Itinerary advice for china

I would definitely add Pingyao back in there per my previous itinerary suggestion.

For the Luoyang part, I would schedule a morning fast train Huashan to Luoyang, then do Longmen Grottoes and some city sights that afternoon, spend night in Luoyang. Next day to Dengfeng for Shaolin Si. While there are a lot of academies there for people taking courses, I'm not sure if they do a "fun" lesson or two over a day or so. I'm going to guess they do not, so while waiting for your investigation on this, keep the working model as per your original--to do this activity in Yangshuo. In this case, after the day at Shaolin Si (and there are some other things nearby like holy Mt. Songshan and one of the biggest active Dao temples in China), you'd get to Zhengzhou which is about equidistant to Dengfeng as Luoyang, and take the overnight train from there to Zhangjiajie, arriving midday.

Zhangjiajie: residual post-arrival half day to get to Wulingyuan and set up there. 2 days for Wulingyuan Park. 1 day whitewater rafting on the Mengdong River. 1 day Tianmen Mountain. So no, I don't think that 4 full days is too much. Putting Fenghuang or Dehang after is optional.

Yangshuo part--you can trim down after you see how the rest of the trip lays out and what the story is about Shaolin Si area lessons. Certainly what you have is too long for just ordinary sightseeing and typical activities (3-4 days is enough for that), but if your son ends up doing his kung fu there and you want to do your cooking classes or whatever, you'll need a bit of extra time.

I don't see any reason to daisy-chain extra stuff and more stops on this backbone, particularly as you said that you were more relaxed travelers.

Hi Jiejie and rp bourne,
Such a delayed response I apologise , things came up that took precedence and I am now back to working on locking in an itinery.
I am somewhat overwhelmed by having to book the detail of this trip in advance as I usually travel quite freely with few dates and times booked too far ahead, quite the opposite from trying to book train trips from across the globe through a third party ( not to mention the extra cost this entails). I am under the impression that I need to book longer trains in advance but can organise the shorter distances on location once in china. Or is it necessary to book all connections in advance do you think? Are there any sections that you think would be more practical to travel by bus as opposed to train? To book Train and bus journeys are the part that I find particularly difficult to find concrete information on so far. Do you have any advice for the best way to do this beyond checking for reviews on booking agencies?

At this point I have pretty much settled on an itinery looking very much like the one laid out by jiejie in previous post. This itinery is very workable thankyou, although I am thinking of slipping Datong back in there...it does appeal to me for whatever reason.

I have also been considering and wanted to check your opinion on whether you think that after Xian I should consider swapping out luoyang/Zhangjiajie to exploring Sichuan province and chengdu instead. It seems that the Hunan and henan provinces are said to be particularly hard to navigate with no Chinese and I speak no mandarin whatsoever. If you were choosing between these two, with a child in tow, which would you choose to explore? I loosely have a week in my itinerary to explore either.
(Very Rough outline: Beijing 6 days - datong and pingyao 4days- Xian 3 days - luoyang/zhangjiajie OR Sichuan 7days- rice terraces/yangshuo 8 days, with a couple of spare days for travel)

Thanks so much for your input and for answering my somewhat naive questions.

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