Wondering with Wind

Want to bring one home while you are in China?

It is coming true in year 2008!

I have been longing to go to Taiwan for a long time, especially when it was not possible for a common Mainland China citizen in the purpose of tourism. Now it is possible, after the talk between two parties across the Taiwan Strait on Jun 12-13 2008. Chinese government approved 1,000 daily visitors to Taiwan as an initial quota as the result of the talk which has been disrupted for 10 years.

Reason 1: It is said that Taiwan is the place that preserves the traditional Chinese culture the best, maybe on the planet. I grow up in a reformed Chinese environment in Mainland where we no longer use traditional characters or study Confucius at school or home. Taiwan is different from Hong Kong where Britain has influenced  for 100 years or China Town in New York where it is in an isolated region: Chinese culture can preserve but can’t develop. I want to see what is this society like that preserved Chinese traditional culture and have moved on for around 60 years.

Reason 2: Taiwanese food! Taiwanese food is a kind of more dedicated (as Japanese food), fusion and creative Chinese food. So I don’t really care about the sightseeing if I can have great Taiwanese food!

Reason 3: The treasures in the National Palace Museum. It is said the exhibits in the Forbidden City in Beijing are left-over by KMT in 1949. The best of the best are in Taipei.

According to analyst, the new tourism policy will bring at lease 2 billion USD revenue to Taiwan when the quota is tripled from 1,000 people per day (365,000 a year) to 3,000 people per day (1.1 million a year), which is estimated to come true in 2010. This number was 86,000 last year.

In general, Taiwan is not a hot tourism spot. In 2007, there were only 3.7 million foreign visitors to Taiwan, half of whom were for business or relative-visit. But the number for Hong Kong was 28 million with 15.4 million from Mainland. Average hotel room price in Hong Kong was 156 USD/night in 2007, but it was only 105 USD in Taiwan, which is believed to be the lowest in the Asian Hospitality Industry.

I am dreaming some day soon I can flight directly from Mainland to Taipei without a stop at the third country or region.

Thank Coolmitch for the splendid image of the landmark/icon of Taiwan: Taipei 101.

-

The new Shanghai landmark is going to be completed:

A closed look at the top. it is going to be completed.

Take a look at it in last Dec. here.

A friend of mine is asking for my advise on which island to go for a vacation as she knows I enjoy doing the trip research. June 17 2008 will be the day that Chinese tourists can land in US with a legitimated “leisure travel” visas, although the visa type is not going to change. (see my previous post here.) Hawaii is the first travel destination in US coming to our minds when thinking a vacation which in Chinese means “spending the holiday/non working day”.

Oahu (瓦胡岛): Oahu is where Honolulu is on. If you are not taking a cruise to Hawaii, fly to Honolulu is probably one of the best options. It is the capital city of State of Hawaii and the hub of Hawaii. I can imagine everything is more convenient in a more developed city, and there are more man-made attractions/landmarks/museums here: Pearl Harbor, USS Arizona Memorial and USS Bowfin Submarine - all are about “not-to-be-missed” military history - a family friendly island. Oahu is good at containing resorts in a single area - Waikiki. Outside, there are only 4 resorts. which is a good news for people have headache in planning where to stay.

Kauai (考艾岛): Kauai is the shell-shape island on the northwest corner of Hawaii. Its interior is mountainous with depply eroded valleys and large plains around most of the coastal areas. Travel guidebooks say it rains a lot. Looking at the map, there are freeways around almost the whole island. Kauai airport is in Lihue. You can find places for hiking, scuba diving, swimming and snorkeling on this island. My favorite dream activity is to swim in the Queen’s Bath and treat myself as a Queen.

Big Island: Big Island of Hawaii is the biggest island of the state, it lies on the southeast and it is the most far away island from Kauai. If Hawaii is famous of its volcano, then Big Island is where you should go to see how the islands are born. Hawaii is the name of this island as well as the state. Hawaii Volcano National Park offers more to see and you will be very lucky if you see the flow of lava. See my previous post about Hilo beaches.

(thanks Sang for the image)

Maui (毛伊岛): Maui is the second largest island in Hawaii. It has the reputation of being pricey. Most activities cost more $$ here than on other island. Be prepared for the fact that “spending time on the island is spending money”. Most of the resorts are on the west and the south, look for names like Lahaina, Kapalua, or Kihei-Wailea when planning where to stay. Beaches and waterfalls are what you can enjoy the most (to avoid spending a lot of money).

