Anyone planned a trip to China without a travel agent?

hook

i was there in 2005 i took the overnight to beijing from hong kong though i did take the overnight from bejing to xian it took 12 hours the rail fares in china are fairly cheap we had a private berth for 2 people to xian cost was no more than £30 we got our tickets straight from beijing train station

alyth

oh thank you all for your fantastic responses! From fiddling around with my dates I've managed to get cheap flights in October via Emirates, and rather stupidly I'd forgotten the fact that when in China last year the guy who took the Chinese tour (I'd gone with an American company) had his own travel company - in fact he's in Scotland later this year! So I'm going to email him tonight and see whether he can arrange the internal flights and perhaps rail travel from China - Xi'an. I'm not particuarly wanting a backpacker type adventure, I'm treating myself to fantastic hotels in Beijing and Shanghai but wanted a last final trip to China before settling down to middle-age!

My time's limited due to work constraints, but I spent 5 days in Beijing on my own last year before meeting up with the group and got used to the stares, in fact at Tianamen Square people kept taking pictures and I was videoed once - I'm blonde and that's a novelty for Chinese people. My company have an office in Beijing and Shanghai as well, so I'm going to try and get into the office and meet some of the people, and I have a Chinese friend in Beijing who may also be able to help me.

I loved all your experiences though, your advice is really so helpful, and cundall I printed off all the destinations in Chinese that I wanted to go to and just gave them to taxi drivers and didn't have any problems - one way I found to break the ice if a taxi driver asked where I was from was to show a British note - as soon as they saw the Queen's head we were sorted!

MORPH3US

GF is blonde too and they were amazed....

Happy times!

Voyager2002

I have dug out the websites for these:
elong.net; yoee.com ; Ctrip.com and 9588.com

Elong and Ctrip are the best known of these.