My partner and I recently returned from a 3 week trip to China. We did the whole thing independently. We also did almost the whole trip using miles and points, so we got a lot of bang for very little buck.

Air was on JAL, which is the only way to get to Asia from Honolulu using AA miles - Honolulu to Kansai to Shanghai, then Beijing to Narita to Honolulu on the return. We'd flown JAL business class several years ago out of NYC, but the difference between a top tier market like NYC and a leisure market like Honolulu was striking. Each flight had a different seating configuration. Only one flight had an IFE on-demand system. Two flights had pop up screens with scheduled entertainment - on one we had to get them to reset the system for the entire plane because the movies were half over at the beginning of a 2 1/2 hour flight. One had only portable DVD players. Food was ok, but interestingly the best catering was out of Beijing, not out of Japan. And seat pitch on some of the legs was not much more than on a domestic US first class flight, which is tough when you have a seat in front of you reclining at a steep angle.

In Shanghai, we stayed at the Hilton, which had been reported to be getting a bit long in the tooth but we found very nice. We were greeted by an assistant manager on checkin due to our Hhonors Gold status. The complimentary Hhonors Gold breakfast in the lobby lounge was particularly impressive - it basically had all of the same food as in the US $25 buffet in the Atrium restaurant, just smaller amounts. Our room was a very nice high-floor room with a view.

The architecture in Shanghai is amazing - huge, space-age buildings going up everywhere. We were really surprised at the quality of both the design and the construction - when they want to build well in China, they really do. I guess their buildings are meant to last for millennia, not decades.

Shopping was great in Shanghai, as all over China, but not for what you would expect - "antiques," porcelain, etc. They have huge glittering new malls and department stores everywhere with good prices on international brand luxury goods! I guess most of that stuff is made in China anyway, so why not sell it for cheaper? We were amazed that China has enough rich people to support all the high end stores, particularly given how poor the low end of society is there.

The Shanghai Museum was the other highlight. It has a great collection of old Chinese porcelains, furniture, calligraphy, paintings, etc., which I've since learned was donated mostly by Hong Kong tycoons.

From Shanghai we went to Suzhou (a couple of hours by train), where we stayed at the Sheraton. It's a brand new hotel, looks like a combination of a Ming city wall and a classic Suzhou garden. Not the highest class hotel (because it caters to both businessmen and package tourists) but very nice, with a great indoor/outdoor pool and spa area and just very beautiful surroundings. Despite Starwood Gold status and a less than full hotel, we were given a somewhat disappointing room - high(ish) floor (it's a low rise hotel), but very small, and facing an interior courtyard.

We really "gardened" out in Suzhou - at some point they all started running together. But we saw all of the most classic gardens and a variety of others. Most were mobbed with Chinese tour groups, so the quieter ones were probably the better experiences.

We also ended up one day at the zoo, which yielded some of the most vivid scenes - we called it the "poke it with a stick" zoo because all the animals were in old fashioned cages just inches from you. We saw a girl putting a ham sausage on a stick and feeding it to a bear. He was really cute, but I can't imagine it was good for him.

From Suzhou we took the train on to Nanjing (about 3 hours). Nanjing is the equivalent of a bland midwestern US city - everything you need, but basically devoid of charm. 3 nights there was at least 1 too many. We had booked the Sheraton, again using Starpoints, but when we got there the entire hotel was suffused with the smell of some kind of solvent - they said they were cleaning the a/c ducts. In the US people would have been suing right and left for "sick building" damages - it was that bad. So we left and went to the Crowne Plaza, which was in the middle of downtown. Excellent access to a shopping center in the same building, and a great Chinese restaurant in the building, although the location was a bit too busy for our tastes. If we had it to do over again, we would have stayed at the Hilton, which is in a nice area in the eastern suburbs next to the Nanjing Museum.

We were horribly disappointed in the memorial to the Nanjing Massacre - it's extremely nationalistic and falling apart, an ugly combination. However, Nanjing was redeemed by two things. First, the Nanjing Museum was possibly even more impressive than the Shanghai Museum, and we had it mostly to ourselves. Second, the "Purple Mountain" to the east of town contains a variety of tourist attractions, starting with Sun Yat Sen's mausoleum. That was mobbed, but we found that all of the other parks, temples, etc. were connected not only by road at the base of the mountain but by well maintained and deserted walking trails closer to the summit. So we wandered by ourselves in the woods quite a bit, the only time we were truly alone in China other than in a hotel room. One of our favorites on the mountain was a Ming-era beamless hall - a huge, 3-part hall without beams - just brick, vaulted ceilings. The Communist-era dioramas they'd filled it with were kind of fun, too.

From Nanjing we took a sleeper train to Qufu, Confucius' hometown. That was quite an experience in itself. There probably was a slightly more comfortable "soft seat" waiting room we could have used in the station but we couldn't find it, so we waited in the crush of people trying to get hard seats in the main waiting room. That was more than enough of a "real people" experience for either of us. The soft sleepers were weird enough - 4 bunks per cabin, so we had to share. The dining car for the soft sleepers was supposed to be vastly better than what the other classes can get, but the food was totally inedible - mystery gristle and seaweed.

We arrived at a train station about 15 km from Qufu at midnight, and were very glad to have faxed the hotel and asked for a driver to pick us up. No taxis were evident, just a bunch of touts and hookers.

Qufu is "small" by Chinese standards - about 500,000 people, and it did feel like the country. The hotel in Qufu (the Queli Binshe) was the "best" in town - a 3 star Communist-era package tour place. Not awful, but the breakfast there tied the train for the worst food in China. Generally, the food in China was excellent, from whatever restaurant we happened to walk into to hotel buffets. Qufu was the first time we had smoked tofu - tasted like it had been hung over a fire in the back yard. Sounds odd, but it was really good. Until we ended up with it (not meaning to) for 3 dinners in a row - which was a bit over the top.

Qufu itself was great - we saw the Kong Miao (the historic Confucian temple), the Kong (Confucius' family name) residence where his descendants lived until the 1940's, the Kong family cemetery - picking up a theme, here? All were mobbed with Chinese tourists. There were also some other temples and sights that had absolutely no one there. That was par for the course. If something is on a tour itinerary for the domestic tourist industry, it was mobbed. If not, there was no one - I mean no one - there.

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