A couple friends and I bought plane tickets to China. It's for September 22 through October 6. October 1-7 is China's Golden Week for the National Day holiday. Obviously, we should have checked the dates better but the price was great and it's water under the bridge now.

I was hoping someone with first hand knowledge could tell me what the situation with Golden Week. I have seen other threads and forums, but I'm unclear on when travel is really feasible. I want to know what days the transit networks are likely to be most congested. Are they busy throughout the entire week? Are they busy in the couple of days before the Oct. 1-7 period? I have traveled in busy periods in other countries, but obviously this is on a different scale.

For an example, a sample itinerary I prepared has us travel from Xi'an to Shanghai on the evening of 9/29 (a Sunday) and go to Hong Kong on 10/3 (a Thursday). Is this even possible? I know things will be crowded in the actual destinations. Nothing can really prevent that now. I just want to hear some advice from the people who've seen it first hand. I do plan to buy hotel rooms in advance. Thanks for the help. I really appreciate it.

I saw it first hand back in 2004, don't know if/how much it has changed. You need reservations not just for hotels but equally important, for transport. If you're taking trains that is complicated by the fact that tickets don't go on sale very early. When I did it (taking the train from Beijing to Shanghai to Hangzhou the evening before the main holiday), CITS (an outfit I would not normally use) provided my tickets. Beijing station was crazy, the police had instituted one way systems at the metro station, and the soft sleeper waiting rooms were packed, but it was survivable if you can handle crowds.

Thanks for the reply! I figured we would need the transit in advance too. What services do you recommend for buying train tickets in advance? Is it just the first day or two of the holiday where transit is busy, or is it the entire week? We will be out of Beijing before the craziness starts, but I imagine all of China is busy.

As I said, I used CITS (actually, I used Passport Travel in Australia, and they used CITS). You could try ctrip, but this is one time I might feel more comfortable dealing with a large agency in person. I would expect the chaos to be worst at the beginning and end of the week, but I would want reservations for the whole time.

The situation with national holidays in China is both more complicated and easier than it at first seems.

In the case of the October holiday, the number of official days of is only three. In recent years, in a policy called 'holiday economics', the government has added two more days in order to encourage travel and spending, to get some of those immense private savings sloshing around the economy. But the extra two days are taken from an adjacent weekend, whose two days become normal working days.

So when people talk about a 'week', this is misleading if it is understood as five days off between two free weekends, and that's important as it dramatically affects travel patterns.

Very few people have discretionary holiday, and most will be working through the weekend prior to the public holiday. Those who do have discretionary holiday, and who have the economic power to travel for the most part live in the cities and head either out of the country or to resort and countryside destinations within it. So the result of the public holiday is that in the major cities while popular sites may be very busy, traffic overall is light, finding taxis easy, pollution drops, and at the mid-to-upper end of the hotel industry occupation is also light. The longer national holidays are in fact good times to be there.

The aim has to be to arrive at a major city before the holiday begins, stay there for the first day or two, and move on in the middle, staying put for the last couple of days. On those days at the beginning and end of the holiday, domestic rail tickets can be impossible to obtain, and flights rather more full. In between, however, there's often little problem and the standard discounts on airline prices easily obtainable over the counter.

So although there are never any guarantees, the trip Xi'an to Shanghai is unlikely to be a problem unless you've devised one of these detailed-to-the-minute schedules which never tend to work out well in China at the best of times, and absolutely must be on a particular flight and no other. There are plenty of direct and indirect flights. You can most cheaply simply buy your tickets on arrival in China (and cheapest still at the point of origin.)

Obtaining tickets for Shanghai to Hong Kong in the middle of the holiday should also present few problems. But Hong Kong is effectively a resort destination for China (a shopping resort) and accommodation there will certainly be very heavily booked. Note that you will almost certainly find it significantly cheaper to fly Shanghai to Shenzhen, from where a frequent bus service takes you through a less busy crossing point directly to Elements Mall above Kowloon Station.

In passing, you might want to consider whether, with only a very limited time in China, seeing both Shanghai and Hong Kong is the best use of your time. I'd drop Shanghai, and add in a different experience, while suggesting that less is more in China: don't have yourself changing town every couple of days. Distances are vast, traffic coagulated, and the time consumed in moving about considerable.

Thanks very much for the info. I'm a little unclear as to what exactly you would suggest that's worth seeing if we don't go to Shanghai or Hong Kong during Golden Week. Unfortunately, my job doesn't really allow me to just take two weeks off whenever I want to come back, so I feel like skipping them both may be difficult to justify. I don't really want to spend a week in Yangshuo or something like that. Do you have any suggestions?

I'm not Peter, but I agree that doing both Shanghai and HK is redundant. I would opt for Shanghai as you can use it as a base for Suzhou, Hangzhou and/or the water towns. And it has a good museum.

