China - Visa and travel plans

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). 

The application process at the Melbourne Visa Processing centre is pretty straight forward and the staff helpful. 

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!