Beijing Discovery Tours

With Olympics fever (and paranoia) in full swing, it has become apparent that many potential visitors to China have been scared away by harsh visa regulations, threats of terrorism and price gouging by hotels and practically everyone else in Beijing. The good news is that it will all soon be over (the Games end with the closing ceremony on August 26), and everyone in Beijing and China will have to face the cold hard reality that despite billions and billions spent to create a gleaming new city, 5 years of hurried planning and fierce construction efforts, and the accompanying displacement of tens of thousands of longtime Beijing residents, the Summer Olympic Games of 2008 last 18 days - a scant 2 1/2 weeks of time for which so much has been spent and lost, and the lives of everyday Beijingers have been irrevocably upended.

Once the inevitable Olympics hangover has set in, Beijing will once again be a fantastic place to visit. October has the best weather in which to take your tour of Beijing - clear blue skies (even without the draconian pollution reduction efforts enforced by the Chinese government), cooler temperatures, and a fantastic pallette of fall colors gracing the numerous sections of the Great Wall of China near Beijing.  Prices for hotel rooms and vehicles for guest transportation should return to reasonable levels, and hopefully they will be hungry for visitors to make up for the lack of guests that did not come during their expected windfall during the Olympics. Beijing Discovery Tours will be here on the ground in Beijing for you to create the perfect Beijing tour or tour of China for your family, group or organization. Take a look at our website at www.BeijingDiscoveryTours.com and let us know at info@beijingdiscoverytours.com how we can help you to create the perfect Beijing tour itinerary at a reasonable price. We can accept payment by credit card through Paypal (you do not have to be a member to use Paypal), wire transfer or most electronic bill payment services offered by U.S. banks. Take advantage of what may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Beijing at its sparkling best with Beijing Discovery Tours!

A huge earthquake of 7.5 - 7.8 on the Richter scale centered north of Chengdu in Sichuan Province had Beijing shaking as well, and reportedly buildings in Bangkok, Thailand were swaying too. I know that our 13th floor office apartment was swaying quite a bit for a minute or so; one of the most bizarre feelings I have ever felt. I’m prone to motion sickness anyway, so an hour and a half later I’m still feeling it. Office buildings were evacuated here in Beijing, and now they are saying that there was a smaller earthquake located just east of Beijing in Tongzhou at 3.9 on the Richter scale that may have been responsible for us shaking in Beijing. Whatever the source, it seems that the ground underneath us is moving, and I wonder if it is the result of the incredible number of huge buildings and construction happening in China that is putting pressure on the Earth’s surface, or perhaps the Three Gorges Dam in central China and the enormous weight of the dammed up water that is to blame. China has in the past had numerous earthquakes, so it may just be time for things to shift again. Regardless, it sure has people here in Beijing literally shaken up today.

Beijing Discovery Tours

Hopefully, with any luck, I will be moving our Beijing Discovery Tours blog to this site - it looks great (this hosting site, not our blog)! So much better than our old location that has almost no functionality. So far I have not been able to import all of our old posts from our old host, and I’m not sure what the problem is, but we’ll keep working on it and we hope to have this blog up and running soon.

I had the opportunity to meet a nice guy from Germany today, who bought some Chinese cooking classes in Beijing for a friend of his from Beijing Discovery Tours, which I thought was a really nice gift on his part. (Sorry for the shameless links to our website, but somebody has to do it.) It’s nice when people put some thought into what they give others as gifts, rather than just buying something just to be done with it. Although this is more of a business blog, I have to say that my sister is the absolute best at this, even though she has no time with her almost 2-year old son and busy life. Somehow for every occasion, birthday, Christmas, wedding - whatever it is, she comes up with something both thoughtful and practical, every time. That’s just one of the many reasons that I care so much about her, but she is a great example of a person that puts the feelings of other people in front of her own, and the world would be a better place if there were more people like her. Not that everyone should buy Chinese cooking classes in Beijing for their friends and loved ones (I had to get back around to the topic), but we should all probably set aside some time in our busy lives to really think about how much our friends and family mean to us, and email or call someone that you have neglected recently. It happens to all of us, time just goes by too quickly, but we all really should make an effort to stay in touch with those people that we really care about.

