We visited China two separate times on our 37 day trip to Southeast Asia.   The first was in the middle of the 17 day Princess Cruise where we had a one day stop in Shanghai.   Because we knew we were going to spend a week there later on we opted to go to a small city about 60 miles from Shanghai called Sozhou.  It is a small city by Chinese standards as about 12 million people live there.

Once we finished the cruise in Beijing we flew down to Shanghai on a Friday to tour the city before we started our land tour of China on Tuesday with Collette Vacations.   After a couple days on the tour in Shanghai we then flew to the city of Yichang to join a 4 day river cruise on the Yangtze River.

At the end of the river cruise in Chongqing we visited a Panda Preserve and then flew to Xi’an, the home of the Terracotta Warriors and the only intact walled old city.  Then we flew to Beijing for four days to complete the vacation with seeing the Great Wall, the Forbidden Palace, and the Summer Palace to highlight a few of the stops in Beijing.

We both absolutely loved China.  The people were so friendly everywhere we went and they loved Joy’s blond hair.  She had her picture take so many times from people coming up to her asking to take her picture with them.  Except in a few tourist attractions, and of course the hotels, no one spoke English but we got along just fine