Why, then, participate in a group tour in China?
And we met .... Wendy Wu! |
There are lots of other
combinations available (both from Wendy Wu and others), and there are many, many things in China that we
obviously didn't see, but one factor that particularly influenced us was the
tour duration – 13 nights in China. This
represented the best balance for us
between seeing the things that were of interest to us without being too
long. We added a few extra days before
the tour started to spend on our own in Shanghai (good decision!) plus an extra
night at Beijing after completion of the tour (no regrets about this, it was
great to get out and about but one day was enough). In hindsight, the arrangements turned out well for
us.
Although the publicity
documentation refers to the tour as being “comfortably paced”, it was pretty “full
on”! We came to value the couple of
hours “free time” that we were granted here and there. We felt that by the end of the tour, we'd done enough!
Steps - Ghost City excursion |
Some general observations may be
of interest.
All the members of our group were
“middle aged” or perhaps a little more!
So, had there been younger travellers,they might not have been entirely
comfortable. On the other hand, as the
brochure clearly stated, there's a lot of walking, and
anyone not able to handle this would have real difficulties A couple of the excursions involved
a significant number of steps: the “Ghost City”
excursion as part of the cruise and the Great Wall component of the Beijing
excursion.
As is probably the case of any
tour of this nature, things would get “challenging” if someone couldn't keep up
the pace. A number of members of our
group contracted a cold, and although this didn't interfere with their ability
to participate, it did illustrate that, had something worse developed, it would
have been very disruptive (an outbreak of food poisoning must be every tour packager's worst nightmare!).
It's interesting that Wendy Wu
uses a lot of internal flights. A couple of this company's packages do have overnight
train trips, but they're in the minority.
Our itinerary had 3 domestic flights (on, as it happened, 3 different
airlines). In all, we either arrived or
departed (or both) from 4 separate airports.
Each one was modern and efficient.
Beijing smog |
The hotels were basically of a
good 3-star standard, although they varied slightly in quality, but the locations in
Shanghai and Beijing left something to be desired. For
tour members content to confine
themselves to tour activities (the majority, I think), this wouldn't be an issue, but especially for
people who add a night or two extra in order to 'do their own thing', this isn't
optimal. However, I suppose
people in this situation will be comfortable using taxis and or the metro (in our experience, easy to use).
All meals were included
on our tour. Hence, we weren't required
to make our own arrangements even for lunch.
This was appreciated, although all meals (except breakfast) were
“Chinese-style” and occasionally you hankered for a pizza or something! Nevertheless, the meals were all of a high
standard, and the dishes provided varied quite considerably. All breakfasts included a range of “Western”
options, although sometimes the queue for the toaster could be a little long!
One of the best aspects
of our group was its compact size (16).
A parallel group of about the same size also operated. On top of this, the national guide couldn't
be faulted. He was across every detail of the arrangements,
always followed up any queries, checked with you shortly after checking in to
your room that everything was OK and so much more. In addition, there was a city guide in
each city, so on each excursion, there were always two guides present! The quality of the city guides varied a
little, but we certainly had no complaints.
The Yangtze cruise was the
highlight of our tour. This isn't to say
that the other aspects weren't good;
they were. But the cruise component
was outstanding. We were on the
Victorian Jenna, which I gather is just a little more up-market than the
Century line vessels that Wendy Wu also uses.
It's interesting how well the members of our group adapted. I guess we sometimes (hopefully silently) deride tour groups that we see in Australia, but our group (including people from Australia, New Zealand and Britain) quickly adapted: we wore our ID lanyards, we followed our guides (holding the flag) and we conscientiously assembled at designated meeting points!
No comments:
Post a Comment