inor

My husband and I are planning our first trip to China. I was thinking we could fly into Beijing (do a couple of organized day trips), then take the train to Shanghai (Where we would do some day trips that included water/ancient towns).

I am concerned about how easy it is to take the train from Beijing to Shanghai (or vice versa) My biggest concern is finding our way around the train stations. Are there signs in English? Are there English speaking information areas or English speaking ticket agents? Does anyone know of a private guide who could possibly take us to the train station on one end and help us figure it out or pick us up on the other?

Also, does anyone recommend a good stop between Beijing and Shanghai?

Thank you, Inor

miamatusow

I have no first-hand experience with this, but we will be in China in March, so I've been doing quite a bit of research. My understanding is that there is an English-speaking window at the main train stations and that it is pretty easy to buy tickets. However, if you're concerned, I've also heard great things about China DIY Travel, which is an Australian couple living in China who will make any sorts of travel arrangements for you for a reasonable (~$10/ticket) fee. I have exchanged emails with them twice, and they've been helpful and responsive, although, again, I haven't actually bought any tickets yet because you have to wait until closer to the travel dates.

Have a wonderful trip!

inor

Thank you for your response. I'll check them out. Also, please let me know after your trip how things worked out.

Have a wonderful trip too!
Inor

temppeternh

Beijing South, the station from which the high-speed trains to Shanghai depart is likely to be the most modern station you've ever entered. Every possible facility is clearly signposted in English, and there are well-marked, English-speaking information desks at two locations. The departure boards are also in familiar script and the platforms numbered with familiar numbers. In short, this is no problem at all, and a guide (as on most other occasions in China, 'private guides'--often illegal--particularly so) will only be money wasted.

You need not, and should not, go to the station to buy your tickets. This you should do from a railway ticket office in town. These are numerous, usually marked in English (although none is spoken), and will charge you merely ¥5 for each ticket, printing it on the spot. Wherever you buy, however, you must show a passport for each ticket you want to buy, or will be turned away. (Carrying your passport at all times is a legal requirement anyway, and sight of it is also required to enter some museums.)

Tickets are typically available 18 days in advance, including the day of travel. On-line they are available 20 days in advance, but you'll need someone with Chinese to do the ordering for you, and there are reported difficulties with entering foreign passport numbers and paying with foreign cards (entering credit card data into Chinese systems is not anyway the cleverest of ideas), although others have had no difficulty. The ticket offices with terminals on the railway system remain the best bet.

Someone at your hotel will be able to point you to the nearest agency, and will write down for you in characters the key information: destination, date of travel, preferred time of day, number of seats, preferred class of seat. The hotel may also offer a ticket service, but they just take ¥30 or more per ticket to go round the corner and do what you can do for yourself for ¥5. Any other agency charging more than ¥5 is doing the same.

Note that return tickets are a relatively recent phenomenon in China, and allocations of tickets for the return part may be small, although there are plenty available at the point of departure. You may attempt to buy your Shanghai to Beijing ticket in Beijing, but don't fret if you don't succeed.

Chinese stations are almost all designed to take you straight out to the street on exiting (and you'll need to show your ticket again as you exit from the platform, so have it to hand), and taxi ranks are straight ahead or signposted, as is the nearest metro entrance. Ticket offices almost always have separate entrances from the main station entrance, and again are clearly marked. So if you're planning to do something about a return ticket look for the signs. But line-ups at Shanghai can be long, so again you're best to work with a railway ticket agent.

In China, as everywhere else, a common language is not required to succeed in making travel arrangements. In most cases context is your friend, English speakers at your hotel can be harnessed to write down key requests in characters, there's a lot more English signage and English announcements than you seem to suspect (especially in the big cities), and a little patience and common sense is all that's required to get things done. Tens of thousands of travellers without two words of Mandarin to rub together get themselves independently around China every year, and you can, too.

kja

Several of us have found visiting China independently quite manageable. You might want to search this board for our trip reports. To find mine, just click on my name.

EllenLM

Wow: temppeternh gave a fabulous response! I live in Beijing and have taken the bullet train to Shanghai; it's about 5 hours and very comfortable. I bought round-trip tickets with no problem. I recommend buying them in person from one of the many ticketing booths around town or at the train station. I've never met an English-speaking ticket agent, but a note from your hotel's concierge (as temppeternh suggests), plus some hand and sign language, should do the job just fine. You can look up the schedule on-line. I really like this website for information about train travel in China: http://www.seat61.com/China.htm.

There are a few relatively interesting stops between Beijing and Shanghai (such as Nanjing), but if you have only a few days in Beijing and a few days in Shanghai, I'd suggest focusing your travels and day trips from those two major cities. You will face the challenge of even fewer English speakers in areas outside the major metropolitan areas.

