Yunnan – Western Sichuan 2025 – Planning

We worked out in June the broad plan for our year-end vacation in China. Basically, we’d cover the Yunnan and also Western Sichuan areas for two weeks, and in the third week we’d visit Jiuzhaigou Valley on our own and wind down with our own DIY itinerary in Chengdu. We next went about looking for local operators to propose tours for the Yunnan and Western Sichuan segments, and contacted four, two of which prepared and sent detailed proposals. Comparisons followed, and it was not easy to decide which to go with! The tour planners in both companies were excellent and prompt in their replies and were very accommodating to our many requests for various things – e.g. accommodation preferences, the type of guide we needed, and also specific requirements on activities we had in mind. The decision to go with one or the other finally came down to cost, with one operator’s package about a thousand moola cheaper than the other. As there weren’t really any other significant differentiations between both proposals, we went with the cheaper proposal.

We next had to wait for the availability of flights. Our preferred airline to get to our start point – Dali – was Scoot, not because there was a direct flight to the city though. Scoot, like many other airlines departing from Singapore, would be flying into Kunming only, so we’d only get to Dali via an additional 2-hour train ride northwards. Rather, Scoot’s flight timing would let us get to Dali on the morning of Day 01 – which would have been ideal as it would maximize our vacation time. Unfortunately, the plan to fly Scoot went awry. Firstly, the Scoot flights to Kunming in December were only released fairly late in August. As the fare prices from other airlines were slowly creeping upwards as our travel date approached, we were getting worried whether we’d be able to even get to Kunming while keeping our flight costs manageable. So, we gave up waiting for Scoot in early August and went with our next option: getting to Kunming via Thai Airways. Unlike Scoot, Thai Airways was not flying direct to Kunming but would have a short stopover in Bangkok. Unfortunately too, we’d only arrive in Dali in the evening, which meant that Day 01 was basically going to be spent just trying to get to the start point. Bummer. The other alternative was to fly AirAsia, but the wife would have none of that, given their history of service issues. Anyway, as it turned out, we couldn’t have flown Scoot anyway: when their flights were finally released, we discovered that they would not fly into Kunming on the day we needed to be in the city.

Either way, the net effect of not flying with Scoot was that our tour would only begin now on Day 02. So, as soon as our outbound flight was booked, we immediately informed our chosen tour operator of our amended start date and that we’d need to compress the earlier 14-day itinerary into 13 days. Our tour planner made a few tweaks and was able to retain almost everything from the 14-day version by removing a planned visit to one of Chengdu’s panda centers on our way back to the city on Day 14. We signed off on the amended itinerary and paid the 30% deposit. So, we’re pretty much committed now to this 21-day trip to China – our longest family vacation so far, and likely ever since with the girl starting a new course of studies next year, it’s unlikely we’d ever be able to find as long a period again to travel as a family. The updated itinerary now is as follows:

Basically:

Our private tour begins on Day 02, and runs for 13 days till Day 14. We’d follow the route I described in the earlier post: Dali => Lijiang => Shangri-La => Riwa => Litang => Xinduqiao => Danba => Siguniang, and we’ll return to Chengdu. Altitude sickness was a worry the wife had. But I reckon we should be fine, since with this route, we’re going from mid to gradually higher elevations. The weather and climate will also likely get progressively colder as we travel northwards, with expected lows of -14 degreeC in selected parts of Western Sichuan.

One request we had was to try to minimize our changes in accommodation – which our tour coordinator took on board. The daily accommodation changes in the second half would be unavoidable though since we had to finish this private tour by the end of Day 14.

Upon returning to Chengdu after our private tour ends on Day 14, our plan is to spend the night in the city, then head to Jiuzhaigou National Valley the next day. While we’ve found and booked a great property to stay in for this segment, we’ve still yet to work out the movement plan. It’s supposedly fairly straightforward: a high-speed train followed by a bus to the entrance of the valley itself.

We’ll return from Jiuzhaigou on Day 17, after which we haven’t yet decided what to do in the next three full days we have left. We might take a day trip to see other places near Chengdu, but nothing too heavy. By that point, we expect all of us to be fairly saturated with stunning scenery, so we might just end up relaxing and vegetating in our hotel!

This family vacation is also going to require less intensive planning than our holidays in Japan in previous years: those required a crazy amount of effort to plan, as we were essentially making up our own itinerary from start to end. It feels nice to foist 14 days of a 21-day trip to someone else to work out. Either way, the next post for this trip will likely be in late November where I’ll muse about the equipment that will be coming with us on this trip. Stay tuned!