Epilogue I

It is Friday morning October 18, and I just completed the preliminary writing for the last post for the trip, our Travel Home post.  We have never gotten this far behind on any trip in the past, and that made it difficult to catch up on this one, even at home.  

We will be going back into each post to proofread them, and to add photos to the individual posts, and also to the Photo Albums.  We just did not have or make enough time to do more while we were traveling.  That will take several more days to complete.

We have added some photos to the Photo Albums, but are continuing that effort.  We also have some videos we may add to the site, or add to YouTube with a link to them in the next post, Epilogue II.  We still plan on giving some of our thoughts on China itself, and on the situation in Tibet once we do a little research to make sure what we learned is correct. 

We have spent some time pulling together all of the costs for this trip.  The table below shows all of the individual expenses and totals for the trip.

China Trip Costs

It was an expensive trip, but for the cost, we saw a lot and stayed in some really nice five-star hotels during the land portion of the trip, and that also included four separate domestic flights within China to travel to the various cities we visited. It was nice that we could pay some of the costs over time and not all at once.

Some of the extra cost was the total of  $3,798.00 we paid to Delta for seat upgrades to Delta’s Premium Select seats on the long-haul flights from Atlanta to Seoul, Korea, and back, which really made a difference on the 15.5-hour flight over and the 13.5-hour fight back.  It was well worth only upgrading those two flights, we did not see any benefit to spending anything to upgrade seats on the shorter flights from home to Atlanta (1-hour duration) and from Seoul, Korea to Beijing, China (2-hour duration) and of course, those same flight on the return journey.  The flights themselves were “free” from Viking, but we did pay them $500.00 more in fees to select our flights through their Air + service and for a flight deviation to go earlier than the Viking tour started.  I’m not sure there was much value in paying those, but it is a necessary evil with Viking Air.

Our trip, including the days we spent in Beijing before we joined the Viking tour, was a total of 25 days, so our total cost per day was $1,252.00 for both of us, or $626.00 per person, per day.

Overall, we did not think China itself was an expensive place to be, the food was reasonably priced when we did eat out away from an expensive hotel, and the transportation costs for using the Didi Ride Share, similar to our Uber, were a great value, rarely did we spend over $4.00 to go anywhere.  The most expensive ride was from the airport to the Ritz-Carlton in Beijing, and that hour-long ride was only $14.00.

One day we may go back, our China Visas last for ten years. so we still have plenty of time left on them for another trip.  This was a good experience for our first time visiting China, but we feel confident we could do a trip on our own now, and it would be much less expensive.  None of the sights were costly and many may have been free for anyone over 65, we experienced that when we went to the Temple of Heaven on our own, I did not have to pay any entry fee because I was 65.  

We certainly have options and may go back to see other areas in China and travel on their extensive high speed rail system, it may be easier than flying.