We have three days to go before we leave on our longest flight ever to go to Beijing, China.
We have been busy with some last-minute preparations, one of them being the setup of VPN access before we arrive in China. We were aware of the need to have a VPN to be able to get around what is affectionately called the “Great Firewall” for China, a spoof on the Great Wall. China blocks all access to some of the more popular Western apps such as Facebook, Google Maps, well anything Google, WhatsApp, and a few others. In order to be able to access them, you have to have access to a VPN that simulates you being somewhere else, and most of the time, allows access to these blocked apps.
We thought we were all set to go with a VPN company that we read a lot about online that was supposed to be the “most reliable” VPN for use in China, but after more research, it was all marketing crap. There were many posts on several websites, Reddit being one of them, with specific discussions on China VPN usage and how useless many of the most advertised and popular VPN companies you see online are, they do not work at all in China.
There was no single clear-cut winning VPN for China, but there were several recommended. Many people sign up for more than one to increase the odds of getting one to work, it seems to vary by time of day, and some other factors.
In the end, we actually subscribed to three different VPN companies, Mullvad, LetsVPN, and AstrillVPN. Each had good and bad points, some limited the number of devices, and one was much more expensive than the other two. Since we’re not in China that long, we subscribed for only 30 days of service on each, and none auto-renew, so that is good. Astrill VPN was the most expensive at $30.00 for 30 days but offered unlimited device connections and had the most features. The other two were about the same cost, around $6.00 for the 30 days, but we had to pay to subscribe to two different LetsVPN accounts, one for each of us since they limit service to only two devices per subscription. Since we have two phones, a laptop, and an Ipad, we each needed to cover two devices, and needed two subscriptions for that.
In the end, we hope one or more of these VPN services will allow us to connect to the banned apps using hotel Wi-Fi services. The important factor on the VPN’s is that they need to be installed on devices before you get to China because once there, they are not accessible, most are blocked. It is sort of a big game because many of the VPN providers are somewhat China-affiliated, or so people say.
We were also trying to locate a small travel router so we could utilize faster Ethernet Cable connections in the hotels, but that proved difficult, the routers had to have specific software loaded onto them to use the Astrill VPN since it is open source through something called DD-WRT. None of the newer models of travel routers had DD-WRT firmware written for them yet, and older routers were no longer available to purchase, they were discontinued. Apparently, it is not that necessary, as proved by there not being any online information available since 2017 on the DD-WRT firmware router compatibility listing. Many routers use another more popular open-source firmware called OpenWRT, but that does not work with Astrill VPN, so we gave up on the whole router project.
We also added credit cards to the two popular payment apps in China, Alipay and WeChat. Both of these apps do a lot more than just payment. WeChat is the equivalent to WhatsApp in China. Most stores in China do not take physical credit cards directly, especially any issued from banks outside of China, so Alipay is essential.
We finally started to pack yesterday, we had a good idea of what we wanted to take since we just got back from a trip, we just need to adjust for drastically different temperatures, it will be warmer in most areas of China we are visiting, except for Lhasa, in Tibet. We are also taking one carry-on suitcase on this trip so we can make sure we have some clothes with us in case we have any flight issues or baggage issues. Stephanie is replacing her backpack with the carry-on, and we will only take one regular backpack for the trip, one for me to carry camera equipment in on excursions. That will be packed in the checked luggage.
I have already migrated my camera equipment to my smaller camera backpack and that is my carry-on. I was able to modify the arrangement of the sections inside the camera bag to allow me to take my large zoom lens. I had thought it might be too large to put into the smaller camera backpack, so I had taken the larger one to Iceland, and it was heavy. I was able to make the modifications to the internal dividers by taking out a few items we could pack in the checked luggage, There may be some situations where the zoom lens will be handy, for the day we see Pandas in Chengdu, and for the day we see the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi’an.
One other item we are working on is having the proper information for all of the medications we are taking with us, just in case there is some issues with getting them into China. Nothing we have is considered to be potentially difficult to get into China, but if there is some issue, we could be left without medications, so we will take the conservative route and try to take all of our medications in their original larger-than-necessary prescription bottles and also take the paperwork we get from the pharmacy showing the prescription and the medications listed for each.
We also received our final documents from Viking confirming the hotels we are staying in for the land portion of the trip, and they did not change, so we did not have to make any last-minute reservations for the first three nights we are in Beijing on our own, and then transferring to a Viking room at that same hotel.
