Beijing Discovery Tours

Obviously I haven’t been keeping up with this blog lately, not that anyone noticed or cared, but it has been an interesting past month. The Beijing Summer Olympics 2008 were enormously successful, and I am not sure that I have ever had so much fun in my life! Personally I was able to attend 9 events, including basketball, field hockey, baseball, boxing, diving, and beach volleyball (that was probably the most fun event of them all, the gold medal game between the USA and Brazil). I was fortunate enough to meet the head baseball coach of my alma mater, Oklahoma State University, and watched the last half of the USA vs. Japan (USA won in extra innings) with Coach Frank Anderson, who is not only a great baseball coach but a great human being.

I met the movie actor Vince Vaughn in a nearly-deserted bar in Sanlitun, and he was gracious enough to take a picture with me even though it was very late.

All in all, it was an incredible experience and I feel very fortunate that I was able to experience such an incredible Olympic Games in my adopted hometown of Beijing. Not only was it a great Olympic Games for me on a personal level, it also seems that such positive exposure around the world has increased interest in people coming to China, and we are getting many inquiries about tours of Beijing and tours of China. It is great to see that Beijing presented such a positive image for the world, and that we will be able to show many more people what an amazing city Beijing truly is.

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.

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.

One of the things that I have been concerned about recently as the owner of a business that is involved with tours of Beijing is that there has been a lot of negative press overseas about some of the political events that have been occurring in China, including the hostile actions of some of the overseas Chinese students, particularly in South Korea, New Zealand and a few other countries. Of course it also concerned me as a foreigner living in Beijing, which can be difficult in and of itself without having to worry about political and external events impacting my life and work here. But having been out and around everyday over this past May holiday weekend, I met many very nice people and I didn’t see or experience anything (other than a nightmarish trip on the subway due to overcrowding, and I should have known better than to try that, plus anyone taking Beijing tours with us will have their own private transportation) that should dissuade anyone from coming to Beijing or China this summer. People were for the most part genuinely friendly, as I have found most Beijing and Chinese people to me during my 8 years of living in China. Prices will certainly be much more expensive just before, during and after the Olympics, but these next couple of months will be a prime opportunity to visit China before it gets hot, both temperature-wise due to the weather and due to the approach of the Olympics.

We had several successful tours of Beijing over the May holiday, some even arranged at the last minute, which came off without a hitch even though we did have rain here in Beijing for a couple of days. Guests from all over North America toured with us, and it seems that they genuinely enjoyed the experience, which is the goal of our business at Beijing Discovery Tours - to show people a good time while they are in China at a fair and reasonable price.

In summary, now is a great time to visit Beijing and China - it’s not too hot yet, it’s not unreasonably crowded (as long as you stay off of the subway at peak times), as well as being a truly fascinating place for any traveler to visit.

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