My husband and I had just recently taken a tour of China and the surrounding areas for our honeymoon. Since I am the type of person who likes to do everything on my own I decided to plan the whole trip. I booked the plane tickets and all the hotels via the internet. Needless to say, I wish I just done it through a travel agency to coordinate all of our transfers to and from the airports, the land tours and to deal with all of our unfortunate events.
We first flew into Hong Kong which is an amazing city but our luggage had not made it to our destination. It was still stuck in the states and needed another day to get here since it took us 22 hours to arrive to Hong Kong. We check-in to our hotel and the hotel is decent but a little small. We reserved a room with 1 king-sized bed and got a bed smaller than a queen but not yet a full. We go to the front desk and try to explain to them what happened and they said they couldn’t do anything for us. We find out later that is what they call a king-sized bed. My husband is a large man and that first night of sleep was awful, uncomfortable and not so much fun for us as newly weds.
The next day comes and we’re off to the mainland without our suitcases. They promised to get our luggage to our next destination so we had to deal with what we had as carry-ons. (The people in China are small and don’t carry very large clothing). The transfer that we had arranged ended up being this petite truck with no seat belts. It had holes in the seats, cigarette burns all over and smelt like a dead skunk. The ride was 3 hours and I wanted to vomit from the condition the car was in and the way the driver was driving. Red apparently doesn’t mean stop, it’s just a suggestion. At least we got our luggage there.
We stayed in a city called Guang Zhou for 2 nights and witnessed the most indecent thing happening in our hotel. Witnessing this had definitely threw me off and made me want to switch hotels; if I had an extra night. I was so happy to leave the next day to Shanghai. That was probably the best part of my trip. After Shanghai we went to Beijing where people at the hotel were rude and unwelcoming. Hailing a taxi and having it take you to where you wanted was by far the hardest thing to do. Taxi drivers would pretend not to know where our destination was if they didn’t want to take you there. How could you not know where the most touristy destinations are? Not to mention traffic was absolutely ridiculous and the subways smelled like rotten bananas. We ended up walking a lot and this time of the year is beyond freezing. It was so cold I wore 2 pairs of pants and 3 shirts on top of all my outerwear. We took a tour to the Great Wall and the tour bus driver got lost for an extra 2 hours.
I was completely over our honeymoon and just wanted to return to the United States. We tried to switch our plane tickets for an earlier flight out but didn’t succeed because of the fare differences. They wanted us to pay an extra $1,000 each. We felt like we were being held captive on our own honeymoon.
