Great website

[Marshie]

We (Australian family of 4) are just about to leave for 6 weeks wandering about China. I've done a lot of research but found your website particularly interesting.

I hope I have some material to add when we return.

Many thanks for the travel tips.

[long_way]

Thank you, Marshie!

I'm glad that you liked the web site and found it useful. At this time I am working on the download section so I wanted to leave this link for you:

www.yilongwei.com/download/Flash_Cards.zip


these are flash-cards that you can use in some tricky situations like when you buy train tickets, make telephone calls etc... I found them extremely useful when I was in China this spring. They will be in the Download section of the web site (which is not finished yet).
I wish you happy travels through China and thank you for visiting YLW!
cheers,
m

[Scott]

I'm going to travel to China for the first time on Oct 3,2007. I'll be going for six weeks and really appreciate the great detail you give to things like getting train tickets. That detail will really help me (especially since, for instance, I'll be going from Beijing to Tai'an (Taishan) and will continue from there. Thanks a lot!

I added a few of my favorite links for learning Chinese in that section.

Also, I have a blog that I'll be posting to when I go, located here: http://www.thoughtbyscott.com
If you don't like the default color scheme that comes up, you can click on the little colored squares in the top right (below the banner picture) to change the scheme. There aren't any ads or anything on that site, either, since it's my domain. But, there are some things that run on javascript, so if you have it turned off for that domain, some things may not work quite right.

Like the tech page here suggests, I use Firefox, too. I like it because of all the customizing you can do with the free extensions. One of my favorite is called "no script", which allows you to selectively turn on and off any javascript source on the page you are looking at. Using this, it's easy to verify that both this site and my site are only running our own javascripts. Some sites you go to have a list of several, including ones that obviously just serve ads. It is nice to be able to browse the web without having these obnoxious scripts adding to the bandwidth! Sorry, I'll get off of my soapbox....

Good luck on your site and I'll check back to see if you've done any more work on it. Please check on mine during my trip. Since you've already been on quite a bit of my route, you'll probably have some timely advice for me!

Take care,

Scott

[long_way]

Hi Scott,

thank you for your posts, both in this forum and also for posting your favourite links; I'm sure other travelers will appreciate that too.

I will check your web site regularly and I would definitely recommend it to the other travelers too because your writing is clear and concise and it is obvious you have done your homework on Chinese language and culture. Also I'm looking forward to reading your reports from Song Shan (嵩山) and Emei Shan (峨眉山)!

I wish you the best of luck and you take care too,

m

[Scott]

Hi again,

Well, as you could tell from my blog, I had an absolutely wonderful time in China. I really wish I could have stayed another year, or so!

I guess you also noticed that the two places you were looking for reports on, Songshan and Emeishan, I didn't get to...go figure.

I found that I really enjoyed not constantly moving, but staying in one place long enough to get to "know the area" and the people a little bit. That's why I stayed in Beijing a little longer than planned, and why I stayed in Chengdu two extra nights, instead of taking off for Emeishan, as planned.

Well, there were a couple of other reasons, too:

All they had was a hard seat to Taishan, and I didn't want that to be my first train experience (I waited two days to get a soft sleeper). Then, as you mentioned, I believe, it was really hard to get a train out of Taishan and, as my "schedule" had me in Xi'an the day after I came down from Taishan (and I had my only hostel reservations at Jiuzhaigou, which came right after Xi'an), I went ahead and flew from Taishan to Xi'an.

With Chengdu, it wasn't only getting to know the locals, it was my love of hot and numbing (ma la) food, that Sichuan is famous for.

Thanks for your comments on my blog. I plan to travel there again, to visit the south part of China, in either 2 or 4 years. The alternate year, I plan to go to Europe, to travel around on a motorcycle.

Have a good one,

Scott (http://www.thoughtbyscott.com)

[long_way]

Hi Scott,

I did enjoy following your journey through China (like many others who visited your blog) eventhough you did not include Songshan and Emeishan into your itinerary. We will leave that report for your next visit to China.
You returned home and I returned to China; I'm writing this from Shanghai where I arrived on the 20th, I will stay in China until mid January and spend most of the time in and around Shanghai. Most like yourself I feel that rushing from one place to another is good because one can see more places but staying at one place for more than a week have its beauty too.

Thank you for your posts too, and good luck with your future travels!

best regards,

m