indiancouple,

You don't need a guide anywhere in China. I hired "guides" to help with translation, which did help in the smaller restaurants and out in the countryside of Yangshuo (Reenie and I would have gotten lost while biking!). Paying 100RMB/day for 2 people I felt was very reasonable, but anything higher is not. I didn't pay based on their "expertise." I traveled to China already prepared with the history and knowledge of the sights. I know from my experience(and from Peters comments) they are unreliable. One provided history information after she surfed the net the night before.

The one enjoyable aspect of having a guide is to chat with them about their lives. We each learned about the differences in our culture and customs.

It's very easy to get around with your destination in Chinese characters. Have someone at your hotel write it down.

If you get lost on the way to/from a place, the Chinese are very friendly and helpful. It takes a little time to talk to someone with limited English, but they help and if needed will find someone that speaks English.

Buy a "Me No Speak" book online and bring with you. Very helpful. I was able to order some food (needed to determine what kind of meat I was ordering) by pointing to the photo and chinese characters.

Monica

PS: Thank you, and Annie, for the compliments of my photos!!

PS: I want to say Stu did lead me away from using a guide in Xian. Instead of paying what he was going to charge us (I think it was around $85 per person), we took a taxi to the train/bus station and the #306 bus to the warriors. Cheap!

Monica

We used a guide in Xian and, in addition to driving us to the warriors, he showed us some cave dwellers and took us to a fabulous dumpling restaurant in a small town. Those kinds of experiences, which I wouldn't find for myself, make a guide worthwhile.

In Beijing, we used a guide who came with a driver. She sat down in our apartment and we outlined what we wanted to see and then she proposed an order that made sense. Coming out of each location and into the waiting van meant that we were able to maximize what we saw that day.

I'm not usually a fan of using a guide, but when we first arrived in Beijing we felt so helpless that we got on the internet and looked up the Beijing guide, a bus tour to the Wall and a pedicab tour of the hutongs.

Indiancouple-
While I like to be non-controversial when answering these posts, the reason one reads them is to get input about many people's experiences.
A really good guide would have been extremely helpful in China. From what I am reading, "good" guides are hard to find and can be expensive. I had some unfortunate experiences, nothing life-threatening, but frustrating and one time almost caused me to miss a flight due to a local bus issue. I also got "shanghaied" at the Shanghai RR station..again, not life threatening, but a bit disconcerting.If you know nothing about the Mandarin language, I think traveling in China is challenging, and I am a very seasoned traveler. I love new experiences and dislike "canned tours", so I travel solo and make my own itinerary. But if I did it it again, I would do it differently, and perhaps hire a guide for an afternoon or 2 in each city I visited.

lollylo 25,
I agree with you. I too am a seasoned traveler and can manage traveling on my own in most places in the world. In China I was glad to have travel guides. It's not that it isn't doable on your own, I just got more out of it with much less hassle (at a price I was glad to pay).

Paulchili-
Yes, for sure, getting more out of it. I felt I had often spent hours trying to get somewhere or find something, and then got lost, to not even find what I was looking for in the first place! I think I would have seen alot more if I had a Guide. I took a day tour to the Great Wall and the organized bus and commentary was SO welcome on my last day...I could finally r-e-l-a-x.

The itinerary sounds good to a first time visitor. But places listed are definitely not enough to see the other side of China since large western regions are left over, such as Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai. As a native of Yunnan province, a short drop to its well-known Dali and Lijiang old town is a nice replacement of Xi'an which I consider less fun though I have been there before. Since the tax on domestic flight in China is lowered, you may book very decent cheap flight between cities in China. There is airport in Dali and Lijiang as well. I strongly recommend a flight search website called "www.qunar.com", similar to Kayak in the US. Bad thing is that this website is in Chinese. Hopefully you may find a person who can read Chinese, then cheapest flight from Beijing to Shanghai would be around 25 US dollars.

lollylo, Paulchili, I agree with your observations about guides in China. We are also experienced travellers, who normally never use guides or 'packaged tours', but were wanting to use guides on some days in China.

We have located and finalized a reasonable guide for the Yangshuo portion of the trip. All guides recommended on this site for Beijing, Shanghai and Xian are quoting very high prices. I think we can manage Shanghai and Xian on our own, but it would be nice to have a guide for 1-2 days in Beijing. We are leaving it open for now. We will see how easy or difficult it will be once the trip starts, and if we feel the need, we will ask the hotel to arrange a local guide whenever we need it. Any recommendations for a reasonable priced guide in Beijing ?

cotineliu, I know we are leaving out large portions of China on this trip. I guess it is not possible to see everything in one trip. We do plan on a repeat trip some years later, when we can cover Tibet, Kunming, Lijang, Chengdu and other places.

For now, we don't want to make the trip too rushed by adding more destinations. Spending 3-4 nights at each destination is suited for our kind of travel, and we would be wary of switching hotels more frequently than that. Better to visit fewer places and see them properly.

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