So the first thing to plan a trip to Hawaii is either pick a city (e.g. which you can get a discounted air ticket or resort stay) or pick an island. Generally, you can do most of the water activities on any of these islands. One other non-typical things to do is to hunt  a vacation home on the islands as investment. Oahu real estate is a local agent help people buy and sell homes, they have branches in Kauai and Big Island as well. Its website provides a searchable database to allow buyers to look for homes before making contact.

I had a trip to Beijing about two weeks’ ago and stayed at a hotel called TravelerInn Huaqiao Hotel (旅居北京华侨饭店) that might has the same density of foreigners as other 5 stars Beijing Hotels.

This hotel is located northeast corner of the Second Ring Rd. in Beijing. It is 10 minutes walk from Beixinqiao Subway Station on Line 5 or 13 mintues walk to Lama Temple Subway Station on Line 2. During our stay in the hotel, I saw more foreigners than Chinese and was pretty sure it was FULL. Why it is so popular?

Well, designed Liang Sicheng, one of the best Chinese architect in 1950s, it offers a very different feel than other modern hotels you will stay in the cities. First of all, it is in hutong area. You will have to walk through a narrow lane (a.k.a hutong) before you see the well decorated hotel surrounded by old houses. The walk offers you some real images of lives of Beijing people. Second, the whole building is in Chinese style, from the yard/garden to the overall color. I enjoy the lobby design a lot: red and green in harmony. Third, if you pay attention, you will notice there are some very important neighbers. China Red Cross HQ is on one head of the hutong, the home of a General who was an important character in the wars around 1930s is next to the hotel.

The people in front desk can communicate in English very well. And I aslo see tours from Europ so I guess CS can speak more than one foreign languages. As we checked in at 8am, earlier than usual, they didn’t have the room I booked, they gave us a free upgrade from Dulex Room to a HUGE Suite for RMB 498/night. This was the biggest bonus at this stay. The interior of the room is pretty the same as regular budget hotels. The last renovation was in Sep. 2007, everything looks fine. Recommended for: family vacation and budget travelers. See more images here.

I stumbled to some Zurich Hotels from easytobook.com as I am curious about the hotel rates in European cities. The webiste is user friendly, its design looks good. But the best price is EUD 83/night for a single room in a 2 stars hotel in a entertainment district in Zurich, Switzerland. Hmm. pretty expensive. Maybe Switzerland is the last country in Europ to visit if you have a very limited budget. Soccer fans have suffered from not able to get visas to see the recent Europ Cup recently.

Hotels in Hong Kong? Carlton Hotel Hong Kong is amazingly attractive to people who want budget trips: only EUR 27/night in Tsim Sha Tsui. Want to check out next time I am Hong Kong.

Thanks to elliottng for his post of  Memories of Hong Kong in June of ‘89 on CNReviews, he reminded me the important day (today) in 19 years’ ago 1989. It may be the most historical event in my life so far although I was too young to fully understand what and why every thing have happened.  Even today, I still don’t fully understand the cause and result.

But, I was lucky enough that when I went to graduate school in Hong Kong in 2001, I was able to access all kinds of information (texts, images, video) from Internet and learned as many as I can about this historical event. Student Union of my college in Hong Kong has special memorial events on this day. They have been doing the similar thing for more than 10 years when I first experienced it. I know local Hong Kong people may get used to it (as they have been staying at the campus for 1-4 years). But people like me, from Mainland China, I felt more respectful to Hong Kong  for its openness and tolerance.

I have asked my couson who is born in 1992 if he ever knows about this. He doesn’t, as this historical event is not yet in History class; and in really life, he doesn’t have any channel to learn a word about it: TV, newspaper, Internet. No media is pushing this to readers or audience unless you are driven by strong curiousity and dig online + you can understand at least one language besides Mandarin. I’ve aslo asked my interns (all in colleges now) who are born in 1985 or 1986. Only one of them knows it.

Thank SDVC for the image.

Last December, China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) added the United State into the official tourism destination list reported by XinhuaNet. Early this month, CNTA head Qiwei Shao (邵琪伟) and U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez announced that Chinese citizens will be able to travel to US in tours from June. 17 2008. Travel agents from Beijing (北京), Tianjin (天津), Shanghai (上海), Jiangsu(江苏), Zhejiang(浙江), Hunan(湖南), Hubei(湖北), Heibei(河北) and Guangdong(广东) are in the first list that eligible to send tours to the States. These tours will be the “legitimated” tourists for the first time. Before U.S. become a travel destination, most of the tourists applied for business visa (B1 or B2) to get into the States.

