Watching all of the happy, engaged tech folks this week on the Geeks on a Plane tour of Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai has me fondly reminiscing about my time in Shanghai and Beijing on the fall 2008 China 2.0 Tour.

We were an international bunch of bloggers/geeks meeting a bunch of China-based tech people, on their turf….probably sounds a little nerdy to some of you, but fond memories of the experience cause me to sit around sighing a lot. 

We did have to eat, sleep and do the tourist thing a bit in between tech presentations, so here are some resources I can recommend:

• Lodging. I stayed in the basic but affordable Orange Hotel (Beijing Jingsong Bridge East) in Beijing, with a nice room and screaming-fast WiFi. The considerably more opulent Marriott Beijing City Wall was several steps up in amenities and price – I was on a strict budget so admired it from afar, but my friends staying there liked it a lot. In Shanghai, take a look at locally-owned Quintet in the French Concession (here’s a review of Quintet from my China 2.0 colleague Elliott Ng.) For China as a whole, there’s the ebullient Winser Zhao’s Sino Hotel Reservation, a China-based hotel and travel search and reservation site.

• Eats. I’ve already blogged about dining Xinjiang (Uighur) style in Shanghai and the joys of the rbt chain’s boba tea.  In Beijing, we had a variety of spicy but delectable Yunnan Chinese cuisine at The Middle-8th Restaurant (here’s an interview with its chef) and duck to die for at Gold Mountain City (recommended by Beijing expat business expert David Wolf.)  In Shanghai I lucked into an amazing (and pricey, but what a view) lunch at M on the Bund, and more laid-back fare at Kabb in the well-designed but occasionally over-the-top Xintiandi section of town.

• Shopping and Entertainment. In Beijing, we didn’t have much time for frivolity, but a foot massage was perfect for attacking jet lag. In Shanghai, I met and was impressed by Toffler Niemuth; in addition to her “day job” at language learning company italki, she runs ShopMyShanghai guided shopping tours. After touring Yuyuan Gardens with an experienced friend, Christine Lu of the China Business Network, I can highly recommend hitting the stores with someone who can speak the language and knows what he/she is doing.

• Getting Around.  I spent a lot of time in cabs and on a bus with our China 2.0 group, but for subway info (particularly Beijing) it’s tough to beat David Feng’s Civitology for detailed information.

I’ve tried to provide the most updated links I can find, after pulling all of those well-traveled but crumpled business cards out from their rubber banded stack. Please let us know in the comments if I’ve missed any good places or if there are better links.

I won’t leave you dangling: bring beer.

I can hear you: huh? Do you mean they do BYO?

That was my response when my younger sister told me and my older sister that we needed to stop by a liquor store for a good-quality six-pack before heading to dinner at SPQR, where her boyfriend is a chef. Why do we need to bring beer? I hear they have a great wine list.

“Look,” she said, patiently exasperated with these two sisters who are woefully ignorant of kitchen etiquette, “kitchen staff really like good beer. And the guys on the line don’t make enough money to be able to afford it very often. So you bring them a six-pack of good stuff, or maybe a bottle of Jim Beam. Enough so they can share it, anyway.” Okay, I’d had my fair share of kitchen jobs, and I’d never heard of this. Granted, my six years of dishwashing, waiting tables, prep cooking (a fancy name for a job peeling potatoes, onions, and carrots), the stint as a pasta chef, and more waiting tables had all taken place in touristy Montana and one family diner in Minnesota. Not the foodie culture of trained chefs and artful local cuisine that she and her boyfriend are immersed in in the Bay Area.

Is this a purely San Francisco thing? I wanted to know. She wasn’t sure. Neither was her boyfriend when we asked him the next day. If this happens in other cities, this underground sliding of a good brew, I’d like to know about it. I bet you all would, too. Unspoken is the idea that, you take care of the kitchen staff and the chefs, and they’ll maybe take care of you. Since we were eating at a place where my sister knew the staff, it was hard to test the theory, but I’m eager to try it next time I’m in, say, D.C. or Seattle.

Bowing to our Montana roots (and our three-sister conviction that everything from Montana is the best except maybe seafood), we got a six-pack of my favorite beer of all time, Moose Drool (made by Big Sky Brewing in Missoula, where our mother lives), along with a 20-ounce bottle of my other favorite beer of all time, Maudite (meaning, “the damned one,” a crazy strong triple-fermented beer made by Unibroue in Quebec). Beer and 21-month-old toddler in tow, my sisters and I raced to an early dinner at SPQR.

I’d heard a lot about this place. Trained in culinary school, my sister’s boyfriend is enthusiastic about working under one of the best young chefs in America, Nate Appleman. Appleman — who won the coveted James Beard award for Best New Chef, was listed as a Rising Star Chef by the San Francisco Chronicle, and was chosen by Food & Wine as one of 2009′s Top 10 Chefs — was also featured in a Men’s Health article this month that reads as a love letter to really great free-range meat (The Beauty of the Beast can be read online, but I recommend the hard copy because the photos are bloody mind-blowing, literally).

I’m not a big meat-eater, so when I have it I want it to be really, really good. Damn good. And ethically raised. And that’s what SPQR does. Their cuisine is Roman, with a focus on the simple and the rustic, and the menu reflects Appleman’s talent in using all parts of an animal.

Let’s put it this way. I have always abhored cow tongue, but that night I went back for seconds, barely using the horseradish crème fraîche. I never knew arugula went so well with pork hearts, and I want to know the secret of that hint of mint in the lamb pasta. And did I mention the chicken nuggets my son gobbled? Healthy meat, healthy fat, actually good for you, and yet tasting amazingly close to McNuggets (come on, I know you secretly love them as much as I do).

