Want to go to China in November. Interested in seeing Beijing, Xian, and possibly Shanghai (is Shanghai a good place to visit?). I also would like to go on a river cruise on the Yangtze River. I found a tour on Pacific Delight (13 Day Historic Cities & Yangtze River - Supervalue). I will be traveling solo (female). I've been reading where you need a tour and other postings where you can plan this yourself. I've been to western Europe 4 times and planned each trip myself (trips were great) but know nothing about Asia and don't want to be there alone and find out that everything's messed up. I would prefer not to go on a tour since I like to do my own thing but want this trip to be a great experience and don't want major screw-ups either. Have ordered my usual guidebooks for learning about China and would appreciate comments. I'm flying from Las Vegas to Asia.

China is very do-able on your own, especially the east coast cities you mention. If you search this board you'll find a number of posts about doing China on your own. You do need a good guidebook (with place names in Chinese characters) and a good phrase book (ditto).

I'm not that fond of Shanghai, but I'm not that keen on big cities with lots of neon. It's definitely worth visiting to spend a day in the museum, though, and likely good for shoppers.

I went on my own as a solo female to China, and really it was pretty simple as far as logistics are concerned. I didn't make it to Shanghai (went to Lhasa instead, actually) but you might like to read the trip report:
http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34656568

If you prefer being on your own, there's no reason not to go solo!

You can go on your own tour alone by asking a local agency to assist you with the lodging and flight tickets in advance, you don't have to go with a group.
I prefer going on my own, as long as my flights/train schedules and accommodations are all booked, then its all good.

bookmarking

China is generally very safe for single foreign travelers, mostly petty theft. The main challenge is language, it gets worse as you head north. This makes travel logistics more of a challenge. I do NOT recommend train travel in China unless you read Chinese, train stations extremely chaotic and most signage in Chinese only and people don't speak English, so you could easily end up on the wrong train. Trains itself also totally packed and not particularly comfortable.

If you can afford it, rent a private car with driver (e.g. Hertz) to take you to day trips. Otherwise, sign up for a day tour locally to visit these sights.

Beijing and Shanghai are totally doable. They're big cities, taxi and subway can get you to most sights in town. You don't really need a guide but you may get tired with the language, in which case, it's nice to had a local English guide for part of the trip just to get a break from the communication challenge.

Shanghai feels like a big city and I don't think you need more than 2-3 days to see sights in town. But there's great shopping and lots of day trip options nearby.

Xi'an is slightly more remote and there's lots of see in town. But the terracotta soldiers are about 45mins away from Xi'an, so you'll need to get a private car or do a day tour to see this.

All major US hotels operate in Shanghai, Beijing and Xian and you can book directly online, no problems.

For local domestic Chinese airlines, I prefer China Eastern or Dragon Air to some of the other ones.

Also, not sure if there're direct flights from LV to China but I'd guess stopover would be either Los Angeles, San Francisco or Tokyo.

Just remember to get yourself a good Chinese Dictionary and tourbook with chinese characters on them.

Happy Trails!

We went to China last summer (family of 4) and thought we would do it ourselves. When we arrived in Beijing, the hustle and bustle and foreign-ness and language difficulty got to us and the following day we booked tours for the next 3 days in Beijing. One group tour to the wall, one group pedicab tour to the hutongs and one private tour guide to the zoo, Summer Palace, Forbidden City, etc.

We had a guide/driver lined up already for Xian, which was pretty much a necessity.

In Shanghai, we went it alone, which was fine. The only problem we had there was that the taxi drivers usually don't speak English and on arrival we didn't have the name of our hotel written in Chinese.

China is great. But much more difficult than Europe, where I can only remember one tour we took in several trips there and that was a historical guide to Rome. We just felt stressed in China and hiring the tour guides was necessary for us. I still am glad that we didn't go as an organized tour, though.

P.S. I wrote a trip report which I recently posted to the Asia board, if you want to read it.

We have traveled all over the world, go to Europe several times every year and the only tour we have ever taken was to China. China is very large, the sighted we wanted to see required flights, our time limited...a tour was excellent. Take a tour....Pacific Delight or Smartours will be cheaper, easier, and you will enjoy it.

Disagree with SeeSee that you can't handle Chinese trains on your own. I did Datong-Beijing-Hangzhou, and Shanghai-Suzhou-Xi'an-Chengdu-Kunming-Nanning-Hanoi with no problems. I did get my tickets through local travel agencies (mostly CITS). You do need to be able to pattern-match the characters, but all the station have big boards with departures listed, and both staff and passengers will look at your ticket and make sure you go to the right places.

Also, I did the terracotta warriors on my own using local buses, but you do need a guide book to figure that out. The key to solo travel in China is to have your destinations written down in Chinese characters, that's why you need to make sure your guidebook has that, so you can copy the names. I also found that those locals who did speak English were incredibly helpful.

I also disagree about the trains; granted I only took one train journey, overnight Beijing to Shanghai, but it was easy to navigate on my own with no Chinese skills. If you can travel in soft sleeper/luxury, the trains will not be crowded or uncomfortable in any way. (You can read my ongoing report; I am a female who just returned from a solo 2 weeks split between Beijing and Shanghai. This was my first trip to China; it could not have been easier.)

you should visit Yangshuo Guilin as it is a must-visit place and do not miss it out, it is not so easy to China on your own, you should have a guide book,learn some chinese, know pinying, and know the the Chinese name of your hotel.