Viking also sent us an email with some specific information we will need to provide once we arrive in China and go through their equivalent Immigration process. There is a form we will need to complete called the China Arrival Card, and there is specific information we need to put on the form about our arrival and departing dates and flights, the cities we are staying in, our passport and visa information, as well as some contact information for Viking for when we are on the ship. We made a “cheat sheet” for each of us in MS Word so we will have the specific information we need when we have to fill out the real form. We do not know if it is something we can do on the flight into Beijing, or if it is something we have to fill out after we arrive at the Beijing airport. The difficult part was the email from Viking was generic, listing both the information needed for people only going on the cruise, and then different information for people like us going on the the cruise and land trip. We made out cheat sheets specific to our itinerary to avoid any errors.
On a whim, I thought about going online to look at what the checked baggage weight allowances are for domestic flights in China. We wanted to make sure we did not have to meet more stringent requirements than the limits for International flights. Lo and behold, we found that for most domestic China carriers, the “free” baggage weight limit is 20 kg, or 44 lbs. This is lower than the 50 lb/23 kg limit we have for our international flights to China. Viking has not informed us about any baggage limitations for the three flights we have in China during the trip. We also do not know which airline(s) we are flying on to make sure we meet their limits. One carrier, China Airlines, appeared to have the normal 23 kg.50 lb limit for their flights. I checked several different Chinese airlines and theywere all the same, 20 kg.
We may try calling the Viking Customer Service folks to see if they can provide us with any more specific information. Maybe Viking has arranged for a different weight limit for our flights. If we can’t find anything out, we will just have to try and meet the 44 lb limit when we pack now to avoid having issues later on. The other surprising discovery was the low weight allowance for carry-on bags, most were at 7 kg, or 15 lbs, which is not much. We will have to see if we can find out if the airlines in China enforce these weight limitations. They certainly do not in the USA.
Well, I took some time to search online and it does not appear that there is any enforcement of weight limits for carry-on luggage. Most people seemed to think if it was close, it was fine, but others said they saw a lot of violations of both the size, quantity, and weight limits on many airlines operating within China, so I guess we will not try and meet the limit on weight for our carry-on bags. However, we will try to at least come close to complying with the limits for checked baggage unless we find out something different from Viking. We also posted something to the Cruise Critic roll call for these China trips, there is only one main roll call for all of the China itinerary combinations since there are not many of these trips.
UPDATE ON BAGGAGE: I called the Viking Customer Service and the representative said they recommend to be below the standard 50 lb limit for checked baggage, and 22 lb limit for carry-on baggage. She said these flights would be chartered, so they would not fall under any specific airline limits. I did not think we would have chartered flights because I did not think enough people were going on the various land tour segments to warrant that, our cruise was only 38% sold when I looked a couple of weeks ago, and many people are only doing the cruise itself, or just a portion of the land trip at the beginning. That percentage would result in about 360 people being on the cruise. We have no idea how many people are going on the entire land portion that we are doing before and after the cruise segment. It was sold by Viking in various length tours, our being the longest combination of land and cruise. I guess we will find out.
I heard back on my Cruise Critic Roll Call post from a traveler on one of the first China trips and they were told by their guide, who does not work for Viking, right before their first flight, that the baggage weight for checked bags was 44 lbs. This sent everyone into panic mode, Viking had told no one this different weight limit. In the end, they were not assessed any additional fees, or at least not yet, and they have now been on two different flights on different airlines. All of the baggage is handled by the tour, so no one individually had to present their luggage to the airline before their flights. That made it difficult for the airline to assess any excess weight fees. I suppose Viking must have intervened and taken care of any issue, and hopefully, this will become the standard for the following trips, including ours. We did verify that carry-on bags are not regulated at all, at least for quantity and weight, so we hope to avoid any issues there, I am sure we will be over the 15 lb limit stated by most airlines in China, that is about impossible to achieve, the suitcase weighs half that amount empty.
We did start our packing effort last night, we sorted through the clothes we had selected, made a few minor deletions, and then packed them onto our two large suitcases and the one carry-on we will be taking on this trip as a replacement for Stephanie’s normal carry-on backpack. We put a change of clothes into the carry-on just in case, and also cross-packed a few items into each suitcase, again, just in case there were any luggage issues. We will either finish packing tomorrow night, or Wednesday night, but we are basically done with the clothes packing, we just need to add shoes and a few other items. As in the past, the majority of our clothes go into one side of our drop-bottom suitcases, and the other smaller side is for shoes, toiletries, and any other non-clothing items we need to pack.
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