One of the things that I just realized that I really love about starting a company like Beijing Discovery Tours is that we get to meet people from all over the world and help them to explore China in comfort without getting ripped off, which is very easy to do if you tour Beijing without an experienced and licensed Chinese tour guide. (Sorry for the constant linking to our website - Google search made me do it.) So far we have hosted groups from Mexico, Germany and the United States, with upcoming tours for groups from Hong Kong, Russia, Ireland (I think), Mexico, and the United States, and tours already booked even into January 2009. We have taken people to the Simatai Great Wall, Badaling Great Wall, Mutianyu Great Wall, and the Juyongguan Great Wall, which is an often overlooked (fortunately) section of the Great Wall near Beijing that avoids the huge crowds and traffic jams associated with the Badaling Great Wall. Other must-see sites that our groups have gone to include the Forbidden City (also known as the Palace Museum), Tian’anmen Square, the Summer Palace, the Lama Temple, the ancient hutongs of Beijing by rickshaw, the Beijing Opera, the Kung Fu Show and the very impressive Acrobatics Show. Beijing is filled with great sites to see, even after you have seen the main places mentioned above, there is no end to what there is to see and do even on your second, third, tenth or twentieth tour of Beijing. We also have groups scheduled to visit Xi’an and the Terracotta Warriors, as well as beautiful Yangshuo, Guilin and the Lijiang River in Guangxi Province in south China, and we have even sent a nice family of 3 on a Yangtze River Cruise. (OK, enough with the links, we’ll probably get penalized as a spam site or something if I don’t stop it.) The point is that there is an incredible diversity of what to see in China and in Beijing in addition to the iconic sites that everyone must see on their first visit to this amazing country. There are wild sections of the Great Wall that are not generally open to the public (sorry, I couldn’t resist linking to that), and even after 8 years of living here I have yet to visit even a fraction of them. I have also just recently bought a tour guidebook of day and overnight trips to the outskirts of Beijing, and hopefully this summer I will be able to talk one or two of my more adventurous friends into trying some of them out. With any luck, I’ll be posting about these visits on this blog and adding new destinations to the Beijing Discovery Tours website in the near future.

I’ve recently started using some of the available social networking options such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter as well as this and an earlier attempt at blogging to try to expand Beijing Discovery Tours‘ presence on the Internet. At first I absolutely hated doing it - to me it used to seem like a person that writes a blog is just “showing off” and trying to get attention, but it has actually been kind of fun to see how these different applications can (and cannot) work together. Also, over the past year or so I have really changed my mind about blogs, especially living in a foreign country so far away from home. My sister-in-law, a couple of her sisters, and their mother all have blogs, and they do a great job of updating them and posting photos of the family that are great for helping me to keep up with what is going on back home. I have 4 nephews now between 10 months and 5 years old, and they are all growing up so fast - that is the worst thing about living abroad - not being able to see my family on a regular basis. But with my sister-in-law’s family blogs, 3 or 4 weekly emails from my own mother and a phone call every other week or so (Yahoo Messenger’s voice service is outstanding - $.01 per minute for me to call the USA from China!), I am able to at least keep up with what is going on back home. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, Beijing Discovery Tours will have grown to also include trips for Chinese tourists to visit the United States, particularly Oklahoma, although I don’t know how well that will go over with most Chinese people who seem to think that the USA consists of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It will be a challenge to attract Chinese tourists to Oklahoma but that’s what business is all about, building up markets that do not currently exist and finding a unique niche where your business can excel. It will be interesting to see if we can build a successful business by targeting Oklahoma as a tourist destination for people from China.

We hosted a group of 3 people today from the United States, and of all the days for Beijing to get a soaking, all-day rain, today was the day. Fortunately they were in good spirits, and the Great Wall, Forbidden City and Tian’anmen Square are amazing even when it is windy and rainy, as it was today. This group took our #DT6 tour of the Badaling section of the Great Wall, Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City but decided to forgo the Acrobatics Show. Thanks very much to them for their patience with the horrible rain-induced traffic jams and we hope that they really enjoyed their one-day tour with Beijing Discovery Tours.

This will be my second attempt to write a blog pertaining to our business, Beijing Discovery Tours, based in Beijing, China and providing outstanding tours of Beijing and all of China. I am not even going to try to pretend that this blog has any purpose other than to try to promote our company and to give us some much needed links back to our home website, but maybe by accident I will throw something in that might be of interest to someone who is bored out of their mind somewhere. I’m also going to try to incorporate my earlier blog that died of neglect a few months ago, but we’ll see how that goes with my limited knowledge of how to work this thing. Anyway, for anyone who happens to stumble across this blog, thanks for reading and I hope that you found at least something of interest for you here. http://www.BeijingDiscoveryTours.com