The Road to Luzhou

[Mengxin]

Sorry I am the person to lead more confusin! The city I was referred to in my previous post is about Lu-ding, instead of Lu-Zhou, I have never been to Lu-Zhou. Lu-ding is also located in Si-chuan Province, very near Tibet.

Sorry for the confusion!

Ha Ha, That's awsome. Dude is on his way from Miami to GZ and ends up in Tibet (in Febuary). You could make a movie or a TV series about that one. That's great! Take away everything but the man's clothes, drop him off in Tibet and tell him to find his way back home to Miami. Too funny. http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/emoticons6/24.gif

[ghostrider]

Just thought I'd update this thread since it's finally been resolved. And just in case anyone else finds themselves walking down my path in need of some helpful experience.

 

So, here goes...

 

I originally wanted to fly to Luzhou (Sichuan province) because that's where my wife lives.

 

The problem was that it's a small city and, at the time of this writing, the only way to get there is through Guangzhou. Also, the travel agents and websites I contacted didn't even recognize Luzhou's airport.

 

The next problem was that I wanted to get there the first week of February so that I could be with my wife for the new year celebrations.

 

So, after I found out that I could only get to Luzhou through Guangzhou, I then found out that all the tickets were supposedly sold. Mind you, this is an entire month before. That didn't make any sense to me.

 

The situation was looking grim and I told my wife what I found out. So, she called some travel agents in China and found out that "they" locked all the tickets from Guangzhou to Luzhou from January 25th through the second week of February. She also read in the newspaper that "they" were going to do this and that "they" were going to add new flights. So, that's why I (and everyone else) couldn't get tickets from Guangzhou to Luzhou.

 

However, since the newspaper article said that they were going to be adding flights, I figured that I could wait about a week and then I should be able to get a ticket.

 

But, somehow, even though the tickets were supposedly locked and nobody could buy them for that time frame, I was still never able to buy a ticket. My guess is that somebody bought a lot of the tickets to later resell at a premium.

 

So, I decided to just forget about this option and try to get a flight to Chengdu. From Chengdu, I could take a 3 hour bus trip to Luzhou.

 

This is what I did last year but this year that same ticket was coming up at about $1300 everywhere I looked. After checking every website and calling numerous travel agents, I was finally able to get a ticket for $1000 from a woman named Star who works at a New Jersey travel agency. ($300 is a LOT of money, when you don't have much to begin with.)

 

I highly recommend this lady for your travel purchases because not only did she get me a great price but she worked over several weeks to find a good itinerary for me. (PM me if you want her contact info.)

 

So, the moral of this story is that, if you're planning on traveling domestically in China anytime around the new year celebration, just forget it. At least, that's been my experience.

 

And, if you need to get to Luzhou and you can't get a direct flight from Guangzhou, the best way is to just fly to Chengdu and take the bus to Luzhou. It's actually a nice bus. They have big, comfy seats and monitors so you can watch a movie.

 

Maybe they'll show "The Road to Morocco."

 

The End.