Instead of HK I would visit Chengdu (there's a night train), from which you can visit Leshan and Qingchen or Emei Shan, and where you can eat well. Or possibly Xiahe.

Thanks for the response Thursday. I think we will cut HK out, especially since it will be just as busy. We will stick with Shanghai. Do you think Chengdu will be busy during the Golden Week?

One can discuss whether this Golden week is 3 days or one week but reality of recent years shows that the crowds are unbearable. Plenty of photos on the internet showing this. It is people shoulder to shoulder in tourist attractions. Same every year.
You can book flights early on ctrip.com and book train tickets with http://www.china-diy-travel.com/
Place your orders early. For hotels it depends on the kind of hotels as 5-star may not be too busy due to the drop in business travel.

There is still possibility to avoid the crowd. If you take the Yangtze Cruise trip during the holiday, i believe you won't feel it as crowded as you expect. You may consider the Cruise from Chongqing to Yichang. After the Cruise, continue your visit to Shanghai. The price for some hotels in Shanghai is lower during the Holiday than the rest time in October.

Be it Shanghai, Xian, Chendu ... everywhere will be extremely crowded, since you can't change your plane tickets, you'll just have to go with the heavy flow and start planning your itinerary now.

Cut out HK and forget about the Cruise, you won't see much of China from a ship. Are you flying into Beijing and out of Shanghai? How many days do you have on the ground? Is your plan to pack in as much as you can see on this trip?

After you set your itinerary, you can book flights, trains and hotels.

Get all your hotel and train/plane tickets in advance, it will not be fun to travel during that time. During the first and last day of golden week, do not travel at all, stay wherever you are.

Every potential 'scenic site' will be mobbed. Best to avoid those. Choose out-of-the-way spots and park for some days. Walk the city, explore close at hand, things like that. IMO chinese cities quite alike, all same culture. Like strip malls off the interstate in USA-one mold fits all.

I appreciate the responses, but I'm not sure "avoid the scenic sites" is really good advice for a trip to China. It's on the other side of the world and I'm paying a lot to get there. Regardless, I will be putting up with it. I will not be traveling on the 1st and I will return to Beijing on the 5th to fly out the 6th. I will be booking trains in advance. One thing I'm interested in is that I've heard that high speed trains are pretty expensive by Chinese standards. ARe they still booked weeks in advance too? Thanks for all the help everyone!

"I'll be putting up with it", I am glad to that. I understand getting the visa was a hassle, be prepared you are going to a country with completely different culture, standards and politics as the western world.

Have you set your itinerary yet? How do you plan to travel within China?

> ARe they still booked weeks in advance too?

No, because they are not even made available until a short period before the day of travel: 20 days if you book on-line via the (Chinese-only) railway website, and 18 days if you book (easiest) through a railway ticket agency or at a station. Demand, obviously, varies according to route and time of year. As already mentioned in some detail, if you plan to travel in some directions at the beginning or end of the holiday you'll find tickets very hard to obtain. If you travel in the middle of the holiday period you will likely encounter no difficulty. It is now possible to go into ticket agencies at point A, and buy tickets from point B to point C (this is a relatively recent innovation) but generally only for trains whose route begins at point B, and not those that pass through.

Nevertheless, on arrival in China, if you insist on sticking to a rigidly planned timetable, you should be able to purchase most of what you need at that point. The kind of agent you want has a terminal on the railway system, prints the tickets on the spot, and charges you merely ¥5 per ticket. In larger cities (Beijing in particular) these are all over the place (even in Beijing's Capital Airport) and clearly marked in English. Elsewhere the characters 火车票 are displayed. Other agencies may charge you as much as ¥30, those in big hotels even more, and will just go round the corner to purchase a ticket from the agent you should have gone to in the first place. On-line purchase through English-language sites may see you paying as much as 70% on top of the cost of the ticket (although this will be carefully concealed by the site), and should be avoided.

The high-speed trains are indeed quite expensive by Chinese standards, but nevertheless are popular. But on routes such as Shanghai to Beijing there are numerous daily departures, and on any route flying, also inexpensive and with tickets often substantially discounted even at short notice, is an alternative, often with many flights a day and alternative routes through third locations. In short, as long as you avoid the days mentioned, your chances of not getting where you want to be by some route or another, are slim.

In passing, note that you'll need to have your passport with you, and those of any companions, whenever you book railway tickets as well as air tickets. You will usually be refused purchase unless you have that document with you (which, as a foreigner, Chinese law requires you to carry with you at all times anyway).

> ARe they still booked weeks in advance too?
Some are. By weeks, that is 3 weeks max. I often take the G train between Beijing and Shanghai and it is generally full. In normal times you can get the train that you want on the day before. If you just show up at the station then you may have to wait 4 or 5 trains later to get a spot. On some other fast train lines there are fewer trains.
The railway company has been making some adjustment and eliminated some train to ensure that they run full most of the time.