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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