Interesting start Andrea and I am impressed with all your pre trip planning. Look forward to hearing more.

Your stay in Xi'An was a bit long but only two days in Lijiang for such a detour. Looking forward to read the details.

I am most interested in finding out how you managed without Chinese food?
KFC, McDonalds, Starbucks, Pizza Hut are there, but maybe you discovered some unique places to eat or did you sometimes cook?

@ileen - actually it is easy to find tons of restaurants with western food in China unless you are in a small village.

I will be interested to hear if your husband had the ham & cheese sandwich at the Banyan Tree in Lijiang. That hotel was absolutely gorgeous and the facilities wonderful, but the ham & cheese was foul beyond belief (soggy, Wonder-like bread; velveeta-like cheese). I have no excuses for getting it -- and all of the Chinese food at the BT was terrific -- just looking for some good Western food after having eaten only Chinese for a week.

no warriors??

You are bringing back some wonderful memories (wasn't the Beilin Museum great?) - thanks!

I had to laugh, though - in my 28-day trip, I don't think I ate anything that most people I know would have considered "Chinese food" and nothing I've ever seen on the menu of a "Chinese" restaurant in the U.S. I was in northern China only, and used various sources of information - but especially Frommer's - to identify and order regional specialties. I had some truly delicious meals!

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed yourselves. Tell use more!

Make that tell US more!

Thanks everyone for the encouraging words.

JPDeM- I agree about 2 nights being enough on a 3-week trip for Xi'an. In fact, we had originally planned only 2 nights in Xi'an & 3 nights in Lijiang but the once daily flight from Xi'an to Lijiang was cancelled before we left Florida so we added a night to Xi'an, then we were to fly from Beijing to Taiyuan & stay a night in Pingyao, but on the day of the flight, the plane was first delayed & then the flight cancelled so we flew to Xi'an a day early. More on this in my trip report on that day.

Ileen- we managed without Chinese food by eating the usually included western breakfast at our hotel and western dinners at the hotel. I did have chinese food often, but at the hotel restaurant. In Beijing at the Orchid Hotel, a small hotel in the Baochao Hutong, we had breakfast at the hotel, but since they did not serve other meals there, I had to be more creative than in the other cities. The first night in Beijing, I discovered that a local brewery called Great Leap Brewery was having a special burgers and fries night for their 1-year anniversary so we hustled there for my husband to have a burger. It was interesting too because there was a big turnout of western ex-pats in their 20s and 30s there. We also found an Italian restaurant "Mercante" near the hotel which had steaks and had dinner there 2 nights. The one other night in Beijing, around dinner time, we were on Wanfujing Street, where my husband thought there might be western chain restaurants like Hard Rock Cafe or Planet Hollywood. We walked the entire length of the street and did not find any such restaurants, but using my iPhone, I discovered that the Beijing Hotel had an Outback Steakhouse. When we went to the hotel, it turned out that the Outback Steakhouse was gone, replaced by William's Steakhouse which was an adequate alternative.

DonTopaz- Too bad you had a soggy disappointing ham & cheese at the Banyan Tree. Neither of us tried that. My husband had steaks both nights and I had a delicious Thai red curry chicken & rice one of the nights and a Chinese dish the next night that was also very good. We adored the Banyan Tree with its wonderful personal service and stunning views of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. It is one of the most beautiful hotels we have ever stayed in and an oasis of calm from the hustle and bustle of Lijiang old town!

Rhkkmk- We did spend a wonderful morning one of our days in Xi'an visiting the warriors and we saw more warriors up close and personal at the Shaanxi Museum back in Xi'an.

Kja- I so enjoyed reading about your adventures in China & I admire your "go with the flow" spirit as you were traveling all over China on your own.

I will post separate report of our daily activities in Beijing later today.

Hard to believe as Chinese cuisine is considered one of the premier food preparation and presentation methods known in the entire world. To go to China and eat burgers, steaks and tuna fish sandwiches is monstrously ignorant. But of course, maybe he has a GI disorder or lack of palate.

Pre-trip planning:

As I said this trip was 9 years in the planning- in the meantime we were taking trips to Europe and in the US. In those 9 years I devoured every book I could find of travelers adventures in China and novels about China, among them books by Peter Hessler, Betty Bao Lord, Amy Tan, Lisa See, Paul Theroux, and the books titled "Factory Girls", "Lost on Planet China" and just before our trip, I read Deborah Fallowes "Dreaming in Chinese. I read trip reports and other threads on this talk forum, I bought and read something like 15 China guidebooks over the years and "Travelers' Tales China" and "A Traveller's History of China" which I read multiple times. I took Mandarin classes at my local university and the area chinese language school- not that I expected to become fluent but to develop some feel for the culture through some small understanding of the language. While we were in China, I was thrilled to understand a simple word or phrase here and there!

