here, there have been a number of posts on this.

rkkwan

Shenzhen is all modern highrise buildings, shops and restaurants. One reason it has good food is because literally everybody there moved from somewhere else in China, so you can find varied cuisine there.

But nobody goes there specifically for a visit, unless you're already in Hong Kong and want to fly out of their airport (cheaper fares to/from other Chinese cities compared to HKG) or to buy counterfeit goods.

PeterN_H

I wonder how up-to-date the observations on the service at The Pen and the Park Plaza are?

The Park Plaza is four-star and attached to The Regent. I stayed at The Regent early last year, just after it had opened, and was astonished at how good the service was by Chinese standards: Not only helpful, but actually anticipatory, which is rare in China indeed. These results had been achieved by training the staff in the Park Plaza as a fully functional hotel open long before The Regent, giving them practical hands-on experience.

However, I stayed in The Peninsula and The Regent consecutively in late summer last year, and The Peninsula service came about as close to Western standards as it's possible to get in Beijing (several Shangri-La properties would receive the same accolade), while The Regent's service was so poor it was a bad joke.

You can blame The Olympics for this, and the opening of 10,000 new top-rate hotel bedrooms in just a few years (including this year alone, a Mandarin Oriental, another Ritz-Carlton, another Intercontinental, a Park Hyatt, etc., and last year a Sofitel, and others).

Staff have very little loyalty to their employers in China, and what's happening now is that new properties are outbidding older ones. The Regent/Park Plaza staff have gone to the new Ritz-Carlton, I was told. One manager said some had tripled their salaries, and with his financial planning already done and approved, there was no way he could match these figures.

In short there's turmoil at the moment, and properly trained staff are a small percentage of the total hotel workforce, so views on quality, unless very recent, need often to be revised.

The longer-standing hotels that look after their staff are the ones still consistently delivering the goods at the moment, at that includes The Peninsula, the Shangri-La properties, and the Hilton, oddly enough.

But there are dozens of decent mid-range (three-to-four-star) Chinese-run hotels you can get in for US$40 or less, and of course a very wide choice for less than that.

Peter N-H

eyeski

Any specific recs for chinese run hotels?

rkkwan

If you can afford them, why not stick with the international-branded ones? Like Peter says, with Chinese ones, quality is inconsistent. When some hotel is brand new, it may be fine; 6 months later, it can be a dump.

That's not going to the case with a Peninsula, Shangri-La, Intercontinental, or a Hilton or Sofitel.

PeterN_H

I suppose it's a case of, 'You pays your money and you takes your choice,' as my mother likes to say.

While there are an increasing number of comfortable properties in Beijing, they are almost all over-priced because while charging global big-city prices none can actually deliver the levels of service they would elsewhere. Some are coming increasingly close, but although it's an excellent hotel, and a personal favourite in Beijing, no one staying at The Peninsula should assume they are going to get the same product as The Peninsula in Hong Kong, for instance, although they will get amongst the best service in Beijing. And that's the same with the less prestigious hotel brands, too.

But I think many of these discussions miss the point: You don't go to China for the hotels, and you don't spend much time in them when you do go. There's no big-name long-term period glamour hotels, for instance, and there are no resorts. The hotel isn't part of the destination; it isn't part of the story of Beijing; it's a place where you lay your head in between those things that are what Beijing's about--currently a combination of heavily reworked historical destinations and the most extravagant creations of foreign 'starchitects', and street life in the hutong if you're willing to get into that.

Although some certainly have an edge over the others, the new hotels are all in that Hyatt-esque mould while stridently marketing their minor differences (the Sofitel thinks it's French because the doors to the bathroom are a pair of little ones, like a closet). The only hotel with something of historical and period charm is the (excellent) Raffles, but in reality that's a recreation of an idealised past in a century-old building. Somerset Maugham and Henri Cartier-Bresson may have stayed there, but they wouldn't recognise what they now see, nice as it is (and it is certainly amongst my favourites--if you want a very different room with a feeling of period elegance, this is the place to go).

Certainly if you are determined to have five-star and nothing else then you should never choose a Chinese-run hotel, as you'll pay the price of the foreign ones without getting a fraction of even their standards of service or housekeeping.

So for many, then, a place to lay the head that's clean and quiet, with reliable hot water, etc., and preferably something resembling a Western breakfast, is all they need. And when it can be had for $40 as opposed to the $200 it can cost to get into the better hotels, it seems a sane choice. Who needs 'service' when that service usually doesn't really know what it's doing? For many the ideal hotel is the new class of jingji (economy) hotels with fixed rates ¥200-300 (US$30-40) which can be booked ahead for exactly the same price as you would get over the counter. Some are purpose-built and some are total refurbishments of older, incompetently run hotels. Typically they feature bright, pastel colours, have a glass shower cubicle rather than a bath, and essentially all the basic amenities without fuss, including (usually) breakfast, and free (or very cheap) wireless or Ethernet broadband in-room; free computer access in the lobbies. There's a Hotel 268 that will put you up for precisely that (¥268) on the same street as The Peninsula. This won't do if you think you're going to lounge around in bathrobes for part of the morning enjoying the (smog-laden) view from your super-king-size bed (with huge thread-count linen) enjoying a room service breakfast with eggs cooked in precisely the way you want, before taking a trip to the spa (and what an incredible waste of time in Beijing that would be). But if you want to be up and out and beating the crowds into the Forbidden City, returning for a quick shower before tackling a tasty dinner with the locals somewhere and then getting some well-earned sleep; these are the places to stay.

If you want non-chain Chinese then newer, as suggested above, is always better. Maintenance and housekeeping are always problems in Chinese hotels, and there's a tendency to let things fall to bits before doing anything about them. But there's many a new 3-star that's well above older 4-stars in quality while being much cheaper. It should be noted, though, that the star system in China is entirely meaningless.

The other option is to go for one of the many hotels in traditional courtyard houses, adapted to a greater or lesser degree. At least there's some local colour, albeit a bit re-imagined. Some of these now have prices well beyond their station, however. But so many are opening up that this can't last, and some indeed are run more on hostel terms, but with doubles with private bath available, too.

After the Olympics there will be attempts to sustain the high prices of the moment, but there's a widespread belief that these will collapse, and especially whatever you see on the websites of (non-jingji) Chinese hotels, are prices you'll be able to cut in half at the counter.

Peter N-H

ekscrunchy

I stayed for about a week at the Beijing Peninsula and I cannot imagine how anyone could have a complaint about this hotel, apart from the fact that the exterior adheres to the concrete-block style of architecture.

Here is my report from 2007 covering my solo visit to Beijing and Shanghai (with Seoul as bookends); it is heavy on food details:


http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34984181

YinJun

Yes, you can try spicy food in Chongqing,especially local typic food HOTPOT. There are two kinds flavor for mandarin-duck hotpot, one is spicy, another one is fresh. Yangtze tour is amazing,you can take a cruise ship down the river from Chongqing to Yichang to see 3 gorges and big dam. Please browse www.yangtzedream.com for detailed info.

Cheers!