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Getting Your Visa

One of the first packages of information we received from OAT was regarding getting our visas for China. Here's the Wikipedia entry on visas.

A visa (short for the Latin carta visa, lit. "a document that has been seen") is a document issued by a country giving an individual permission to formally request entrance to the country during a given period of time and for certain purposes (see below for caveats and exceptions) and usually stamped or glued inside of a passport, or sometimes issued as separate pieces of paper.

The OAT instructions made completing the form easy. And we sent the application off to the company recommended by OAT, PVS International. We sent ours in by UPS on November 30, 2007, and using the UPS online package tracker, are able to see that it was received by "Evangeline" at PVS on December 4. Update: We received our passports back, FedEx, on December 12. Pretty painless, and we did not pay any extra for expedited handling, which was an option. The visa is a sticker for each of us that almost entirely fills up one of our passport pages.

Because we were not certain what quality of printed photograph was needed, instead of taking our own and printing them out ourselves, we each went separately to a FedEx/Kinkos, and paid about $14 for two photos. More guidance at this point as to whether our home-grown photos would work or not would have saved us a bit of money. I suppose we should have called the OAT customer service line, but we did not.

We had to mail in our passports to do this, so we made photocopies of them, as well as of the forms we completed and sent in with them. Good thing, because just a day or two later we received a request from OAT to share our passport numbers and expiration dates, which we were able to access on the copies.

A Great Report from a Similar Trip in 2000

This website has wonderful images and great narrative about an OAT trip similar to the one that we are taking, only this one was in 2000. Truly a great website.

The Yangtze River

We spend three nights on a river boat on the Yangtze River. This post will serve as a collection of links to information about the Yangtze River and its surroundings:

Wikipedia article on the Yangtze, which is the venue through which I found the image at left.

Here is a "tour review" of an OAT river cruise aboard the Victoria Queen by Laura Lindbergh. Assuming that OAT still uses this cruise company for its river cruises, this should be similar to what we experience.

Here's a report from someone who also did what sounds like the same OAT tour that we are on: "Mike, I did four night cruise as part of a land tour. I did Overseas Adventure Travel, 22 days. You can check out the trip at the OAT website. www.oattravel.com The trip I took was the Imperial China, Tibet and the Yangtze. I see that next year it comes with a 3 night cruise instead of 4 nights. It was a great trip. OAT hits the normal tourist sights plus tries to give you adventure experiences. We actually stayed at a farmer village in private homes one night. We ate dinner and breakfast with our hosts and danced with the entire village in the park in the evening. Definitely not a 5* hotel but a very memorable experience! OAT is real great because there are always 16 people or less in the group. We had only 15. We did miss Shanghai on this trip, so I'll have to go back again. This trip did go to Tibet which was extremely interesting.
The cruise I went on started in Yi Chang and ended in Chungking. This was an upstream cruise. The three night cruises typically cover the same distance as the four night cruises but go downstream therefore the ship can go faster. You will really enjoy the cruise. It was the only restful time we had on our trip."

Some more first-hand info from 2004 from a traveler who was still there as he posted. One really interesting hint from him: "Hints: If the owners suites are empty, you can negoiate a lower price for an upgrade. member of our tour did and we all had a front deck to ourselves to go through the gorges." We'll have to see about that! :)

And this tip, from the same guy, will eventually go into a "shopping" post: "Money: Lots of small bills if you want leverage in negioating with free market vendors. No credit cards here and US money seemed a solid 10-20% bargaining chip verse the same Chinese Ren. Hotels will cash travelers checks and US money into Chinese with no service fee for guests. They will not break US money into smaller US bills. Credit cards only really worked for upscale markets (Jade,Silk, Art) and Chinese government stores."

First Beijing Night Out - What to Do, Where to Eat?

On Wednesday, March 5, we will arrive in Beijing from Shanghai and, after settling into our hotel, the evening is on our own for entertainment and dinner. So I am going to research some possibilities and will share some of what I learn here. (And, of course, come back and report later!)

Frommers (again) has a nice introduction to what to expect when eating out in Beijing; among other things, the Chinese food is often nothing like what we think of as "Chinese food." It also notes that the restaurant scene can change dramatically quickly in Beijing, so we will try not to make final decisions well ahead of time. Hopefully, we can learn more about the current situation as we get closer to March 5.

One early favorite for me is Taipo Tianfu Shanzhen.

Taipo Tianfu Shanzhen Jiulou is among the first few restaurants to sell mushroom hot pot. Various fresh mushrooms cooked in nutritious black-bone chicken broth taste quite different. Finished off with a cup of red bitter deer blood tea, the meal is almost perfect except for the dim lighting.

Location: Building Jia No.19, southern end of Erqi Juchanglu, Fuxingmenwai

Tel: 010-68019641

The quote, above, is from Where to Eat Hot Pot in Beijing? And now that I've looked that over, I guess I am inclined to hot pot, but where? One reference calls Taipo "a total dive . . . [but] amazing" But that's a vegetarian writing. This writer shares that it is easy to order too much added to the pot.

Maybe a little foot massage, before or after dinner?

Well, we have a second dinner free in Beijing on Friday the 7th. I am going to archive this link to a great series of Beijing food descriptions for now. Whoever is posting there as nr706 has put up tons of good info and pictures of plates of food and more. This is a keeper!

Another blogger thought their best meal in Beijing was at Keijia Cai which serves up Hakka cuisine and is likely listed in Frommers with a variant on that spelling? It's in the "Back Lakes" area which is supposed to be interesting to visit.

