So here we are with just over 2 months to go before we start our adventure!
We have recently managed to get our Chinese Tourist Visa - L type for 60 days. A bit of a headache but overall doable. No need for a Letter of Invitation for us Aussies (and for many other countries) but you do need to provide
- a detailed itinerary (we just submitted a document typed in word with the cities we will visit, dates and how we will travel from one city to another)
- flight bookings in & out of the country (we won't actually fly out, but booked a flight with a fully flexible policy that allows us to cancel and get a full refund once we have figured out how to travel out of the country via land)
- hotel bookings (we just booked the main cities with Booking.com - very flexible with date changes and cancellations).
We got all of the info we needed on the website http://www.visaforchina.org/. With a bit of creativity and $98.50 per person you you can travel trough china for 2 months!
We are not going to follow it strictly as we want to be as free as possible during this trip, however this is the plan we have in mind:
We will be going slightly off the silk road when visiting Chengdu and Chongqing to try some very spicy food in the Sichuan region (ever heard of their super-spicy hot pot?)
Things we are excited about seeing during our Chinese slice of the trip are:
Beijing and the Great Wall
Xi'an
Huashan
Jiuzhaigou Natural Reserve
Zhangye Danxia (Rainbow Mountains)
Jiayuguan Great Wall
Dunhuang (Crescent Lake and Mogao Caves)
Max and I are particularly curious to explore the Xinjiang region, where China meets the surrounding cultures - this is where a number of ethnic groups such as Han, Mongols, Kazakhs, Uyghur can be found.
These photos have obviously been stolen from the web - we can't wait to post the ones we took!
