Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #101404 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 896 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780470181843
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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

About the Author
Simon Foster was born in London and grew up in rural Yorkshire. Family trips first kindled his wanderlust and after graduating in geography from University College London, he set off to seek what he had been studying. He started work as an adventure tour leader in the Middle East in 1997 and was then posted to India and China. Lengthy e-mails home evolved into travel writing and he has contributed to several. Simon now lives with his wife and dog in sunny southern Taiwan and leads Grasshopper Adventures’ (www.grasshopperadventures.com) Taiwan and Silk Road Story photography tours. When he’s not travel writing or tour leading, Simon enjoys, you guessed it, travel, whether to the Philippines or just back home to Yorkshire.

Jen Lin-Liu has worked as a freelance journalist based in China for 5years. She has written for the Associated Press, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Though born in Chicago, she was raised in southern California and studied at Columbia University. She is currently writing a book about how and what modern China eats. She would like to thank Wang Xin, Sherrise Pham, Hyeon-Ju Rho, and Matt Flynn for their much-needed help in traveling to far-flung places.

Sharon Owyang, born in Singapore and a graduate of Harvard University, divides her time between film and television projects in the U.S. and China, and freelance travel writing. She is the author of Frommer’s Shanghai, 3rd Edition, and also contributed to the 1st edition of Frommer’s China. She has also written about Shanghai, China, Vietnam, and San Diego for Insight Guides, Compact Guides, the Los Angeles Times, and several websites. She speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, and enough Shanghainese to be a curiosity to the locals. When she’s not traveling, she pays her dues in Los Angeles, California.

Sherisse Pham graduated from the University of British Columbia and immediately hopped across the Pacific Ocean to live in Asia. She is a Beijing-based freelancer who has contributed to several Frommer’s guides, including Frommer’s Vietnam, Frommer’s China, Frommer’s Beijing, and Beijing Day by Day. She has also worked for Zagat’s Survey as a shopping editor and contributed to several local and international magazines and websites. She would like to thank Karen Xiaoling Wang for her excellent work as a fact-checker and occasional translator. A big thank you also goes out to Linda Barth, her editor at Frommer’s, who polished things off and fashioned it into the wonderful guide you have today.

Before she could even read, Beth Reiber couldn’t wait to go to her grandparents’ house so she could pour through their latest National Geographic. After living several years in Germany as a freelance travel writer for major U.S. newspapers and in Tokyo as editor of the Far East Traveler, she authored several Frommer’s guides, including Frommer’s Japan, Frommer’s Tokyo, and Frommer’s Hong Kong. She also contributes to Frommer’s Europe from $85 a Day, Frommer’s Europe by Rail, and Frommer’s USA, and writes a monthly column on Japan. When not sleeping in far-flung hotels, she resides in Lawrence, Kansas, with her two sons, a dog, and a cat.

Lee Wing-sze, born and raised in Hong Kong, is a freelance writer, translator, and avid traveler. She studied English Journalism at the Hong Kong Baptist University and has worked for the city’s English-language newspapers, the South China Morning Post and The Standard, and contributed to Cosmopolitan’s Hong Kong edition. Her dream is to travel every country on the earth.

Christopher D. Winnan’s love/hate relationship with the continent currently known as China has lasted more than a decade. He has lived and worked in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and, unable to keep his comments to himself, has written extensively in both English and Chinese, most recently for Time Out and Intercontinental Press. Last year he bought a retirement house in Thailand, but even that cannot seem to keep him away from China, and he is currently residing in Dali, Yunnan Province.

Customer Reviews

A userful guide with some shortcomings
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.

I think tenley peterson is looking at a different book
My copy of this title has the Chinese in large, useful characters right next to the maps. Only if there's no map for a small town is the Chinese listed in the back, with the information for each town handily grouped together in alphabetical order.

And like every other guide book, the map for a town is in the middle of the text talking about that town. So what's hard to find? The hotels and places to see are right next to the map in most cases. And since the towns only have one map, what's to guess about which maps things are on?

I don't know about the Beijing and Shanghai guides, but of course there will be a lot of repeated information. The sights don't change, after all. The best place to eat is the same. Bus 47 still runs the same route. Of course lots of the information is the same. What do you expect?

But what I do agree on is that this books is waaaaay more accurate than any other I looked at. I'm no fan of the usual schmaltzy Frommer's style, but this book really tells it like it is. It has the most extensive, detailed and accurate practical information of any guide I've seen, including the do-it-yourself budget guides.

And while we're on the topic of Chinese, note that for every recommended restaurant there are recommended dishes, and the characters for them are given so you can just point to them to order. There's also a good long list of Chinese favourites you can buy anywhere.

And while the major destinations are covered, this guide also scores with some remote rural destinations I've not seen covered anywhere else, including LP. Even if you don't want to go there, it's fascinating to read about the real China away from the regular tourist routes.

You know, the first thing you want to check out when you buy a guide is the author biogs. Most of the writers on this guide speak Chinese and have lived in China. It really shows. All the LP and Rough guide readers were borrowing my copy all the time and making notes.

Woefully inadequate
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.