Hmm. Apparently, the Donghuamen Night Market is a good place to get lots of things we consider strange, skewered on sticks. (Same link as above.)

Trip Insurance: "Travel Protection Plan," or "Trip Cancellation Insurance," or Whatever

I didn't really intend to be posting quite so frequently, but our intent is to share what we learn that might be useful to others. And we are learning a lot.

One decision that you may have to make fairly early on before a trip like this is whether to purchase "trip insurance," or whatever name whoever wants to sell it to you is calling it. I am sure that for a tour operator, like OAT, the more people who purchase this, the better. If for no other reason than it does provide various sorts of protections for travelers who might otherwise be expecting OAT to do for them, or complaining about if OAT doesn't - and, really, it can't afford to. No company could.

And, of course, there are different kinds of insurance: Much of your own insurance might already cover you for some things like health care. We thought it appropriate to purchase insurance that helped us get our money back if the trip was canceled, due to OAT or us or for other reasons. We also wanted to be sure that we were covered on top of our regular medical care for things like getting us home if we were seriously ill and in the hospital.

OAT offers such insurance, and it is quite prominent in your early communications with the company. You can only purchase it from OAT prior to making your 90-days-out final trip payment. On the other hand, Frommers and other guides, tend to say something about that like this: "Always check the fine print before signing on, and don't buy trip-cancellation insurance from the tour operator that may be responsible for the cancellation; buy it only from a reputable travel insurance agency. Don't overbuy. You won't be reimbursed for more than the cost of your trip."

As I noted, OAT has good reasons for wanting you to have insurance. And even better ones for wanting to sell it to you. If you have an insurance agent you trust, we recommend that you look through them. We used AAA, which is where most of our insurance already is. But I am sure other companies have such things and the Frommers link, above, has a list of companies which specialize in related insurance.

We found comparable insurance, even slightly better we think, than that offered by OAT, and for about 40 percent less. It looks to us like preconditions are better covered (although to get that we had to purchase insurance, even from AAA, within 14 days of paying the final trip fees to OAT) and that there are less issues with the reasons why you might need emergency medical travel home. Note that what we purchased includes 24x7 toll-free access to both travel and medical experts.

And we also have about $400 more to spend during the trip itself!

Ning Xia Hotel - Beijing

Folks, if you enjoy our blog and end up using Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) for any future trips of your own, please use our names - Sheila and Terry Calhoun - when you sign up. That will give us a little bit of credit with OAT for a future trip . . . and get you $100 off of your first trip with OAT. You will also need this number: 1027952. Thanks.

Since my only previous overseas travel has been to, from, and around Vietnam, as an impoverished sailor, in the late 1960s and 1970s, almost all of my Asian memories are of the kinds of places such a person was able to visit. I can remember Japan when it was still a developing nation. So, I was skeptical when I heard that most if not all of the hotels we would be staying at were modern and upscale.

We start our trip with a pre-trip to Shanghai, and we don't know yet what hotel we will be staying at while there, but our hotel for 4 nights in Beijing is the Ning Xia Hotel, pictured here. I will now explore what else I can find out about the Ning Xia Hotel:

Trip Advisor has a few reviews. Let me summarize: It seems to be a large, new hotel in an older area of Beijing, but not far from things most people visit in the center of town. It is in the Fensiting Hutong area of Beijing. Ning Xia is a Chinese province with a large Muslim population, so the hotel has Muslim theme and appearance to it. I also found it references in a Mulsim tour of Beijing promotional advertisement. The lobby seems quite elegant.

In the map at left (click on it for a larger view), the street that the hotel is on is the very northernmost street, running east to west at the top of the image for about 2/3 of the breadth of this map.

One reviewer had the following recommendation for what to do in a four day visit to Beijing, which I am going to capture here for later reference:

Day 1: sunrise flag-raising at Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, hutong tour, Wangfujing, Donghuamen snacks market, Qianhai/Houhai nightlife
Day 2: Jinshanling-Simatai Great Wall, foot massage
Day 3: Panjiayuan market, Temple of Heaven, Hongqiao market, Yonghegong Lamasery, dinner at Gui Jie (Ghost Street)
Day 4: Summer Palace, Peking duck dinner, acrobat/kungfu performance
Day 3 should be on a weekend and Day 2 should ideally be on a weekday.

Actually, I liked these recommendations so much that I am going to record here that they were made by Ellyse, who is listed as a local expert on Shanghai. I'll be contacting her inside Trip Advisor as we plan the free time in Shanghai on our tour.

Here's some more formal information on our hotel, consolidated from a number of sites. (And here is a Google Images search results page for it.)

The Ning Xia Hotel Beijing (****) is located on Anding-men Avenue and only five-minutes stroll from the Lama and Guozjian and Confucius Temple. The hotel is also easy to access to the Tian'anmen Square and Beihai Park. Its name in Chinese is 北京宁夏大厦.

Room
The hotel has 160 Big Suites, Suites and Standard Rooms. Each room has air-conditioning, satellite TV, domestic long-distance access, international long-distance access, broadband access, room safe, and mini fridge. Hotel has three restaurants serving traditional Chinese and Muslim favorites for every guest. The suites look great, but somehow I think that the image here is more like what we will be staying in.

Addr:13 Fensiting Hutong, AndingMen Ave, Dongcheng District, Beijing
Tel:86-10-64009999