Bye-bye Beijing Great Wall bungee jumping!

I have been checking hotel accommodations in Beijing and I have found a few ones with acceptable prices. There are good hotels near the train stations, near the Tiananmen Square and other great sites in Beijing. Prices start from 350 RMB (approximately US$50) per night and goes up to 700 RMB. Though I haven’t booked any hotel yet because I’m still not sure if our company would declared May 2 as holiday (May 1, which falls on a Thursday is Labor Day and therefore a National Holiday).

Yesterday, my wife heard from the news that train tickets to Beijing for May 1 were almost depleted (apparently around 20 million tickets has been sold), even the travel agencies were fully booked for that day. But that is not the reason why we canceled our plan to go bungee jumping in the Great Wall, we could still go there on other weekends where the crowd is not as much as there will be this coming Labor Day holiday. We cancelled our planned trip to Beijing because of the price of train tickets from Shanghai to Beijing.

I checked the ticket prices in the internet and found out the single trip ticket from Shanghai to Beijing costs 500 RMB per person. That means for the whole trip, we need to prepare 2,000 RMB for the train tickets alone. I told my wife about this estimated costs and she couldn’t contain her surprise and disappointment. Surprised because of the ticket cost and disappointed because she couldn’t agree to shell out that amount for a mere trip to Beijing. I told her we’re already in China and it would be more expensive if we would visit Beijing on another time where we will be coming from other country. But in the end, we both agreed that the price really is expensive. You could check the train ticket costs here.

So bye-bye Tiananmen Square, bye-bye Great Wall of China, bye-bye Beijing Olympics 2008 stadium, bye-bye Giant Panda. Perhaps the “bye-bye Giant Panda” part would be the most difficult thing for my wife to let go since she really wanted to see some real pandas. She’s been watching Pandas from the CCTV since her arrival here in China. We could only hope that the nearby zoos have pandas so she could compensate the canceled trip to Beijing.

This week end, we plan to go to Shanghai to buy tickets to Hangzhou, Nanjing and Suzhou. We also plan to visit Zhouzhuang which is just a bus ride from Kunshan.