Dear Elaine,

Thanks a lot for organising our tour. We really had a splendid holiday and we really liked China.

The trip was wonderfully arranged, and we greatly enjoyed the rich variety of opportunities it offered us to see many different aspects of Chinese life and culture. It was a continually exciting and absorbing, but also an exhausting and demanding trip, especially after I injured my tired arthritic knee by so much walking for two weeks on end.? Almost all our guides were first-rate, speaking good to excellent English and providing useful information about the sites we visited. More important, most of them were very flexible, allowing us to alter the schedule in accord with our wishes and sometimes going out of their way to satisfy our particular needs.

For example, Sandra in Beijing arranged for us to visit a small art museum I had learned about, omitting locations we were not interested in, and hastened to find a store in which to buy a camera when mine ceased to work; Lemon or Shou in Shanghai arranged for us to visit the wonderful museum both morning and afternoon and similarly found a store for us after the?camera I had bought in Beijing was stolen in the museum; Jane in Chengdu added Tu Fu's cottage to the list of sights we visited; and Foster in Guilin arranged to find us an upper floor room in the hotel after the ground floor room proved to be unacceptably mouldy, and arranged for us to have massages before leaving. You of course were personally of great help in arranging for us, after my knee injury forced a change of plans, to take a later flight to Guangzhou and proceed directly from there to Hong Kong. Thank you again!

The most memorable natural sight for both of us was undoubtedly the Li River cruise in Guilin. Unforgettably beautiful. The Great Wall was of course spectacular, but so famous as not to be unexpected; so too the stunning terracotta warriors of Xian, some of whom we had previously seen on tour in San Francisco. More surprising was to find the Shanghai Museum such an astonishingly comprehensive collection of Chinese art of? every major kind throughout the ages: surely one of the greatest museums in the world (even if my camera was stolen there!).

As indicated, at least four of our guides were outstanding. But our very favorite was Shou, or Lemon, in Shanghai, who was especially energetic, lively, interested, and informed. She went far beyond the standard tour guide presentations and was a continual source of fascinating conversation. She seems to us worthy of advancement! 

Bob Torrance (rmtorrance@ucdavis.edu) and/or Donna Reed (dkreed@ucdavis.edu).

• Client's Information: Robert Mitchell, United States
• Tour Starting Dates: September 10, 2007
• Tour Itinerary: 16 Days of Best Seclected China Highlights Tour
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