Travel

I bought a day tour to visit Blue Valley ( 蓝月谷), Impression Lijiang ( 丽江印象), and Yulong Snow Mountain ( 玉龙雪山). All these attractions were in one big park. The tour included transportation, lunch, a free rental waterproof winter jacket, and two cans of oxygen. The price was 1080 RMB (~$150) for two people. I booked the trip a few days prior and had to send them photos of our passports. In general I do not like group tours in China since a lot of time was wasted on things I don't like. This tour was no exception. However, I could not find a way to book tickets on my own for the cable car ride to Yulong Snowy Mountain without joining a tour, a questionable practice on the park side. In hindsight, we should have skipped this park completely Most of the attractions were too crowded and not worth a visit. To Start the Tour The tour driver picked us up at 6am. We then went to a shop to pick up rental jackets and oxygen cans. Over there, we had to listen to a sales pitch on products for al...

Our driver picked us up from the hotel and we went to visit Qianguishan. Qianguishan means thousand tortoise mountain, referring to a hill with a unique rock formation. The scenic area was actually vast, way more than just that one hill. Qianguishan and White Water Terraces were my favorite places in this trip.  We took the cable car ride to the top and hiked down. The trails were quite easy, all paved boardwalks. Once we walked off the cable car, we saw majestic mountains. It was raining on and off, so there were clouds around the cliffs, making it even more scenic.  The last picture above was the tortoise rock formation that gave the park name. The rocks were red, but since it was a rainy day, the rocks did not show much color.  It rained a lot during the hike, so it was not the best weather. Unfortunately, Claire's rain jacket leaked water, and she was all wet. We skipped lunch and asked the driver to take us back to the hotel. I ordered rain jackets and two ...

I hired a driver on Ctrip for ~$120 for this day trip, an exceptional value.  We first went to Tiger Leaping Gorge. It was very impressive with massive water rapidly flowing between cliffs. It was also crowded, although our driver said that the crowd size was much smaller than usual.  The drive near Tiger Leaping Gorge was very scenic. The driver stopped by a few places so that I could take photos. There were famous hiking trails here for hikers to backpacker for days.   We then went to White Water Terraces. This was an amazing place with very few visitors. The only annoyance was that there were people trying to sell us horseback rides at the entrance. I had to repeatedly saying no a few times. The hike was rather short before we reached the top of hill, where the beautiful white rock formations were. There were also yellow rock formations due to the mud content in the sediment. We also saw some pool-formation-in-progress along the hiking trail. We had lunch at ...

We flew to Lijiang in the morning. Lijiang is a town in the Yunnan province. The weather here was very comfortable ~20C in the summer. June-August was the raining season here. While it rained quite often, it was just some drizzle for a short time, so it was not bad for traveling.  Hotel We took a taxi from the airport to our hotel, Hampton by Hilton Lijiang Old Town ( 丽江古城希尔顿欢朋酒店). I chose this hotel because it was outside of the old town and very quiet . The staff was super nice. When the front desk lady saw that we were curious about the delivery robot, she offered to send the robot to our room by putting two bottles of water in the robot and programmed it to go to our room. We had fun following the robot. The included breakfast buffet was nice too. They had local specialties such as flower cakes. A couple of downsides of this hotel. The hotel was supposed to be non-smoke building. However, we had smoke smell coming from the vent on two days around breakfast time, most likely bec...

I did laundry at Bei's apartment in the morning while Claire stayed with Jane's family. In the afternoon, we went to Yisushe 易俗社, a shadow puppet show 皮影戏 place recommended by Bei. It had a Qin Opera museum and a theatre. The museum had many displays and we liked the wax figures. The museum was peaceful and quiet, really nice, and opposite to the museum we went yesterday. We also watched a shadow puppet show performance. We even bought a shadow puppet (monkey king) as souvenir.

We visited the Shanxi History Museum ( 陕西历史博物馆) in the morning. It was awful. The museum was free admission but required online reservation. However, the online reservation was always sold out. There were people online selling those reservations, they would take your passport information and make a reservation for you. Our friend Jane paid for such a service and got us tickets to get in. I didn't mind paying so this was not the awful part, although this was an example of the poor management of this place. At the gate of the museum, there was no sign for any direction or any staff, just a huge crowd of visitors. We had to ask around many times and got into many wrong lines before we finally figured out that visitors with passports needed to go to a booth to get entry tickets. Even though there were less than 10 people ahead of us, the line moved so slowly that it took over an hour before we got our tickets. They copied our passports, took photos of us, then issued a paper ticket for...

