Today in China

Olivier, Jose and me are back from our expedition on the Huvsgul Lake in the North of Mongolia. Here are some pictures. I will upload more of them and provide a slideshow soon…

I recently received a request from one of Today in China’s Readers about how to import a car from abroad while you are in Beijing. Since I use to drive a scooter around Beijing (much more convenient than a car…) I had no idea and my first answer was the following:

Most of my friends here in Beijing prefered to buy a used or new car in China which is much cheaper.

Then I thought… Maybe I could make some more research and provide a better answer and decided to ask
Asian Tigers, a Move Management specialist in Asia and here is the answer I got…

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I dedicate this port to The Chiners… Francesco seemed so happy when I sent him this link! hahaha!

So, if you plan to travel around China and are afraid of taking the plane or just want to travel on a low budget, take the train! The question now is to know which train or even if there is a train between two cities. This is exactly the purpose of this page on TravelChinaGuide.com.

Let’s take for example Francesco and Celine who want to travel to PingYao for the Chinese National Day. They are students in TianJin so they are looking for a train Leaving from TianJin and Going to PingYao. And the website gives them the information about the train 4478/4475 from Tangshan to Linfen that would leave TianJin at 11:10PM and arrive in PingYao at 2:09PM the next day. The website even gives the price of the tickets for hard seat (7USD), soft seat (12USD), hard sleeper (14USD) and soft sleeper (21USD). I would recommend the hard sleeper…

However, something that this website will not provide is the booking of the tickets… and believe me, the tickets for the three official holidays (Chinese New Year, Labour’s Day in May and Chinese National Day in October) are difficult to get. And I would not be surprised if they get more expensive than the ones advertised on the website.

Anyway, have a nice stay in PingYao and bring back lots of pictures!

Yesterday, the first Beijing-Lhasa high altitude train arrived at Lhasa Red Ball. The only minor issue they encountered was… bags of processed food bursting due to the low air pressure after the train climbed above 13,000 feet and up to 16,640 feett to go through a pass in Tibet’s Tanggula Mountains.

You may find many more information related to the train on Tibet.cn. Here is the official FAQ

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