Product Description
Frommer’s. The best trips start here.
Experience a place the way the locals do. Enjoy the best it has to offer.
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Insider tips on China’s top attractions, plus extensive coverage of unique and off-the-tourist-track regions and villages.
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Outspoken opinions on what’s worth your time and what’s not.
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Exact prices, so you can plan the perfect trip whatever your budget.
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Off-the-beaten-path experiences and undiscovered gems, plus new takes on top attractions.
Find great deals and book your trip at Frommers.com
From the Back Cover
Frommer’s. The best trips start here.
Experience a place the way the locals do. Enjoy the best it has to offer.
-
Insider tips on China’s top attractions, plus extensive coverage of unique and off-the-tourist-track regions and villages.
-
Outspoken opinions on what’s worth your time and what’s not.
-
Exact prices, so you can plan the perfect trip whatever your budget.
-
Off-the-beaten-path experiences and undiscovered gems, plus new takes on top attractions.
Find great deals and book your trip at Frommers.com
To begin with, readers should know that this guide was severly pared down, which explains why there are so few budget hotels and budget restaurants listed. Many section writers knew plenty of cheaper hotels and restaurants, but due to space limitations the decision was made by the publisher to list only the upper-level accomodations. This is partly because Frommer’s really isn’t geared towards the budget traveller.
The Beijing section is excellent, and you should go with their recommendation of staying at the Far East International Hostel, or the hotel across from it.
I am suprised by the review that felt that the authors had never been to China. In fact, all of the authors were actually foreign residents of China. While this means that they have a more intimate understanding of their region, it often means that they are less focused on the area as a travelling destination, which may explain why they don’t go into the kinds of historical and cultural detail that a travel writer (who is experiencing the city differently) might.
Also, it means that much of the recommendations for certain sections of the book are not at all written from a traveller’s perspective. In particular, the section on Chengdu focuses nearly all of its restaurants in the middle-south of the city. After hearing locations described in terms of their proximity to the US Consulate three times, it certainly makes me suspect that the writer of the section spent a long time there. In fact, 7 of 12 of the restaurants were located no more than half a mile from the consulate. Good luck finding a description of many places to eat within a 30 minute walk of the fairly popular Dragon Town Hostel (which, although offering pretty good accomodation, was not mentioned at all in the guide) located slightly northwest of center.
As other reviewers have noted, the section on Shanghai is pretty worthless. Even the editor of the book will tell you this. Against his recommendation, the publisher cobbled on a highly shortened version of the already out-of-date Frommer’s Shanghai into the Shanghai section of the book. It is out of date and not all that helpful as a guide.
For those who travel to a new place just to try the food, you’ll love this book. It has an entire section in the back listing common dishes, dishes unique to featured restaurants, and specialities. The listing includes Chinese characters and pinyin.
If your travel plans include Beijing, this book is a must. If you’re going only to Shanghai, choose any other book.
We just took a trip to China, and brought this book as our primary guide. In the store it looked like the best of the bunch, full of details, lots of info to help us find a hotel and get prepped for the trip, but once we got there it was not useful at all.
Our biggest problem was the lack of Chinese characters for any of the places. We took taxis most places, and they would look at the pinyin (romanized) names and addresses in the descriptions section and either not understand or flat out refuse to take us. It was VERY FRUSTRATING not having the Chinese characters, and not having the Chinese addresses. We later realized that the characters for the names were on the map pages, however not all places were on the map, and the full addresses and Chinese street names weren’t listed, so it still wasn’t what we needed. Not only that but the maps were hard to find, as they were buried in the middle of the descriptions and we kept flipping past them. Even after I’d dog-eared them.
Secondly, once we got out of Beijing, most of the information was way out of date, or flat out wrong! For instance, we went to Kunming, and the first restaurant we tried to go to wasn’t there anymore, and the other restaurant had the wrong address! Fortunately our taxi driver figured out it was talking about a vegetarian restaurant that was nearby. At that point I was extremely glad we had a Chinese speaker with us! Otherwise we would have never found it. Not only that, but when we tried to go to the Stone Forest, it recommended to take the train, but the train they mention apparently doesn’t run anymore, and the ticket-seller told us that the other train (later in the day) was a really bad option, very slow, and that we should take the bus. We ended up hiring a car for the day.
The only thing we ended up using (successfully) from our trip to Kunming was the location of the internet cafe. It was China Telcom, and so not likely to change, and even so the only reason we found it was because it was near the post office, which (unlike the cafe) was listed on the map.
It’s also worth noting that the hotel we stayed at in Beijing, which was absolutley wonderful, the guide said wasn’t worth our money. Fortunately we had our friend to go scope out nice places ahead of time for us (we wanted something really nice, as it was our anniversary), and after looking at about six places, she decided the Grand Hotel Beijing, with a view of the Forbidden City, was the nicest, even though the guide didn’t recommend it. That and the St. Regis, whose location wasn’t as good for being a tourist. It turned out our hotel was one of “the” hotels to stay at in Beijing, and got all kinds of positive comments from her Chinese friends. Go figure.
All in all I was very dissapointed with this guide. We got sick of being led to places that either didn’t exist or had the wrong address listed, and after a while our friend who spoke Chinese refused to even use it, and we went and found a local travel agency everywhere we went. I don’t know what we would have done if she hadn’t been there, since hardly anyone in Kunming spoke good English.