"Vincent and Caitlin" wenzhi_travels's Profile

Well, there's two of us here - the guy is Vincent, and the girl is Caitlin. We're in college, young at life, so not very good at it. Before college, whenever we travelled, we travelled with our parents, who did all the work, God bless them. Now that we're on our own, we know the value of tips in guidebooks and websites, and the value of the people who share them - truly, the few times that we've travelled on our own, without the expertise of our parents, the kindly advice from people ranging from close friends to strangers on the internet has been priceless. Here in virtual tourist, we can give back to all those kindhearted people, and to everyone else planning to travel somewhere we've been.

We spent our 2005 Spring Semester studying Chinese in Nanjing, P.R.C. The math involved with our time periods unveiled a golden oppurtunity that we found long before we even went to China: the semester's 4 months long, both our tickets and our visas, however, were for 6 months. That translated into two months of continuous travel throughout China, which is a virtual continent in terms of geography, ethnic composition, cuisine, and language. With that discovery, we started setting aside chunks of our income in August 2004 to save up for the trip.

We're back from those two months of mind-blowing travel, having toured at a leisurely pace through Xinjiang, Manchuria, and Inner Mongolia. Here we'll share the tips we gleaned during that adventure.

A note to our readers: please bear in mind that China is a rapidly changing country and what we describe in our tips might be completely different from what we say by the time you get there. We advise checking things in advance, getting the newest guidebook possible (except for Let's Go, which proved unreliable in less touristed places like Manchuria and Inner Mongolia), and also recommend www.ctrip.com as an excellent resource.

Most of our city pages are under contstruction. We plan to:

-Add Chinese characters to tips that don't have any, so non Chinese speakers can print them if they feel the need.
-Find some way to put the pinyin with tones next to Chinese characters if a reader wants to be able to say a location.
-Make city pages for the most of the cities; we simply haven't gotten around to that yet.
-Of course, add more tips. We aren't anywhere near the number of tips that we plan to put up.