Dear Windy and Bessie

Thank you very much for a wonderful tour in China. My family had a fantastic time and we were fortunate to have been able to take advantage of your expert and reliable service. We have recommended your tour company - Travel China Guide to several of our friends and were very satisfied with all of the arrangements.

We got off to a great start in Hong Kong. Although we didn't use your service there, as you know our contact with you began there because we were relying on the delivery of our onward air tickets and the confirmation of our first leg of the tour on the mainland. Happily, just as you had said, the airline tickets and itinerary were waiting for us at the Peninsula when we checked in. The tour company also called the following morning to confirm receipt and to ask if we needed any further help or information. This was very reassuring and took care of one of my biggest worries right at the beginning.

We landed in Guilin on schedule and immediately met Jesse Zhong, who was a very good, very helpful and very knowledgeable guide during our entire time there. He proved his dedication very early in the trip when we arrived at our hotel in Guilin and discovered that we had left a piece of luggage at the airport. Jesse had given us his mobile phone number and, despite it being very late when we made the discovery, he did everything necessary to locate the bag at the airport and have the Dragon Air staff deliver it to our hotel within 90 minutes. We really appreciated his help and quick work because we would have been in an awful predicament if the bag had never turned up.

The sightseeing you arranged in Guilin was terrific. The cruise on the Li Jiang was beautiful and very memorable, and Jesse did an expert job pointing out the landmarks along the way and explaining life on the river. The day dawned misty and cloudy, but the skies improved during the course of the cruise and by the time we reached Yangzhou we had a beautiful sunny day to enjoy. We took some great pictures of the spectacular scenery, the flotilla of cruise ships making their way down the river, the incredibly intrepid bamboo boatsmen who catch up to the cruise ships and sell local souvenirs, some actual cormorant fishermen and lots of life on the riverbanks. In Yangzhou we rode bicycles through town and into the countryside, which was one of the great highlights of the trip for many reasons! We were exhausted by the end of the first day.

My 14-year-old daughter and I went for a long run on the streets of Guilin early in the morning of our second day there. The wide bicycle lanes and bridges make Guilin a very running-friendly city, and it was a real education for us to see the day starting for the residents of Guilin. We couldn¡¯t believe the huge number of people who were out for their early morning exercise! Almost every square and public area featured large groups of people doing tai chi or other kinds of physical activity. We also saw all manner of vehicles loaded with produce, chickens and other food on their way to market. We would definitely recommend getting out early in these smaller towns for a taste of how everyday life for Chinese people begins.

We packed a lot of activity into that second day - Fubo Hill, Seven Star Park, Reed Flute Cave, a shopping trip for pearls and three meals. Jesse set a very good pace and we felt that we had enough time to enjoy and learn about each site without feeling rushed. One major highlight at Seven Star Park was seeing Mei Mei, the giant panda, who was outside and seemed quite happy to pose for pictures.

We had only two nights and one day in Shanghai but with our guide, Xu Long, we made the most of it. Long-Long, as we came to know her, was another wonderful guide and obviously very proud of Shanghai. We spent most of our single day outside, which was unfortunate because we had the worst weather of the trip there - cold, rainy, misty and generally pretty miserable. Still, we managed to see most of the Bund and all of Nanjing Lu, but our best and most memorable time there was our morning in the Yu Gardens. It's such a beautiful and fantastic place, and we took some of our best pictures there. We found it amazing that such a lovely and tranquil place has been preserved in the huge, urban metropolis that is Shanghai. After a very pleasant lunch in a fine hotel off Nanjing Lu we spent about two hours at the Shanghai Museum, which is as impressive for its size as it is for its contents. The hall of ancient stone carvings was our favorite area.


Our last and longest stop was Beijing, where had the most wonderful guide of the trip - Hua Rong, who, with our driver, Mr Liu, gave us some of our best and most enduring memories of China. Hua is a fantastic person - very knowledgeable, very flexible, and very funny. He helped us see all of the major sites on our itinerary--- Tianamen Square, the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace--- all in good time, and on our second and third days he also accommodated a major change in our schedule, which was to go back to the Great Wall a second time. According to Hua, we were the first and only tour he'd ever taken a second time to the Great Wall. And here's the reason: we had chosen originally to go to the Mutianyu section of the wall, which is certainly impressive and also much less crowded than the Wall at Badaling. However, having been to Badaling once before, I understood after seeing Mutianyu what the tour books mean when they say Badaling is the "more magnificent" section of the Wall. And so, on the morning of our third day, Hua and Liu agreed to meet us at our hotel at 7 am and make a very early dash to Badaling to get there before anyone else. We were the second cable car up the mountain and spent a gloriously clear, sunny morning climbing all over that section of the Wall. It was a special and memorable experience, and Hua did everything he could to make it a success. He and Liu also recommended local restaurants for the dinners at which we were on our own, and one was a fantastic little dumpling restaurant about a mile from the Forbidden City where we had one of our most special meals. Hua also arranged for the hutong tour and the Beijing acrobatic show, took us to a very cool bar alongside Beihai Lake and helped us find one of the best shopping areas away from the major tourist attractions. All in all, we had the best time of the trip in Beijing, much of it thanks to Hua.


We also wanted you to know that we were very happy with the travel arrangements and the hotel accommodations that you arranged in Guilin and Shanghai. All of the flights--- from Hong Kong to Guilin, Guilin to Shanghai and Shanghai to Beijing--- were comfortable and on time. The Sheraton in Guilin had a great staff--- very service oriented--- and the Hua Ting in Shanghai was really fantastic and had the best breakfasts of any hotel we found in China. We were a little worried about it appearing on a map to be far from the Bund, but Long-Long and our driver in Shanghai made it seem no problem to get back and forth in only 10 or 15 minutes.


Our overall experience with Travel China Guide was really first-rate and we're grateful to you for helping us have such a fine experience throughout China. Feel free to publish any or all of this email as a testimonial on the web site--- reading other testimonials helped us choose your agency, and I can say that all of the good things we read certainly turned out to be true!

I'm also attaching a few pictures we took on our trip. I'm sending lo-res pictures because there are so many; if you want high-res images of a few for your website, just let me know and I'll send them.

If we travel again in China we'll definitely think of Travel China Guide first! Many thanks.

Best regards,

John, Mindy, Abigail and Jeremy Hollar