Lost In China

It won’t be long now until I set off on the old silk road! Or to put it more accurately Air China flight CA856  to Beijing and then on to Fuzhou. It goes without saying that China is a first for me but so will the long haul flight. The longest I’ve spent flying to date is under 2 hours. The travel nurse that gave me my Hep A, Typhoid and Tetanus jabs advised me to wear travel socks and move about a lot so I plan to take bags of sweets with me and make my way up and down the aisles offering them to all the passengers. Perhaps a song and dance routine might go down well too, it would certainly keep the blood clots at bay.

I’m awaiting the return of my Visa. I decided to use a visa specialist to process this for me. Mark suggested the company he used, the first hurdle was they had gone out of business! However eventually I got wonderful help from Ilana at ctmstravel.com. I was a bit daunted by the visa application form. It asked me to list my close family. Now I have a lot of children and grandchildren and I was a bit worried as to how many of them I should list. Ilana came to the rescue and assured me that just listing my wife was fine.

Another plus was 祁丽 (Qi Li although she introduced herself at Julie) at Super 8 Hotels in China. Her English was excellent and she was supremely efficient. I rang the Chinese booking number for Super 8 with some trepidation. It wasn’t advertised for western bookings and I had to translate the page from Mandarin using Google before I could locate the right number. I was quickly and politely put through to 祁丽 and it was so easy to make the booking. I guess the trepidation says much about my own prejudice. As an aside Chinese Hotels are really cheap. The big international chains are around £40 to £50 per night but you can easily find good rooms in Chinese chains at £20.00 per night.