Shortly after I concluded the series of posts covering our June 2026 Jeju trip, I revisited our plans for the year-end vacation. The on-off, is-it-or-isn’t-it war, open-or-closed Strait of Hormuz, and volatile airfares aside, we had some major changes to when we could travel and for how long. Largely because of when the daughter’s academic semester ends, we had to push our travel dates later into December, and also reduce the planned length of the trip from 18 to 16 days. Bummer.
I’d already worked out a fairly detailed 18-day Huangshan–Yangshuo–Wuyuan itinerary back in March this year, and had also contacted Windhorse Tours for a preliminary discussion on whether a December trip there would be feasible. Our trusted tour planner opined that a Huangshan itinerary would work much better in November. The thing is, a November vacation simply isn’t possible for us right now, and I was also wondering if I was ready to return to broadly the same type of scenery so soon after our Yunnan–Western Sichuan trip last December.
So, knowing that we’d need to shorten our trip to 16 days while also exploring alternative destinations, I went back to the drawing board and worked out several new possibilities. As things stand right now, we’ve narrowed it down to four:
Huangshan–Yangshuo–Wuyuan: A slightly shortened version of the 18-day plan I developed in March 2026, trimmed down to 16 days by dropping a few places.
Guangxi–Guizhou–Chongqing: A completely new itinerary in a different part of China, offering scenery very different from Huangshan and, in theory at least, more colourful landscapes thanks to the slightly warmer December weather.
Taiwan: A revisited and reworked version of a 21-day itinerary I originally developed last year for a December 2025 trip. The revised version drops several of the smaller offshore islands that I’d included previously.
Northern Vietnam 2026: A 16-day itinerary covering parts of the country we’d not visited before, including Mai Chau, Pu Luong, Ha Giang, Cao Bang, Ban Gioc, and Ba Be.
Of the four, the Northern Vietnam itinerary was perhaps the most intriguing. It takes us well away from the typical tourist trail into relatively rural and unspoilt regions featuring limestone mountains, river gorges, national parks, waterfalls, and rice terraces. The Taiwan itinerary would have been the safe choice, centring around Alishan and the eastern side of the island. Meanwhile, the Guangxi itinerary promised karst landscapes, waterfalls, emerald-green rivers, ancient forests, granite peaks, historic towns, dramatic gorges, and even a mountain where we might have a chance of witnessing a sea of clouds.
In terms of sheer iconic and dramatic scenery though, Huangshan would still take the crown. The trip would also include landscapes similar to Guangxi, but on a grander scale: granite peaks, seas of clouds, ancient villages, and terraced hills that have inspired traditional Chinese ink paintings for centuries. If we had the time, we’d happily do both! But the Guangxi itinerary seems to offer the best balance of landscape variety while also benefiting from slightly milder winter weather.
So, a difficult decision lies ahead, and one we’ll probably need to make within the next few weeks. More to come soon!