I am posting this from dial up line, man this sucks. The first thing you do is cut what ever the price they are asking for by half! then start bargaining. You could also ask the tour guide to bargain for you and give him/her half of the money you saved.
Awesome. Any advice what else to see in the area? I'll be in Changsha a week from today and I'll be in Lanzhou in a month. I'm going to see how far I can get down the silk route in a couple of weeks I have.
Hmm, around Lanzhou itself I'm not sure of anything aside from the caves. Although if you're in Lanzhou on a Sunday afternoon, be sure to take a stroll along the south bank of the Yellow River, in the "middle" part of the park where the floating barges are - because there the locals gather to play cards & sing traditional Northern Chinese songs and operas and play music & dance - all for themeselves (I didn't see a single other foreigner there), so it's pretty authentic. In Gansu province, there's a number of other stops easily reachable from Lanzhou - Xiahe in the south is supposedly a great place to go if you want to see a Tibetan village without the hassle of going to Tibet. Jiayuguan is teh first big stop on the railroad west and is worth it to see the fortress & the wall, but those are the only two things to do there, basically, and you can see them both in about 2-3 hours. I ended up spending the night there but wished I hadn't, I would suggest taking a night train there from Lanzhou, leaving your luggage in the station, seeing the fort & wall and then going back to the station and taking the afternoon train (leaves around 3, maybe 4 hours or so) to Dunhuang - which is a must see if you're going to travel the silk road and kind of a relaxed place. I made it out to Kashgar in about 12 days after setting out from Beijing, traveling mostly overland though the last 1000 km from Urumqi to Kashgar I flew, I couldn't take a 24 hour train ride.
Fantastic. Thanks for the info. How much is domestic airfare in China? How much was the airfare from Urumqi to Kashgar? Any idea about how much a one way from Kashgar to Shanghai would run?
domestic airfare is pretty cheap. It's not like the US where you get killed if you buy tix on short notice. Urumqi to Kashgar (1hr 40 min flight) was about 480 Y (60$), i think - well worth it considering the alternative. Though i bought my ticket in what passes for a fancy hotel in urumqi since i was in a hurry, I bet you could find it for cheaper if you look around. Kashgar -shanghai, not sure, but i think it would be around 800Y or so - it's probably a 5-7 hour trip after you change planes in urumqi. that was orginally my plan but now I thik I'm headed for Chengdu instead.
Having been to both Shanghai and Beijing before, I wonder how the athletes will be able to compete in the pollution of Beijing in the 2008 Olympic games without passing out? Beijing makes Houston's air seem like nothing.
