FlyerTalk Forums - Shanghai to Beijing, independently

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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Because Qufu is only an hour's drive from Tai An, we hired the same driver who picked us up from the train station to drive us on rather than taking a public minibus. He probably thought he was ripping us off by charging us RMB 260, the equivalent of about $32. Tai An, while a bigger city than Qufu, definitely felt like the most provincial place we went. Only one person at the hotel spoke English, and none of the restaurants we went to had English menus, though they all automatically scrambled to find an English-speaking waiter to help us the minute they saw our faces. Worked fine, especially with the assistance of a phrasebook with a pretty complete menu section. (In restaurants in most other places, we were surprised to see that they inevitably managed to dig up an English translation of the menu, even if it was just an old photocopy. This was not only in "touristy" restaurants.)

An aside, we were well and truly suprised at how many people in China do speak servicable English. All the bookstores had huge sections for books on learning English, many very business-specific - English for hotel workers, English for bus mechanics, etc. There's obviously a real push to teach people how to communicate in a manner understood by the Western world.

The Taishan Binguan (hotel) was clearly a dinosour - really well located in the nice part of town for climbing the sacred mountain of Tai Shan, but there was hardly anyone there. They also stuck us in a lousy second floor room overlooking the parking lot even though we paid rack rate - but we don't think there was anyone on any of the other floors.

The temple in Tai An was really gorgeous, though. We went on both afternoons we were there - first day we just napped until almost dark, so we didn't feel we had enough time to explore it properly. Two cool things - first, there was a truly ancient mural in one of the buildings that covered all the walls - second, you could climb up on top of the wall surrounding the temple and get a great view of the city and the mountain.

The second day there we climbed Tai Shan - and climbed - and climbed. More than 6000 stone steps, a 4500 foot elevation gain, straight up. None of that wussy switchbacking, and we didn't take the bus or cable car for any of the ascent. There were temples, old inscriptions, and other sights all the way up, many of which we missed because we had no idea what the signs along the way said. By the time we got to the top, we were exhausted, taking one step at a time. We thought we were so slow. But we then realized all the books said it would take 4-5 hours, and we had done it in 3! At the top were hotels, restaurants, temples - almost a miniature tourist city. We saw exactly 4 other westerners the whole day - it was amazing the number of people who "surreptitiously" took our picture that day, and many others in China, just because we didn't have Asian faces.

Coming down, we were exhausted - took the cable car to a bus to a taxi back to the hotel. We then resolved a snafu with the non-English speaking travel agent we'd found (she'd neglected to deliver our air tickets to Beijing when she promised the night before, but we got them when my partner left her a note threatening to call the police). This was our last night (thankfully) to have smoked tofu.

Early early the next day the travel agent had arranged a car to pick us up to drive us to the nearest airport at Jin An to catch our flight to Beijing - from Jinan, a 2 hour drive away. It's hard to imagine, but Tai An, a "town" of over 5 million people, doesn't have an airport! In the dark traffic was ok, but as it got lighter we (as was typical in China) shared the highway with pedestrians, pedicabs, bicycles, trucks - you name it. And everyone just jockeys for position. We finally had to look in the phrase book to figure out how to tell the driver to slow down, he was making us so nervous. At first I think he thought we were complaining that he was going too slow, because he sped up. Arrrgh. But ultimately we got the point across.

The flight, on Shandong Airlines, was fine, albeit cramped. I had a pleasant conversation with the gentleman next to me, who ran the refinery in Jin An. Across the isle was a Chinese couple with a very fat little boy - somewhere between 3 and 5 years old, I'd guess. He was the perfect example of the "spoiled child" syndrome. As he stood up when the plane landed, he proceeded to pull his pants down and try to defacate in the aisle. His mother pleaded and pleaded and pleaded with him as he screamed and screamed and screamed. It was about to get really ugly, but she did ultimately prevail and get his pants back up. Last I saw them they were holding his pants up and running to the bathroom in the terminal.

Beijing reminded me of Washington, DC in some ways - very grand public boulevards and squares. The Forbidden City was kind of overrated - and it didn't help that half of it was under reconstruction. The Temple of Heaven was very cool, though. We went to two "museums" in Beijing. One - the Academy of Art- was taken up by an architectural biennial, which was basically advertisements for a bunch of big architecture firms. The other - the National Museum on Tiananmen Square - was more like an old elementary school, much of which was boarded up, with some reproductions of architectural finds in two old classrooms. Strange and very disappointing.

We walked and walked and walked in Beijing. One day, we took the subway 10 miles across town and walked the whole way back, stopping at a whole bunch of sights, heading through everything from huge boulevards to lakes to old house museums to parks to fetid little alleyways strewn with garbage. Very scenic, and really fun.

Food was also great in Beijing. One night we walked into a Sichuan restaurant, which IMO was the culinary highlight of the trip. I've never eaten anything like it. We were dripping sweat. But it was delicious. One dish had bamboo shoots and dry-fried pork strips. Sounds normal, except for the crushed Sichuan peppercorns encrusting the pork, and the hundreds of dried Sichan red peppers. Whew.

The St. Regis was a really really nice hotel. I wouldn't have paid for it, but for points it was perfect. Our SPG Gold status got us a high-floor room with a view. There was a "butler" for each floor (basically a glorified concierge) and a really nice spa and pool. We also indulged in the buffet dinner a couple of times. By that time in the trip we didn't always want to go out exploring for dinner.

We had saved most of our souvenir shopping to the end of the trip, but up until the last day or so weren't having much luck. The Friendship Store was overpriced. We thought that Beijing Curio City would be good - a huge antique mall with hundreds of stalls - but absolutely everything was "Ming Dynasty" and the initial asking price was in the thousands of dollars. We were really disheartened. Then, on the last Saturday morning, we went to the Dirt Market - basically a huge flea market, no longer in a dirt field, but with aisles upon ailes of stalls of porcelain, jade, furniture, bronze, etc. Many of the same things from Curio City, but no one was trying to convince us they were antiques instead of reproductions. Jackpot! We got into the bargaining and brought home some nice things - even one bowl we're convinced is really an antique. I'm sure we paid tourist prices even after the bargaining, but least we paid the well negotiated tourist price, less than we would pay here for nice decorative pieces.

All in all, traveling independently in China was a bit frustrating at times, but also rewarding. The older I get the more I like to be taken care of, but getting around on our own still has its charms. We're not yet ready for the packaged bus tour route!

We'd definitely go back, maybe to Sichuan, Hunan, Tibet or the Silk Road. It was a wonderful trip.