Our Trip To China - October 4th-16th, 2001



Rick and Mei-O Shabsin
of Rochester, Minnesota
"...our trip of a lifetime!"

Click on this map for more information on China

Our trip to China in October of 2001 began with us flying from Minneapolis to Detroit, Detroit to Tokyo, then Tokyo to Shanghai, arriving in Shanghai on Friday evening, October 5th. The map above indictes our itinerary within China: the green lines indicating flights we took, the red line indicating the path of our 841-mile five day cruise up the Yangzi 1 River (Chang Jiang on the map). The trip was offered by Pacific Delight Tours and for us, ended up being the vacation of a lifetime.

Our tour group consisted of 38 people, mostly couples but a few singles, from all over the U.S., including three of our friends from Rochester, and one of our friends' daughter. We all joined up in Shanghai where we were met by our tour guide, Mr. Wang Chengli ('Charlie') and our local guide for our stay in Shanghai, Mr. John Wang. Upon arrival Friday evening, we settled into the Hua Ting Hotel (all of the hotels we stayed in were five star hotels) to get some well needed rest after the long flight (and to try to adjust to the jet lag), anxious to begin our exciting journey on Saturday morning.

In general, I've broken the trip pictures down into the various legs of the trip:

And here are some comments and personal thoughts about the trip and what it meant to me and our detailed itinerary outlining where we went and what we did.

There are currently over 240 pictures on-line! You probably don't want to see them all at once, so come back often!

1 The correct spelling using the official Chinese Pinyin system of romanization of what has commonly been known as the 'Yangtze' River is 'Yangzi' which is what I have chosen to use throughout this web site when referring to the river. In actuality, the Chinese call the river the Chang Jiang, or 'Long River', it being the world's third longest river after the Nile and the Amazon.