May 22, 2008 by admin.

Life sometimes throws cruel ironic twists at a person, and the key to living a happy life is to make the best of what could otherwise be an unbearable situation. I mentioned in a previous post the tour guidebook about Dujiangyan that my friend had written, which has the incredibly tragically ironic title: Dujiangyan: in Harmony with Nature. I had attended a party to launch the book on April 30, 2008, and had even added a webpage to our website devoted entirely to Dujiangyan. Very sadly, it is one of the cities that has been hardest hit by the tragic earthquake of May 12, 2008 and its aftershocks. Thousands were killed in this great city alone, many of them young students killed when their classrooms collapsed.

So what to do with travel guide books for a destroyed city? The publishers have wisely decided to sell the books as a memorial to those great people of Dujiangyan and the surrounding area, with all proceeds going to the Dujiangyan Young Survivors group, a charity group donated to providing support services to the youth of Dujiangyan and Wenchuan who have been disproportionately affected by this enormous disaster. You can not only get a book about the great city that Dujiangyan once was, but you will also be donating to a worthy cause dedicated to efficiently using that money to help those that need it most. To buy the Dujiangyan guidebook, please visit the publishers homepage at www.cnlookingglass.com. 

To contact the Dujiangyan Young Survivors charity group, please email them at DJYoungsurvivors@yahoo.com.

It’s a good way to get a great book of the way that Dujiangyan was before May 12, 2008, and hopefully how it can be again in the future.

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May 14, 2008 by admin.

Now that the enormous scale and loss of human life in the Sichuan earthquake has become clear, my earlier post about motion sickness and the swaying of our apartment building in Beijing seems incredibly trivial. I do remember though, in the hours immediately after we felt the earthquake, feeling this ominous sense of dread, because as much as our building was moving around here in Beijing, I knew that wherever the epicenter of the earthquake was located, it had to have been hit very, very badly. Slowly the news came out, first 4 confirmed dead, then more, and more, and more, along with horrific photos from Dujiangyan and elsewhere in the area that were absolutely heartbreaking. I felt a personal connection with Dujiangyan even though I had never been there, because one of my friends here in Beijing had recently completed a travel guide for foreigners that was all about Dujiangyan. There was a book launch party for the Dujiangyan book at the end of April here in Beijing, which I attended, and where I met the head of the Ministry of Tourism for the city of Dujiangyan. We had even put up a web page for the city in anticipation of offering tours to the area because it was a truly interesting place with thousands of years of history and tremendous strategic importance to the development of China over the millennia. Tragically, it is impossible to know what the future holds for this devastated city, but the people there are strong and they can and will recover from this terrible earthquake. Faced with a decision on what to do with the unfinished web page for tours of Dujiangyan after this disaster, I decided to put up a couple of links to trustworthy organizations on the web page for donations to the victims of the earthquake. I couldn’t stand to simply delete the page, as if the city had never existed. I just hope that anyone that comes across that web page on our website realizes that it was there before these tragic events unfolded. For now, we are left wondering if our friends in Dujiangyan survived, with the hope that they and all of the people affected will have the strength to get through this unimaginable tragedy.

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

World Vision

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May 12, 2008 by admin.

A huge earthquake of 7.5 - 7.8 on the Richter scale centered north of Chengdu in Sichuan Province had Beijing shaking as well, and reportedly buildings in Bangkok, Thailand were swaying too. I know that our 13th floor office apartment was swaying quite a bit for a minute or so; one of the most bizarre feelings I have ever felt. I’m prone to motion sickness anyway, so an hour and a half later I’m still feeling it. Office buildings were evacuated here in Beijing, and now they are saying that there was a smaller earthquake located just east of Beijing in Tongzhou at 3.9 on the Richter scale that may have been responsible for us shaking in Beijing. Whatever the source, it seems that the ground underneath us is moving, and I wonder if it is the result of the incredible number of huge buildings and construction happening in China that is putting pressure on the Earth’s surface, or perhaps the Three Gorges Dam in central China and the enormous weight of the dammed up water that is to blame. China has in the past had numerous earthquakes, so it may just be time for things to shift again. Regardless, it sure has people here in Beijing literally shaken up today.

Beijing Discovery Tours

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May 11, 2008 by admin.

One of the great things about living in Beijing is that there is an endless number of interesting places to visit and sites to see in this amazing city. It’s not only because Beijing is an ancient capital city that it provides a wealth of worthy sights to see, but also it’s importance to China and the rest of the world throughout history. One can visit the Marco Polo bridge in southern Beijing, supposedly visited by the famous traveler himself, or travel even farther south to visit the Peking Man site, where archaeologists have uncovered evidence and bones of prehistoric humans that lived near Beijing. Fantastic and largely unexplored “wild” sections of the Great Wall of China lie scattered to the north of the city, making for great one-day or overnight trips to visit on of the “modern” wonders of the world (strange that something hundreds of years old would be considered “modern”.) I would recommend for anyone visiting Beijing to certainly take in all of the familiar “must-see” sites - The Forbidden City, Tian’anmen Square, and the Temple of Heaven, but if you can possibly spare one day to visit some of the more obscure places in and around the city, you can have a unique adventure that most tourists never get to experience. Beijing Discovery Tours can take you to these places. Just let us know what it is that you would like to see while you are in China, including ancient important Buddhist sites, temples, mountains, caves, horseback riding etc., and we will do our best to make it happen for you.

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May 11, 2008 by admin.

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 Li 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.

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May 11, 2008 by admin.

Hopefully, with any luck, I will be moving our Beijing Discovery Tours blog to this site - it looks great (this hosting site, not our blog)! So much better than our old location that has almost no functionality. So far I have not been able to import all of our old posts from our old host, and I’m not sure what the problem is, but we’ll keep working on it and we hope to have this blog up and running soon.

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