I also used to watch CCTV-4, the English language version of Chinese television on DirecTV, until the rat finks at DirecTV pulled the plug on that programming. I complained about it to them, but it availed me nothing. Anyway, I used to watch the Chinese lessons by Da Shan-the Canadian host, Mark Rosewell and other China travel and culture programs and the Spring Festival gala every year for Chinese New Year (coming up this year on February 10, 2013). More recently, I have taken to streaming the online version of the shows (particularly the Travelogue shows) from my ipad to my television through my Apple TV. I also watched any travel DVDs I could find on China, including the Samantha Brown DVD on Asia (which includes Hong Kong) and the Globetrekker series (this series is aimed at folks in their 20s and 30s and traveling on a budget.) All this information was grist for the mill.

I had a pretty good idea of the itinerary I wanted 2 or 3 years ago, but my husband was nervous about independent travel to China so I looked into a private tailored tour through Kensington Tours. I priced the trip this way and, not surprisingly, it was very expensive! But, by 2011, I had convinced my husband that we could do the trip on our own. During our first trip to France together in 2001, I was worried because he was showing signs of being a travel troll, which might crush my dreams of a lifestyle of annual international travel. Happily, he shook that off and I am happy to report that he has taken very well to all this travel!

I began by using C-trip to help me devise a feasible itinerary, which is actually quite similar to the itinerary of the tour I took with my mother in 2003. I really wanted to include some more off the beaten path destinations to see some of the sacred mountains of China but I decided that with the 3 week time constraint, this was just not feasible. I thought the temperatures in China in October 2003 were very comfortable

Thanks for your kind words, AndreaLang! My travels in China were a bit out of my comfort zone (to say the least!), but I ended up with some experiences that I would never otherwise have had.

So glad you convinced your husband to go to China independently!

Sorry, I accidentally hit "submit" before I was done with this post.

So I decided to go in October right after the National Holiday in 2012. I liked the enormous, over-the-top floral displays everywhere for the holiday. The weather was warmer in October 2012 than in October 2003, but still comfortable. We had no rain on the whole trip except one night in Beijing. More importantly, we had no noticeable air pollution on this trip, although I remember the air being pretty bad in Xi'an in 2003.

Although I enjoyed my Yangtze River cruise in 2003, I decided to cut that out and instead include Lijiang and the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. I thought about going to Datong, Pingyao and Luoyang, but decided to include only Pingyao on this trip. My plan was to alternate a large city with a more rural environment. The plan was Beijing, Pingyao, Xi'an, Lijiang, Shanghai, Yangshuo & Hong Kong. As I explained earlier in this thread our flight to Taiyuan was cancelled so we sadly had to skip Pingyao.

We selected our hotels with an eye to a central city location and availability of western food for my husband. We arranged for pick up at the airport as arranged by the hotel in each location except Xi'an and Hong Kong where we took taxis. All these arrangements worked out well. After we made the hotel reservations, we made the international flight reservations on American Airlines because this was the only flight from the US to Beijing & back from Hong Kong that I could find where the seats in Economy class were in a 2-5-2 configuration as opposed to the more common 3-3-3 configuration. As it turned out we were set to fly to China in the middle of the airlines negotiating with the pilots' union and some flights were being cancelled, but luckily, our flights were not affected. After making the flight arrangements, I used mychinavisa.com to obtain our single entry visas from the Houston consulate. Several people in my Chinese class had recommended them to me. This process was very smooth and fast. I was very careful in filling out the applications and reviewed them several times to make sure they were complete because I had seen some horror stories about this process in this talk forum. About a month before our trip, we made the domestic flight reservations through C-trip. Within a week of our trip, our original flight from Xi'an to Lijiang was cancelled so we rebooked for the next day. I loaded up my iPhone with the Pleco Chinese application including the character recognition and handwriting recognition add ons to the basic Chinese dictionary application. These are cool applications that help you translate characters by writing them out on your phone or using the camera function to identify the character (this part is not as easy to use.) Of course, in the hustle and bustle of getting around in China the fact is I really did not use these much, but they are still very cool! I also had the old Google Maps application on my iPhone and purposely did not upgrade to the new operating system, which would have substituted Apple maps for Google until after I returned home from China. I used the Google maps a lot when we were on foot in the various Chinese cities. The Google maps had first gotten us on course to return to our Paris hotel from a Paris Greeters tour on a very cold day after Christmas in 2008 so I am a big fan. Just before we left for China I found myself feeling very impatient with all the preparation and thought we just need to get this party started!

Since this is the first trip report I have written, I hope I am including the kind of information people are interested in. If not, let me know what other questions you have. I have read lots of reports, but its a lot harder writing this than I would have thought!

Tomorrow I will start talking about each of our days in China.

Congratulations on traveling to China on your own. Your preparation was remarkable - I went on my own with much less! But I do have some sympathy for jobin's post - China with Western food is better than no China, but Chinese food in China is in no way comparable to the "typical" Chinese restaurant in the US. (I say "typical" because I'm fortunate enough to have a local restaurant with a Chinese as well as a western menu.) However, I have read that package Chinese tourists in Europe don't want to eat western food so it goes both ways.