As extensive travelers, we have had a lot of experiences on tours. As a visitor to a foreign country, what you expect is learning from the natives a little of their culture.
This is the first time I write a review like this because I don't like to mess with someone's job, but as a client and a traveler I am very disappointed. This could be one more tour from the point of view of the tour guide, one more time in the Great Wall, but this is the ONE AND ONLY tour I would have to the Great Wall of China, our only experience, our unique day coming from the other side of the world.
This tour was more like an expensive taxi to go to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall alone. The tour guide barely talked to us during the times we were on the car on our way to the sites.
As part of their job, you expect that a tour guide will be there talking a lot about the places, the country and the culture, at least that has been our experience in all tours around the world. Most of the time he kept talking in mandarin with the driver, he kept silence and even he fell asleep! During our way back from the Great Wall to the hotel, he was sleeping almost all of the way.
If the man wants to be a tour guide, he needs to understand the needs of foreigners in terms of information. If we wanted to be quiet all the way, we would hire a taxi. Actually, we have had transfers and taxi drivers that have talked to us more about their country or even ask us about ours.
In the tombs and in the wall he barely shared information, even if all these places hold centuries of history. At some moment, we passed by another tour guide as she was explaining a lot of what her group was seeing and I even told our tour guide: what is she saying? Just to provoke on him to explain more. He gave us a short explanation of what we were looking at, and the other guide was still talking while he was in silence.
He looks like a nice person, but if he wants to pursue into tourism like a tour guide, he needs to continuously talk about all important stuff of China, history, the things or areas that we are passing by or at least talk to us of what we've seen already.
The other thing is the driver. He kept driving like crazy and we felt so insecure. In one moment, he started driving through the emergency lane and he kept changing lanes without precaution, sometimes keep driving in the middle of two lanes.
I have to say that the Tombs was a nice sightseeing and the Great Wall was a breathtaking moment, though, but yet we felt we could do it alone with a taxi as we only got a short piece of information in each place. We were extremely excited to visit this, since as part of the world history classes that we took during our school years, we learned and saw it in pictures.
The lunch was nice. We asked not to be taken to any shopping tourist trap, and at least they kindly accept it.
As I said, I was expecting more for that only day we would be visiting this part of Beijing. Coming far from America, is difficult to get to China again.
As professionals in our own careers and as a recommendations for his future, we told the tour guide the things written in this message. We are letting you know so you, as a company, keep updated the trainings of your tour guides and make sure they are competent tour guides because, sadly, the image that we got from your country is not the best one.