According to data of US commerce department, there were more than 320,000 leisure visitors to US in 2006. These visitors were said to “have spent trememdous amount of money in US”. Let’s do an easy math problem: suppose the number of visitor to US increases by 25% compared to 2006, it will be 400,000 in 2008. According to travel agent, the average cost for a typical tour package per person is 25,000 RMB (apprx. $3, 570 USD). If eachvisitor spends 1,000 USD in the States besides the “all-inclusive” tour cost in shopping or casino, the Chinese visitor will spend total 1.8 billion in the States this year.

But I have to say the estimation of “1,000 USD for shopping” is very very conservative. Last year, Chinese spent $8 billion on luxury goods last year, accounting for 18% of the world’s total, the World Luxury Association says. Russell Flannery from Forbes didn’t say how much this 8 billion USD was spend outside of China where brand luxury goods are relative cheaper oversea.

Although 2 billion USD seems not like a big pie in the 90+ billion online travel industry, when you see the number by travel destinations by city, it is something. According to GNS Travel & Tour, a travel agent that is running tours for Chinese visitor in US, most of the visitors are going to visit East Coast: New York, Washington D.C. , Philidelpihia, West Coast: San Francisco, Los Angeles (things to do), Las Vegas (things to do), and islands of Hawaii (Honolulu Things to Do). It is estimated that by 2011, over 580,000 Chinese tourists will visit US annually.

But in 2006, there are already 1.9 million Chinese visited Europ. The most popular country is England in Chinese visitor. The most popular travel information website Go2EU in Chinese provides practical travel tips and guides such as how to get a visa, how to book hotels in London, what are the attractions for independent travelers. The most popular tags are “Rome” and “Paris” for cities and “Italy”, “England”, “Gemany”, “France” for countries. US is less popular than “Span”. The everage cost for a Europe tour is 1,500-2,000 USD per person. The bottleneck of China outbound travel to US is visa application which involves a long lead time interview appointment and high reject rate. But there are good enough of number of Chinese want to see US regardless of the complicated procedure.

So US travel agents, are you ready for Chinese visitors?

Data from the post are from this report in Chinese

An image of Jiuzhaigou I took last Oct. Hope this “heaven on earth” can be accessed again soon!

Uptake.com launched its public beta version on May 14. Users can search “hotel” and “things to do” with a theme-based filter, such as family friendly, pet friendly and even girls getaway. It is a travel planning service. Budget Travel called it “a clever twist on travel planning”. Read Write Web has a very detailed description on how this Semantic Travel Search Engine works from algorithm level. The exmaple Ontology can give you an idea about how the a “kid friendly hotel” is determined from 400,000 hotels in the largest database Uptake has.

I just tried the new launched “girls getaway things to do ” in Las Vegas. Four of the top five results it recommended are Museums. Hmm… it is interesting. If I take a vacation in Las Vegas with my husband, I don’t think we will go to more than one museum. But with my girl friends, It is very likely that we will go from museum to museum. I want to check out Guggenheim Hermitage Museum next time.

Uptake is formerly named Kango. Due to a name dispute with a classifield site called Kaango, it has to change from Kango to Uptake. It launched a private beta in Dec 2007. Now, user can try the product out without a password required.

This is the first image sent from the 5.12 Sichuan earthquake center Wenchuan by a Xinhua reporter at 12pm May 14 2008. Kids are expecting…

Relief for Wenchuan Earthquake Needed: 

CN Reviews has an up-to-date list of more than 24 charities that involved in helping Sichuan earthquake. Choose the way you are most comfortable to help it.

A terrible tragedy- a 7.8 earthquake happend in Wenchuan, Sichuan province China at 2:38pm on May 12 2008. More than 9000 death have been reported on May 13 2008 7am. More than 60,000 people were trapped and disconnected. China national TV station CCTV news channel broadcasts the after-tragedy rescue live. We watched TV for about 3 hours last night.

The center of the earthquake Wenchuan (汶川) is the home to lovely Grand Pandas. It is also a popular travel destination. It is reported that the roads to the best attraction of the province - Jiuzhaigou are seriously damaged in the earthquake. Jiuzhaigou is about 450 km away from Chengdu and around 300 km away from Wenchuan.

The neighborhood provinces: Yunnan (云南), Shanxi (陕西) and Gansu(甘肃) recorded death in this earthquake. Railways, freeways, power plants, telecom signal towers were damaged. More than 2,800 cellphone signal towers in Sichuan province collaped. Quite some cities and towns near the earthquake center lost electricity. Weather forcast says it will rain in the coming 3 days. So bad.

I would recommend you to change your travel plan to west China in the coming week.

The scene of a high school after earthquake in Doujiangyan (都江堰) which is famous for a dam built in 2000+ years ago. 100 km away from Chendu.

This Ming Dynasty tower in Sichuan Mingzhong city. The tower was 12 floors in the past 400+ years and now only 6 levels left.