CHINA!  I love China!  Look at China!  Yes, this is CHINA!

Booking my trip to China turned out to be Hell.   Looking back though, I can see that there were so many things that would have been easier if I had just known what I can and what I cannot do, and how to get around the cannot part.  Every single time I tried to book something, I just kept hitting road blocks.  Then I would figure it out and hit another one.  Then another one.  To the point I could not take it anymore and I hated myself for ever wanting to go to China in the first place.

This is a guideline of sorts for anyone who needs help in booking a trip to China.   If you follow everything below, you will be absolutely fine and suffer no pain.  I promise.

MOST IMPORTANT!  Know your Visa requirements:  You will need proof of arrival to and departure from mainland China.  You need to purchase your flights before applying for your visa.  If you are planning to arrive at, or fly home from, Hong Kong or Macau, be aware that neither of those are part of mainland China.  You must show proof of how you are getting to mainland China and how you are leaving mainland China.  I showed I was going to be taking a ferry from Macau to Shenzhen.

If you are planning to go to either Hong Kong or Macau in the middle of your trip, and leave for the mainland again, you will need a multiple entry visa to do this.  If you have a single entry visa, your first entry will be your only entry.  Do not count on getting a multiple entry visa and do not book any plans you cannot cancel should you not get the visa you apply for.

In my case, I redid my plans to not leave the mainland and simply applied for a single entry visa, good for 30 days.  What they ended up giving me was a multiple entry visa, valid for a year, each entry up to 60 days. Who knows how this works.  All I know if that I can re-enter China as many times as I want until April 2015.

[China just started granting ten year visas to United States citizens.  I would not assume you are guaranteed a ten year visa if you apply.  Do not assume anything when it comes to China actually.]

If you are going to the consulate in New York City, it is rumored to be the worst place on planet Earth.  I cannot compare it to other places since I only went to NYC, but be aware that you will not be allowed to enter the building if you do not have your visa application ready to go.  This means that it must be typed in ALL CAPS.  The guards outside will ask to see it, I promise you.  If you do not have what you need, they will mock you.  If you do have everything you need, they will tell you that you are perfect and will tell the people who do not have what they need, that that they should be more like you.

I got there half an hour before doors opened and there were about thirty people ahead of me.   That pushing and shoving thing that the internet warns you that you are going to experience when you are in China?  You will experience this there.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE MOST CURRENT APPLICATION.  When I went, I discovered that the one that I printed out from the actual Embassy website was outdated.  If you cannot get the correct one from the actual Embassy’s own website, what do you do?  I got mine off of Yelp, seriously.  You cannot get one at the Embassy because you cannot get inside the Embassy without the application already filled out.

Still want to go to China?  Of course you do.

If you live in the United States and try and book a flight with a Chinese airline, good luck.  I could not get this done no matter what I did.  Could not.  I even had my credit card cancelled for trying.  I ended up booking my flight with Delta.  I don’t know if this applies to other countries, I can only share my own experience.

You must show an itinerary with booked hotels in your own name.  If you are traveling with someone and they have booked the hotels, you must get your name added to the reservation.  Contact the hotel or booking company to do this.

Once that is all done, you are ready to go!

China is enormous.  You may want to book domestic flights to get around.   You need to book domestic flights through a Chinese booking agent because you just cannot get a Chinese airline to accept American credit cards.  I used http://www.travelchinaguide.com/ for three of my flights and it went incredibly smooth.   To the point where when I got to the airport to take my first flight, I was so petrified that because this was the one thing that went so smooth, I would be faced with the disaster of finding out my flights were never booked.  But hey they were!

In order to use this company, you fill out a form on their website and then pay through Paypal.  Paying through Paypal is key.  Paypal goes through, unlike credit cards.

Booking train tickets in advance from the United States is a whole other hassle.  You cannot book online.  You can wait until you are there and book in person, but that runs the risk of your train being sold out.

Also, you may want to go from station B to station C and then find out that the line sells out at station A.   So you have to buy your tickets from there, and just board at B.  How would you know this?  You wouldn’t.  But a ticket agent would, use one.

I used http://www.china-diy-travel.info/ which is run by a very nice woman named Helen.  She was an angel.  She even sent me print outs to hand to the ticket agents when picking up my tickets, written in Mandarin, so that I did not have to worry about the language barrier.   She also gave me printouts to hand to taxi drivers with what train station I wanted to go to, so I could just hand it to them and again, not worry about the language barrier.  This was extremely helpful in Xi’an, which has two train stations.  Even if I were able to mime “train station” without her helpful print outs, who knows if I would have ended up at the right one.

I knew you could not book tickets until 20 days out (note, as of December 2014, it is now 60 days) so I waited until I was about 25 days out to contact a booking agent.  DON’T DO THAT.    The more and more she told me about nope can’t do this, can’t book that, that train does not even exist despite the schedule being all over the internet, the more I wanted to scream.  I had booked things I could not cancel and my train tickets were supposed to be the easy part.  As a result of this huge mess, I am now going to be on a hard sleeper in a middle bunk for 24 hours to Tibet.  If I had contacted Helen sooner, I would have been able to change my plans.  But by waiting until it was time to book, it was too late.  It never occurred to me that the booking train tickets could be such a nightmare.

I will be returning to China in May and this time booking everything is going so much smoother because I know what not to waste my time with.  I know what I cannot do (book China domestic airlines for one) and I am not feeling the frustration of hitting so many walls.

One of the biggest pieces of advice is something that may be obvious, but just in case not: If you do not speak the language of where you are going to be (Hint!  There is more than one language spoken in China!  Do not assume it is going to be Mandarin!), take a bit of time and find out what language is spoken wherever you will be.  Then spend a bit more time Googling anything you may need to ask (“One bus ticket to (this place) please”) in that language.  It will be so much easier to hand someone a piece of paper with what you want written in their language, than to stand there trying to mime the name of a city you don’t even know how to pronounce.   Also hint: If you want to know how to pronounce something, Youtube may be able to help.

China truly is a beautiful country and is worth anything you have to go through to get there. If you think China is all smog and crowds, then you really need to do a lot more research to discover China exists beyond Beijing.  It really does!  See?