Four Great Gardens China is renowned for its magnificent gardens. At the same time, Chinese are obsessed with ranking and listing the best things – Five Great Mountains, Six Ancient Capitals, Four Sacred Mountains and Four Great Gardens. If you are enjoy gardens,...

Manchuria was not originally a part of my travel itinerary. However, I have managed to finish my goals in other parts of China sooner than I thought so I have decided to reward myself with a super-fast tour of Manchuria.   My first stop was ancient city of Mukden, now...

After settling in Beijing, it is time to try out new things – traveling with a long-distance bus. It is a much different story from traveling with trains. First of all, you cannot buy bus tickets on trip.com, which makes it much more challenging to buy tickets in...

Pingyao is a small town in a dusty province of Shanxi, only 3-4 hours away by bullet train from Beijing. There are two reasons tourist congregate to Pingyao. First, it is one of the best preserved medieval towns in China. Second, Pingyao was China’s first Wall Street….

For any history enthusiast, Luoyang is a must-see destination. The city has been changing places as the capital for over 1000 years with modern day Xi’an. The city represented morality, while Xi’an represented brute force, so often emperors would switch the capital to Luoyang to signify to their people that they plan to be a benevolent ruler. Xi’an has become the first imperial capital of China, but Chinese history is very unkind to China’s first Emperor Qin Shi Huang……

I have reached Datong in the morning and after checking in I grabbed something to eat and went straight to my first destination – Yungang Grottoes. The grottoes are only a few kilometers away from the city so I took a Didi (Chinese Uber). Taxis are very cheap in China, it costed around 2.5 euros for 20-minute ride…..

After Hangzhou, which was the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, I am now in Kaifeng – the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty. The Song Dynasty is my favorite dynasty. It was a period of scientific, cultural and economic prosperity of China. In fact, three out of four great inventions of Ancient China were finalized during the Song Dynasty – gunpowder, magnetic compass and printing press….

I have arrived to Nanjing late at night and took Didi (Chinese Uber) to my hostel. Unfortunately, my hostel was not on the main road so my Didi left me to look around for it. This is the worst – you have to go to the trip.com page and look for photos of the hostel from outside to try to find it. Everything is in Chinese and even people who work in the same building did not know where it was….

The first thing you need to know about Zhangjiajie is that it consists of two mountains:
1. Tianmen mountain – near Zhangjiajie city (this is where the train station is).
2. Avatar mountains (Zhangjiajie Natural Forest Park) – near a town called Wulingyuan….