Review of 1 Day Tour : Hutong, Lama Temple, Panda Zoo and Olympic Square by robin

We recently visited Beijing and used ChinaTour.net for three separate day tours. Day 1 we visited Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace . Laura was our personal tour guide and despite the rushed atmosphere caused to having to see so many sites in one day, she was very informative, exceptionally helpful, and a delight to be with all day. I highly recommend personal tour guides. The next day we visited the Lama Temple, the Panda Zoo and the Hutong. This was a small group tour and turned out to be a lot of fun. The Hutongs we visited were being renovated so there was a lot of construction debris. I think its great that these areas have been declared protected and are being redone. Lunch was great, in one of the Hutong houses. The Lama Temple was gorgeous and the pandas were sleepy and cute. The tour guide was incredible and I am sorry I forgot her name. I would like to give her personal credit for making this day a great memory. Our last tour was also a personal tour. We went to the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. We chose the Badaling site since it has the cable cars to take you to the top. I was a little disappointed in that we went to the Great Wall at the last or our tour. The sun was in our faces so any pictures I took turned out rather poor. It would have been better to go to the Wall first but it was incredible to see! During all three trips, side excursions to silk factory stores, cloissone factory stores and other preferred shops took up some of our day but there were no hard sells. Probably what was the most fun was going to the Silk Factory and Pearl Market store. This is 5 stories of shopping heaven. Resist the temptation of buying at the stores visited on the tours if you can. You can find everything you want here if you are willing to bargain. My advice? Start really really low. If we return to China, we will definately use this service again.