Side Trip Advice
 

Hello! We will be heading to China from Dec 8-18. After a quick overnight we will take the high speed train from Beijing West to Xi'an spending three nights there. Then stopping in Pingyao for one night before returning to Beijing. That leaves me with about 4 days to burn before returning to the USA.

I have been to Beijing twice and have seen what I want to see, so I am trying to figure out a good place to visit to burn 2-3 days.

Any advice?

ETA we are looking at Datong...

Chengde is a two-day trip with transportation. Datong is good too.

While the city as a whole is unremarkable, the old section of Zhangjiakou is both interesting and original, not tarted up like Pingyao. Zhangjiakou also has an attractive setting with surrounding hills.

Shanghai, you can get there in about 5 hours on the HSR.

I visited Shanghai last year and its awesome - fully intend to go to PVG again and visit the 2-3 towns around Shanghai in the near future

Want to stay relatively close to Beijing and do a city that is close to Beijing or between Xi'an and Beijing.

I was tempted by Chengdu but decided it's best to go in the warmer months and explore all the parks in the Sichuan region.

It's looking like we will do 2 days in Datong visiting the grottoes and Hanging Monastery.

Question - for the train ride my friend thinks there is no point paying $10 more for soft sleeper over a hard sleeper. He's even considering hard seat on the day train :o any advice on which class we should use?

Note that I said Chengde, not Chengdu.

Maybe you can look in Tianjin, Dalian, or Qingdao. All of these are easily reachable by HSR.

My bad :o

We decided on Datong and found a tour guide to take us to the hanging monastery and the Grottoes. My friend who will be staying an extra week after I leave is looking into Qingdao so thanks for the advice!