For Americans who grew up picturing China as the land of the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace and the Tiananmen Square, Beijing is definitley worth the visit. The minute you land in Beijing you'll feel like Marco Polo. Not only have you crossed the International Dateline, but you've traveled to one of the most exotic places on the planet. China is the land of pandas and pagodas, rickshaws and rice fields, farms and forests, mountains and monuments. It is acrobats and artists, children and chopsticks, tea and temples.
Some people only dream about going to China.
Those who do go, dream about going back. We think that probably no person comes to China, if they've got a reasonably open mind, that it doesn't change them in some way, said Claude Batten, a retired China tour coordinator from Queensland, Australia. Batten was among a group of international guests, tour operators, and travel writers invited to sample China's emerging ecotourism industry during the 1999 International Forest Protection Festival in Hunan Province. Nearly 6,000 people attended the festival's opening ceremony on September 22 in Zhangjiajie. Staged in a forest amphitheatre surrounded by sandstone spires, the ceremony featured singers and dancers in regional costumes and children parading with balloons in a tribute to the preservation of China's natural resources.