My main goal in Xi'an was for Claire to visit the Terracotta Warriors. Unfortunately, while the artifacts were majestic, the experience was a total disappointment.  The museum was more than one hour drive from the city.  Our friend Bei drove us there. It was also her first time visiting the museum. Our friend Jane had made the reservation for us. We showed our passports at the gate and went in. Once we got in, we entered this crowded chaos. It was full of people and noise. We were first warmed by a group of guides offering guide service. Jane had called a few minutes earlier and told us that they had already booked a guide, so we kept declining the guides. It took a few minutes but we finally met with Jane and started the tour.   Our guide first took us to Pit No. 1. The site was a huge stadium-sized room, with visitors limited to the outer rim of the pit. There were so many people that it was jam packed on a super hot day. We had an ear piece to hear our guide, howe...

We took a morning flight from Dunhuang to Xi'an. It was a budget airline that did not allow any luggage as carry on. I had prepaid for check-in luggages when I was back home. At the airport, the weight of our luggages was 0.5 kg above that limit, because we bought a heavy book at Mogao Caves. The airline staff just let out luggages pass without any hesitation. I liked it! In Xi'an, we met our friends Jane and her family, and my friend Bei, who was a Xi'an local. Bei picked us up at the airport and gave us really nice milk tea. She even prepared cooling gel for Claire's fever.  We checked in at the Sheraton Xi'an Hotel ( 西安喜来登大酒店 ). I booked the hotel because it was close to Bei's home and had a swimming pool. At the check-in, they informed me that the swimming pool was closed for maintenance during our stay, and offered a coupon so that I got a cookie at the bar.  Tickets for several attractions (shows, museums) in Xi'an were difficult to get. There were pai...

Mingsha Mountain After a nice breakfast, we went to visit Mingsha Mountain 鸣沙山, a huge desert park. The taxi ride was a short 10-minute drive to the central gate 中门 of the park. We bought the tickets at the gate and got in. There were lots of vendors selling all kinds of things. Besides the usual souvenirs and food, there were lots of vendors selling photography services, helicopter rides, camel rides, ATV rides, sand slides, shoe covers. It was a hot day and Claire did not want to do any of these.  I bought round-trip shuttle tickets to the Crescent Lake 月牙泉. The lake was very unique because it was in the middle of a desert. We bought some ice cream at the building next to the lake. Got sick  We went back to the hotel and I realized that Claire had a fever. The hotel staff told me that there was a pharmacy nearby, so I went to buy a thermometer and some ibuprofen. At the recommendation of the staff at the pharmacy, I also bought some pills of Chinese medicine, which turn...

Day 2. Mogao Caves  Mogao Caves We went to visit the Mogao Caves today. Mogao Caves were build 1800 to 1000 years ago. At that time, Dunhuang was the last town on the Silk Road before entering the desert where many merchants would die. So many people paid artists to build these caves to seek blessing from or worship the gods or thank the gods after they returned with wealth. It became a place where lots of ancient arts were preserved. One can only visit the caves through guided tours. Before the trip, I called the visitor center to ask how to reserve tickets with our passports since the official website required Chinese IDs. They told me that there were three time slots (8:30am, 11:30am, 2:30pm) where foreigners could get the same-day tickets without a reservation. So we got a taxi and arrived the visitor center before 11:00am as instructed, and bought two tickets for the 11:30am tour with our passports for 516RMB (~$75) without a problem. There were several options for the tour. I...

We had a long flight to China with two connection flights. Our first leg was United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong (11:50pm on June 18 - 5am on June 20). Our second leg was China Airlines to Beijing (10:30am - 1:55pm). Our final leg was China Airlines to Dunhuang (5:05 - 9:00pm)  Hong Kong We arrived at 5 am in Hong Kong airport. We got our luggage and got to the China Air customer service counter. It was too early and nobody was there. So we sat there and played with our phones. After 7am, shops at the airport were open and we had a nice breakfast.  After 8am, one lady showed up at the customer service counter. I asked her whether she could issue our boarding pass, and she did. She told me that she was actually in charge of helping customers for multiple airlines at that counter.  Beijing We arrived at Beijing at about 2pm. I bought a SIMS card for ~$35 (250RMB) and put in my phone. The hotel in Dunhuang offered a free shuttle service for airpo...