Train Bookings

It looks as if most of our train trips have now been booked.
Mind you, it took some time to go through the timetables and choose the trains that best fit our proposed itinerary. Then there was the issue that tickets are not made available or issued until shortly before the date of the train's departure - a somewhat uncertain and changing 5-20 days before. This makes it a little difficult to plan in advance with certainty. But leaving it all until we arrived in China raised the prospect of endless hours at railway stations across the country trying to buy tickets, often with only Chinese spoken.

The best option we found was to use an online agent. They charge a fee of about $24 per ticket for their services. Sometimes this is higher than the actual ticket price, although not for overnight sleepers or long journeys. It seems worthwhile, however, as they obtain the tickets and deliver them to your various hotels across the country.

We ended up using travelchinaguide.com. Their website had easy access to the train timetables. They also had free phone access in Australia as well as China, Skype, MSN. We couldn't book online as we didn't have all our hotel bookings made so did it all by email. They were quick and efficient. Lets hope the rest of the process goes as smoothly.

Now it's on to looking at hotels.