I'm sure there are guides you can hire to meet you at each of the train stations, but I'm pretty confident you can manage on your own. I suggest you take the name of your hotel written in Chinese to hand to a taxi driver. There is no correlation whatsoever between the English name of a hotel and its Chinese name, which can get frustrating for all parties.

I hope you have a wonderful trip.

inor

Thank you everyone for your replies. I now feel very comfortable with not taking a tour. However, if anyone has a day tour to recommend in Beijing, Shanghai or a water town in between, please let me know.

EllenLM

I can recommend China Culture Center as a reputable place for good tours, and they may have some you're interested in while in Beijing. http://www.chinaculturecenter.org/ They also have offices in Shanghai. Go to the website and click on the "Beijing Walks and Tours" tab. Their guides are enthusiastic and speak excellent English.

What I do NOT recommend in Beijing is signing up for a day-long tour to the Great Wall with your hotel. Unless you hire a private car and driver, the hotel will put you with a tour group on a bus that will take you to the Great Wall and the Ming tombs, but you'll spend 12+ hours because they also take you to a "jade factory" and maybe a "pearl factory," both of which exist solely for the tourist trade and contribute handsomely to the tour operator's monthly revenue.

When I have visitors to Beijing, I generally encourage them to hire a private car and driver or a taxi, which will cost about 700-800RMB for the entire trip. The driver will pick you up at the hotel, take you to your preferred Great Wall destination(I recommend Mutianyu for first-time visitors), and take you back to Beijing when you're done. If you do a lot of homework and read up on the history of the Great Wall, you can do it on your own but if not, it might be smart to hire a tour guide as well. Your hotel can arrange that--just make sure it's a private tour. You're spending a lot of time and money to get to China, so I believe it's worth it to fork out a little bit extra to make sure you get the most from the magnificent Great Wall experience.

kja

Hmm... given that it is incredibly easy to see Beijing and most surrounding sites without a private car, that sounds inordinately extravagant to me. It is extremely easy to see the Great Wall on one's own, particularly at Ba Da Ling (for at litlle as ¥12, about $2 US), but also at Mutianyu (for less than ¥100). For recent info, see tempperternh's post on Oct 7 at 4:30 pm:
http://www.fodors.com/community/asia...great-wall.cfm

I honestly can't imagine a reason why I would have spent so VERY much more for something I could easily do on my own. Yes, my flight to/from China was price-y. IMO, that's no reason to pay outrageously high prices while in China.

Just my opinion.

temppeternh

Even the Chinese press claims that 90% of economically priced one-day tours in Beijing fail to deliver what they promise, so certainly avoid those.

China Culture Centre may avoid (at least some of) the shopping shenanigans, but offers massively overpriced and fake experiences (tawdry Cadillac-rickshaw tours of streets you could walk yourself for free) for those with little clue about real prices, with local guides who have no more of a grip on the realities of history than any others, and who will simply tell you what you want to hear, what impresses, and (if properly licensed) what they've been trained to tell you, which is what the Party wants you to believe. In short, prices entirely out of synch with the local economy for misleading information.

If you want to go the expat-y route, as well as seeing a more atmospheric and less-visited part of the Great Wall, look at the site of Beijing Hikers: http://www.beijinghikers.com . Tours are priced for expats but not unreasonable for the convenience and level of service, and often include lunch at a genuine 农家院 (farmhouse-restaurant). One or two of the newer guides do spout the typical nonsense, but the more senior ones have a much better idea what they are talking about, and don't take the official view too seriously.

As for reading about the history of the Great Wall, that takes no great effort, you can read as much or as little as you want, and you'll find no accurate information locally from guides. General information about sections near Beijing is easily obtained (the brick-clad sections are Ming dynasty--post-1368--despite what the guides tell you about it all dating back thousands of years. If you really want to get into the detailed history of individual sections, the battles fought there, the official responsible for construction, the particular construction technique used, of course you can do so. Arthur Waldron's 'The Great Wall of China--From History to Myth' will debunk what you'll be told locally. For general chit-chat by enthusiasts, have a look at http://www.greatwallforum.com/forum/ .

If you do take a taxi to the nearest sites such as Badaling or Mutianyu, then you should pay no more than around ¥500 at most. You can reach Badaling by direct public bus for merely ¥12 each way, or just ¥6 if you go by train. That's real local pricing. For more details see:

http://www.fodors.com/community/asia...great-wall.cfm

But as for getting around Beijing, simply get a public transport card (yikatong) from any metro station (full details of how to do this on request) and get yourself around at your own pace, carrying some reading you've brought from home.

temppeternh

My apologies for appearing to repeat some of kja's remarks. We were posting at the same time.

kja

(Since I was, in part, quoting you, temppeternh, that seems only fair! )

MichelleSonya

I went with semi-organized tour. So they took up in between cities but with it the cities we were on our own. I found that subway system in both Beijing and Shanghai were the easiest to navigate compared to anywhere else in the world