Spoiler alert!  There is no beach near Beijing!  However, I didn’t discover this until AFTER I had convinced a group of 15 of my fellow classmates to take a day trip to the sea!  We were two weeks in to our study abroad in Beijing, China and had a few days off to explore. After looking at a map and noticing how close the coast appeared to be, which was pretty much the extent of my research, I came up with the brilliant idea to take a trip to Tianjin and spend a day at the beach. When I posed this to the group, everyone agreed without hesitation!

The following morning we got up early, donned our bathing suits, shades and sunscreen and headed to the train station.  We took a High Speed Bullet train to Tianjin (which reaches speeds up to 329KM!). That’s sort of when my “plan” started to crumble.  We had some lunch to re-group only to discover that one of our classmates was MISSING!  While we fretted about our lost friend, we learned from some locals that we needed to take a bus to get to the coast.  As we were gearing up to leave, our missing friend miraculously emerged from the train station! I don’t know how he found us, but we were all relieved he did! At this point, it seemed like things were looking up!

After giving high fives and pats on the back to our newly found friend, we all boarded the bus. It was high class all the way with upside down water buckets placed in the center aisle for added seating.  After about 45 minutes, it sort of looked like we were nearing a body of water although all we could really see were factories and abandoned houses…not very promising.  We tried to describe our desired destination to our fellow bus riders who told us to get off at the next stop. WOO HOO!  Looking back, they were probably just sick of us and wanted the extra seats!

Turns out our next “stop” was none other than an industrial shipping port.  There WAS water, just not quite what we’d had in mind.  Another local informed us that we needed to take yet ANOTHER bus to get to the “beach”.  After having already spend 4 hours in transit, we had pretty much come to grips with the idea that there would be no sun or sand in our future.  We took some pictures of our friend to commemorate his first visit to the “ocean”.  It was about as pitiful as you can get!

With our original plan spoiled, we decided food would be the only thing that could salvage our experience.  We found a pizza place and had just settled in when the Russian in our group, whom we endearingly referred to as ‘Sargent Serge’, dashed all our dreams.  With his voice of reason he informed us that if we didn’t leave IMMEDIATELY we would miss the last bus that would get us back in time to make our train.  Siiiiigh, the pizza would have to wait!  Luckily, we made it back just in time to catch our train. We never did see the beach, but we made some great memories nonetheless. It was one of my MOST epic travel fails, but I don’t think any of us regret it!

Have you experienced any funny travel fails? If so, how did you handle it? Share your comments below!