There’s been a lack of posts over the last few months about our year -nd travel intentions, and it’s been largely because the wife made a comment that had me going back to look up my old drawer itineraries: and that comment was: “Dear, I think we can consider traveling to China this year.” And to put things in context, up till that moment, the wife has always been dead set against holidaying in China! 🤣
To be fair, the both of us have always been hesitant about vacationing in the country of our grandparents’ generation, but for different reasons. For me, it’s about not wanting to be in places where hordes of visitors are also crowding around, and China has a huge domestic travel market. On the other hand, the missus has been worried about food and hygiene, and I suspect it’s because of the amount of incidents commonly reported on social media about food posioning and all manner of food fakery in selected parts of the country.
Still, we’d reconciled our anxieties by concluding that traveling in December to China shouldn’t be that bad – it being the off-peak season for domestic travel. And as for the food situation, we’d just have to exercise special care to make sure we know what we’re consuming!
The spots I’d been to China have invariably been on the eastern side, and our initial focus for our first family trip to the country was on the western and central part of the country. A couple of places immediately made it into the must do list in late April when we decided to give China go: including Jiuzhaigou National Valley, and a Yangtze River Cruise. Over the weeks that followed, we also added Zhangjiajie (or that ‘Avatar’ mountain), Guilin, Beijing as other places of interest. But all except Jiuzhaigou was finally dropped from our finalized itinerary for China if we were to go, and because of these considerations:
Most reviews of Yangtze River cruises were largely positive, but there were also indications that told us that what we’d be seeing would not be finally too different from what we’d already seen 2 years ago at Halong Bay. Moreover, we would also not be seeing lush greenery and autumn colors during the sailing. The sailing dates and cities of embarkation and disembarkation also posed difficulties, as we’d be essentially orienting our entire trip and also being at those cities around those dates.
Guilin is also one of the very popular and picturesque places in the country: but our reading up about the place also revealed that the place looks less spectacular in winter months, and selected spots either coated in brown or grey, or possibly even inaccessible.
We also considered doing the closing segment of the trip of the trip in Beijing. The city is huge, very modern and built-up with plenty of things to see and do. And I’d not visited the Great Wall either. But including Beijing would mean a trek or journey across half of the country where the first half (or more) of our itinerary would be.
Zhangjiajie, made famous as it served as the inspiration for the floating mountains of Pandora in James Cameron’s first Avatar film, was a hard place to drop. The views are to die for, but it also was a little out of the way if we were centering our trip on the western side of the country. Moreover, a comparison between the two places basically led us to conclude one key thing: the Jiuzhaigou National Valley basically would be offering more scenery variety.
We’ve finally narrowed down our places to two areas though: Yunnan, and Western Sichuan, and only Jiuzhaigou from the initial bucket list was retained. And the considerations that led to that:
One tour operator we talked to early on about a 8 day trip with Jiuzhaigou suggested we visit Western Tibet, and included a trip to the Mt. Everest Base-Camp. No, we’re not quite ready for the latter, but it did introduce to us the possibility of touring Western Sichuan itinerary.
Further exploration led us to discover Yunnan as a popular region for travelers to spend a week in, and they routinely cover the same route: the city of Dali to Lijiang and finally to Shangri-La. The spots of interest in all three cities are largely scenic with good variety, and apart from a few places in the three cities, would not be expected to be too crowded in December.
The plateaus of Western Sichuan were especially of interest to me, as the area is vast and traveler density is relatively low. And most importantly, assuming that I’m not incorrect, there would be opportunities abound for me to fly drones, a key activity I’m really hoping to do this December.
Most Western Sichuan itineraries start and end in Chengdu and are between 4 to 7 days. A check on the map and traveling distances noted that our terminal point in the Yunnan itinerary – Shangri-La – isn’t very far from the route the Western Sichuan itinerary would cover.
So, we went to several tour operators to explore if it would be viable to do an arc-like travel loop that starts in Dali, and we gradually make our way north across Yunnan, then into Western Sichuan, and finish in Chengdu – rather than complete the Yunnan tour that ends in Shangri-La, and for us to fly to Chengdu, then start the Western Sichuan itinerary from Chengdu. Some tour operators strongly advised us immediately against trying to do a this loop, explaining that traveling distances by road vehicle would be really long, and a 13-14 day combined itinerary would be really tough on the kids. Other operators were more circumspect: observing that it is indeed a little challenging in view of the month we’re traveling, but finally still doable.
Our own analysis was basically objective: would we be saving time and costs if we do a combined Yunnan and Western Sichuan itinerary, and it seemed to be a ‘yes’ on both counts. But we’re still mindful of what the various operators have advised us, and have finally yet to reach a firm decision on which of these two broad itineraries to adopt: a decision we’ll probably make in a few weeks!
The other thing we’ll be sorting out very soon is flights. Basically, we’re fairly set on starting both options of tours in Dali. Problem is, there is no direct flight from Singapore to Dali, so most travelers from here would fly into Kunming first, a city south and 2 hours away by high rail to Dali. But there are two airlines that fly direct to Kunming with our target flight timings: one is China Eastern, which at this moment is charging an atrocious ~$900/pax fare for a fairly short flight. The other is Scoot, which has yet to release their flights for the month of December. Our back-up plan if both direct flight possibilities fail: that’d be to take any one of the other alternate flights with one stopover. We’re hoping it wouldn’t come to that as it’d be basically additional overhead time spent unnecessarily to get to our starting point, but we’ll know soon enough. And depending on which flight we can get, this trip to Yunnan and Western Sichuan would be either 20, or 21 days – our longest family vacation yet!
More to come soon!