SQPR’s menu, along with their great wine list, was the cause of my minor food-and-alcohol hangover the next day that fueled the early-morning walk around Haight-Ashbury, but I don’t regret it.

However, after stuffing myself silly I actually needed the 2 1/2-hour walk to make room for the brunch my sister and her boyfriend later escorted us to. Zazie, my sister said, made the best hollandaise sauce for their Eggs Benedict she’d ever tasted. And my sister knows from good hollandaise. She was right. Washed down with a cassis (blackcurrant) mimosa, it soothed the places previously filled by pig meat and wine.

Since we were stuffed to the gills, it of course made sense to stop by Magnolia, their favorite local pub on Haight Street, as a primer for dinner at Salt House, where my sister would not, for once, be waiting tables. Instead, she was eating with us — and in charge of buying booze for the kitchen.

Salt House is one of San Francisco’s premier restaurants. Its decor of exposed brick and solid wood beams is a nod to the location’s previous incarnation as a printing press, but also accents the simple, incredible food that my sister describes as “San Francisco, pure and simple.” Raw oysters, light fish, honey-glazed duck, fois gras — fantastic, sustainably-raised ingredients and local greens. It was decadent but not stuffing, especially when you start with a unique martini that includes chili powder and kaffir lime.

By this time I had, thank goodness, long forgotten that we started our whirlwind foodie tour of San Francisco with a stop at Tartine Bakery, where we’d fueled up after the two-hour drive up from Santa Cruz, before racing to dinner at SPQR. My sister didn’t miss a beat on this one, either. “The eclairs,” she kept telling me and our older sister on the way up, “you just have to have an eclair there. I don’t care if you eat anything else because we’re going to have a big dinner (boy, was that an understatement), but you’ve got to try an eclair.” I was game. I hadn’t had a decent eclair since I was nine years old, having tea at Vancouver Island’s Empress Hotel with my grandmother.

So we got in line at this obviously popular place, and were interrupted before ordering eclairs by a nice man loaded with a really nice camera snapping shots of my son peering around from the Ergo carrier on my back. Writing down our names, he said he was from the San Francisco Chronicle, taking photos for an upcoming Mission District Sugar Trail article, and had been told to by no means miss taking a picture of the brioche bread pudding. At that, my sisters and I looked at each other, and at the bread pudding. Um, yeah. We’ll take one of those, too. My son, as usual in these situations, got a chocolate chip cookie so large and so awesome that he refused to share. That was okay. I had an eclair.

If I’d had the time and money and didn’t mind leaving San Francisco a blimp, I could have followed up on some other recommendations. My sister is a manager at Blowfish Sushi to Die For, which is known for its knockout sushi and hip decor (think Manga and anime). She also recommends Farina, which is consistently voted the best Italian in San Francisco. And one of her favs (because it’s “incredible and so affordable”) is Namu, a Japanese-Korean fusion restaurant with a modern twist.

If you can’t get there yourself, then the next best thing is taking a virtual trip with someone else.

Thanks to Tourism New Zealand and TRENZ, you can join Ruth Atherley at Trenzblog and follow her adventures around New Zealand. Ruth started her blogging trip on the 31st of May with her flight over from Vancouver and immediately threw herself into the deep end by bungy jumping in Queenstown on her first day in New Zealand.  

For the past eight days Ruth as been visiting Queenstown and the West Coast of New Zealand (two of my favorite places) and this week will be in Auckland for TRENZ (Tourism Rendezvous New Zealand), New Zealand’s largest international tourism business event.

TRENZ (from 8-11 June) is a full on trade show featuring over 250 of New Zealand’s leading providers of accommodation, transport, activities and attractions, letting them showcase the best of what New Zealand has to offer.

Maybe next year I’ll attend but until then I’ll be there in cyberspace, following Ruth as she interviews leading tourism officials and discusses what’s happening at TRENZ via the trenzblog and twitter.

Trenzblog will be active until the 30th of June — what happens then is anyone’s guess.

I’ve been called a marginal techno-phobe, but those who know me know my aversion to social networking comes more from an aversion to socializing than to technology. That’s why it took me a while to get on Facebook (and how I’ve regretted it at times!) and LinkedIn, and missed MySpace entirely. But honestly? What better way to share immediate insights and passing thoughts about destinations and travel issues? Sometimes it’s better than my pile of mangled index cards that sometimes get accidentally tossed in foreign gutters.

I finally got my butt in gear and added myself to the legions of hyperactive Tweeters on Twitter, which means the whole Perceptive Travel team is now on board! You can now follow me — @amalchik — along with editor Tim Leffel (@TimLeffel), Liz Lewis (@kiwiwriter), and Sheila Scarborough (@SheilaS) for tidbitty insights to our travel-obsessed world.

If you like what we write here, and the information we bring, don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed, too!

Well, I’ve finally read and re-read my copy of Lonely Planet New Zealand’s South Isand and I’m ready to pass it on the winner of the book giveaway.

It’s in pristine condition, a little like the island that it’s all about. And one lucky winner will soon be able to read and dream of all the amazing places worth visiting.

This guidebook really is a gold mne for anyone considering visiting New Zealand. It features…

With such detail, you are guaranteed to not to miss any of the amazing things that the South Island has to offer.

Now on to the winner.

The trusting random number selector has chosen….

#5  Wild Junket

…as the soon the owner of Lonely Planet New Zealand’s South Island.

Congratulations Wild Junket. Send through an email to kiwiwriter at xtra [dot] nz [co] with your mailing details and the book will make it’s way to you.