VPN?

Booked on the October 31 departure from Beijing....also monitoring the site for any information regarding Hong Kong.
On a separate matter, wanted to ask if anyone traveling in China has used a VPN? I've read about the problems with gmail, etc., being blocked in China, and that the work-around is to use a VPN. Tauck doesn't mention it in the booklet.
Any comments from other China travelers, or Tauck, would be welcome.
Looking forward to our trip....
Suzy800

Comments

  • This has been discussed before, so a search may help with more info. I used NordVPN while in mainland China (no blocks in Hong Kong). They have a category called "obfuscated servers" and I had about a 50% success rate with those. The problem with The Great Firewall of China is they block the IP addresses of known VPNs, so it's a cat and mouse game - as China blocks a server, the VPN changes its IP address.

    I always use a VPN when travelling, especially in airports where there are often fake, free wifi hotspots that are there to harvest usernames and passwords.

  • We leave in two days to take the tour beginning on the 17th. We got ExpressVPN to use on the tour and are trying it now. It does not seem to work on my iPad in the house, maybe we have too many devices here. We have no experience of using VPN but decided to give it a try and signed up for a year because it was cheaper to do this and we are traveling to very remote places in the next six months.
    Notice lots of trouble in Kowloon today where the Tauck hotel is situated. I’m so surprised no one has posted any comments here after they returned for, a trip recently......but maybe they never made it home.......or maybe the trip got cancelled or people cancelled and it didn’t run.

  • Thank you British and BKMD. I've downloaded Express VPN and will have to practice before leaving... Really all I care about is keeping up with gmail, and checking BBC and CNN...
    I'm also very surprised there have been no recent postings on Hong Kong, and no updates from Tauck.
    Safe travels!

  • My husband had to call Tauck this afternoon to get correct dates of arrival in Kenya and Tanzania so he can start filling in visa forms for our upcoming tour. While he was on the phone, he asked about HK and the agent said there had been no changes or problems with tours that have recently returned from there.

  • I am planning on using Google Fi with VPN for my trip in a few days. Stay tuned for results!

  • I’m in Beijing right now And using VPN

  • Suzy. There were supposed to be 32 on our tour but now there are 24. We met some of them this morning. Met our tour directors already, tour begins tonight. We have had him for a previous tour and earlier tours have been fine in HK he says

  • The hotel in Beijing blocked VPN over their WiFi, but you can use It with cellular roaming if you have a reasonable data plan from your carrier. The resort in Gualien’s internet was too slow, but generally, Everywhere else, VPN worked over WiFi. Hong Kong doesn’t block Google, Facebook, etcetera, but a VPN keeps you more secure.

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