Hello all, it's time for me to ask the great members of this site on suggestions for my upcoming trip to China. On "another" site these questions for Japan eventually turned into the official Japan Travel Thread which has made it's journey over to here. Maybe the same will happen here :).
I'm leaving October 10th (arriving Oct 11th) and leaving on Oct 26th. Flying in and out of Hong Kong via Air Canada leaving from Pittsburgh. .
City suggestions? How and where to see the Great Wall? Hidden gem cities? Day trip suggestions? Good way to get your China visitors visa? etc. Thanks in advance!
It would really help if you narrow down a bit on what you want to do, but I will throw some general ideas for you to consider -
Hong Kong is the greatest city in the world and you should spend some time there.
Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan is a great city with amazing food, also, the best place to see Pandas. The area around it is very pretty. Google huanglong.
Guilin is gorgeous, consider taking the boat to yangshuo there. You can spent quite a few days mountain biking and hiking in the region.
Kunming is the cleanest, best designed and best run city in China (it's a bit of a model city since they run all their pilot programs on it) and it's in a beautiful region.
If you want to see mountains, google Zhangjiajie, hua shan and mount tai and pick the one you think is the prettiest (I can list 20 more if you want, I tried to keep it manageable).
X'ian is really pretty, has amazing food and is in a really beautiful region, I believe the high speed rail from Chengdu to X'ian should be open now and I would highly recommend taking it. The terracotta army is there, but honestly, it's shitty, would skip.
Shanghai is the most westernized city in China and as someone who lived in Beijing I'm contractually obliged to shit on it. It has great night life, amazing skyline and the most art deco buildings of any city in the world outside NYC. Also, their food is too sweet and they have no culture.
You go to Beijing to see the great wall and the forbidden city, it has amazing food and great night life, but the touristy stuff there is not great. I would not budget too much time there.
That's just stuff that popped in my head, I traveled China a lot, if you have any other questions I will be happy to answer. Once you settle on an itinerary, I can go into more details, I'd rather not wall of text about a region you won't visit.
p.s.
I always that that the UNESCO list of world heritage sites is a great place to start when planning a trip to a new country.