Talking Travel: CN Drops in Passport Ranking, BJ-SG Train Coming
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Talking Travel: your roundup of Beijing's latest transportation-related news.
Beginning Aug 30, Beijing Capital Airlines will add a "direct" Beijing-Xi'an-Lisbon service. The three outbound flights per week (on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday) are scheduled to leave Beijing at 6.30am and land in Lisbon some 13 hours later, after a three-hour stopover at Xi'an. Unfortunately, the return flights, leaving on the same days at 10.55pm, will take 25.5 hours and include a five-hour stopover in Xi'an.
Manual payment of on-street parking fees is soon to be history in Beijing, after five more districts in the capital – Chaoyang, Haidian, Fengtai, Shijingshan, and Yanqing – joined Dongcheng, Xicheng, and Tongzhou to digitalize fee collection as of Jul 1. Parking payment can now be made online via the Beijing Transport app, through the Beijing Transport WeChat account, or the in-app city service function on WeChat and Alipay.
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The Henley Passport Index (henleypassportindex.com) has released its 2019 rankings of the world's most powerful passports, which is determined according to the number of destinations specific passport holders can access without a visa. China ranked 74th this year, down three positions from 2018, with visa-free access to 70 destinations. Japan and Singapore both topped the list with access to 189 destinations each, followed by South Korea, Finland, and Germany, whose passports all afford their citizens access to 187 countries. At the bottom of the list, meanwhile, is Afghanistan, whose passport only allows its citizens visa-free access to 25 countries.
Lonely Planet's (lonelyplanet.com) annual roundup of the 10 best places to visit in the Asia Pacific has placed Beijing ninth alongside Margaret River and Southern WA in Australia; Shikoku in Japan; Bay of Islands and Northland in New Zealand; Singapore; The Cook Islands; Central Vietnam; Fiji; Palawan in the Philippines; and Cambodia.
Singing the praises of the China's capital, the travel company stated, "Beijing is modernizing without sacrificing a jot of history, feted in all its dizzying splendor at sights like the colossal Forbidden City, the biggest palace complex in the world, the Lama Temple, the visible-from-space Great Wall and the narrow, ancient alleys of the hutongs, where Beijingers now party in some of the city's hippest bars."
On this we would like to mention two things: A) With the continuing and well-documented eradication of Beijing's hutongs (and its hippest bars), we would tend to disagree that the city is developing without sacrificing "a jot" of its history (read more on this via QR code above), and B) It's a myth that you can see Great Wall from space (according to nasa.gov). Good job, LP!
Sick of flying? You might never have to leave the ground again if China's ongoing plans to develop its already vast railway network are any indication. The latest plan announced to link us to the rest of the world comes in the form of a new bullet-train route that will eventually connect Beijing, Laos, and Singapore. The track is currently under construction in Thailand, as a part of a USD 5.5 billion high-speed railway project that was signed in 2017 between Chinese and Thai authorities, and is set to begin operation in 2021.
READ: Pingyao: The Walled Historical Chinese City Matched by None
Photos: ttgchina.com, CNN, msn.com, hobotraveler.com
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