We visited Beijing in the first week of June. We are Singaporean Chinese and can speak Mandarin well so many find it funny why we would engage an English-speaking tour guide for our trip. We planned our holiday to Beijing as a sort of “Chinese immersion” trip for our son who only started learning Chinese formally this year. We wanted an English-speaking tour guide to engage and interest our 7-years-old boy and introduce the Great Wall to him because the Great Wall day trip was the “highlight” of the holiday for him. We visited the other sites like temple of heaven, forbidden city, local hutongs without a guide on our own.
From the beginning, Qing has been very helpful in answering our queries on email and giving us advice. She assigned Becky to bring us to the Great Wall and our boy really loved her company and had a great time on the Great Wall. He was ill during the trip and Becky and our driver brought us around the city to try to buy western medicines for him – we are very thankful and appreciative of that after having met no success at the numerous local pharmacies around our hotel who declined to sell us paediatric western medicines without a prescription.
Becky was great with our boy and managed to engage and involve him during the trip even though he was a little bored with seeing palace after palace and grew tired after climbing on the Great Wall. She patiently waited for him to climb up and down each tower. He even wrote about her in his holiday journal!
The next day, the same driver brought us out to Longqing Gorge – a really nice scenic place where we could have a leisurely cruise, did a little hiking and had a nice picnic on a rock overhang. It is a nice place to bring young children and to see something different – for our boy it was a nice change of scene after several days of historical visit to temples, palaces. He had fun riding up the dragon escalator, river cruise, rowing a small dinghy boat with daddy and taking a cable car ride and short toboggan slide down.
Becky is thoughtful, attentive and focused on client’s needs, our driver was very friendly and drove safely. Qing was very sincere in helping us meet our needs during our tour and even offered advice for visits to sites which we did on our own – she wasn’t obliged to help us with that but she still went out of her way to do so. We’re glad to have met them and will recommend their services to others who are visiting Beijing with young children.
Dominique,Singapore
