vdtoorn.nl - Story of our trip from Beijing to Hongkong

Story of our trip from Beijing to Hongkong

Introduction

In 2004 we made an excellent trip from Beijing to Hongkong, in China. In xx days, we've seen the project of the nearly finished Three Gorges Dam, the nearly finished preparation for the olympic games in 2008 (!), the overcrowded city of Beijing and the extremely peaceful countryside. This articly is only available in Dutch.

After a long period of doubt whether we should or shouldn't go to China, we finally booked the 'China Hoogtepunten' (China Highlights) trip with Koning Aap. A group travel, this time, as it seemed a little too difficult to travel through China on your own and see and much as possible at the same time. The trip of three weeks starts from Beijing to some other cities and touristic highlights to the countryside and finally to the southern part of Hong-Kong. We'd planned to leave on sunday August 1st 2004

About a week before leaving, we received our surprise a Koning Aap backpack including a small first aid emergency set and the participants list we've been expecting. There were two persons from Aalten (NL-east), six from Doesburg(NL-east), a couple from Limburg(NL-south), two individual travellers, a woman from Belgium and some people from the western part of the Netherlands. In total a group of 18 persons, the maximum number for this trip.

Because of a busy schedule at work, the wasn't much time for preparation, as usual. One day before we were leaving, we dropped out bunnies at Astrid's for a longer than usual stay. Because we were leaving in the the afternoon, we spent the morning packing our bags, which is precisely in time... Although the suitcases stayed at home this time and were replaced for the nearly-new-and-only-used-once-or-twice backpacks. As we normally have no problem at all to pack our suitcases to their maximum capacity, it took some effort to carefully pick the right clothes and stuff for the much smaller backpacks. It would be fairly warm in China, so we could bring along many t-shirts and shorts that wouldn't occopy that much space at all. However, to ease the transport we did have to buy some flightbags and transport covers for the backpacks, which seemed a good idea.

Our trip looks about the following:

In total we would be:
* taking three night-trains;
* spending two nights on the boart;
* taking 1 extra domestic flight;
and spending five night in extremely simple accomodations on the countryside.

Next page (Day 1: Flying from Amsterdam to Frankfurt to Beijing)