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.

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!

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.

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.