How Great Thou Wall, China

I am slowly but surely making my way through my very ambitious list and this month I get to cross out number 26 with my recent visit to China. While the Koreans celebrated their Chusoek holiday with family - my friends and I popped on over to Beijing for a 5 day tour of this amazing city with an equally amazing tour company. This was the first time I have traveled in a tour group, on previous occasions I have traveled independently then booked tours to sight-see specific landmarks and tourist sights. Yes people, I was one of those people following the flag and I loved it. But don't worry there were no matching uniforms for our group, I thought I'd save that for retirement age.

The tour was well organized and all inclusive (accommodation, meals and transport) with the exception of the last day which was left open for us to explore the city at our leisure. We were spotted at attractions such as the Summer Palace, (almost) Birds Nest Olympic Stadium, Forbidden City, Tienanmen Square but the highlight of course was seeing The Great Wall of China. Here is how the events unfolded:

boarding pass ready to go

landing time

yep - that is me jumping on the hotel bed, so mature of me

we came prepared for a patriotic moment on The WALL

Too many photos with strangers

Afia trying her hand in a game with the locals

flags flying high at the forbidden city

A visit to the market before our cooking class

cooking family and the dog

the only group photo we have that did not include random strangers 

The tour group convert

Well not completely, I won't choose tour group holidays every time but there were significant benefits in doing our Beijing trip this way.

1. Air-conditioned bus to drop us off and pick us up and ON TIME. Koreans are pretty good with that, but when I travel especially South East Asia, I lower my expectations when it comes to transport schedules. It was great knowing that transport has been paid for (no negotiating with tuk tuks like in Thailand) and will be waiting for us on time. It meant that we were able to keep to our schedule and see all the sights on our planned itinerary; this was important to us due to the limited time we had. We would not have been able to see as much if we were busy trying to navigate public transport. And we could safely leave our belongings in the bus after shopping. Plus the tour came with an amazing driver and hilarious tour guide.

 

                                                   our amazing tour guide Charlie - great sense of humour this guy

2. Accommodation was amazing. 4 star Holiday Inn with a buffet breakfast every morning - what a treat. It was so nice to check in to a place like this, after all that walking every day compared to a hostel sharing a bathroom with 7 other people. Don't get me wrong, sometimes the adventure is great and you meet awesome people in that setting, but sometimes you just need your rest. Our hotel room had wifi (although not free), tv, a safe to lock up passports and gadgets, amazing pressure on the shower and beautiful city view from the 32nd floor.

3. From a budgeting perspective - going with a tour group offered far more value for money than if I had tried to book the trip independently. Usually tour groups are synonymous with astronomical mark ups in price but this time, this was not the case. After researching the cost of flights and accommodation alone, I could tell that the tour group definitely had advantage with economies of scale which I could benefit from. Plus the tour included all meals (except on the last day), an Acrobatic Show, transport and entrance fees to the sights. Because we paid for everything in advance - cash flow was better too because any money I brought a long was for souvenir shopping and any extras I wanted to add on (like our cooking class).

4. Jump the line - this was one of my favourites. Being a national holiday, the capital was flooded with people and there were lines just about everywhere. Being with a tour group meant, we just needed to follow the flag. We got to go in separate entrances for tour groups and at popular restaurants, we had our tables reserved for us, no waiting, no missing out - it was awesome.

Tips and Opinions

1. Between Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan (and I am guessing Japan but I haven't been there myself) China is the cheaper of the Asian Tigers. From shopping (at the markets) to food and public transport -our money really went further; not as far as South East Asia but definitely further than in Korea.

2. Chinese food was great and significantly different from Korea. I think coming from South Africa, I always pictured the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese to be far more similar than they actually are in reality. In the cooking class we did, there was no presence of red pepper sauce - that's all I have to say.

3. Tour groups are not such a bad thing. Think about it. Beijing is the capital city to the most populated country in the world - this, people, is a big city. Besides a lot of people, the language barrier is high up and with only 5 days at our disposal, we felt that we did not have enough time to get lost explore at our own pace. Also being a huge holiday season in the far east (there is always a full moon involved), they anticipated a lot of traffic, certain sights of interest were closed on certain days, and generally long queues were expected as the rest of China descended to the capital. It made so much logic to sign up for a tour group and have someone who knows the place take us around and worth every penny. I would not have enjoyed showing up somewhere only to find it closed.

Final thoughts
We had an amazing time in Beijing and were pleasantly surprised at the cleanliness of the city (a lot of Koreans had told us otherwise). We even survived the Beijing metro. We made a lot of great memories and our tour group was made up of friendly faces. From the shear number of photos taken of us by strangers, I can say - Obama has really made being "black/African" cool again, you would think we were celebrities the way we were being photographed - perhaps they thought we were related to him or maybe royalty back home - either way it was, most of the time, fun to strike-a-pose.