Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Tuesday

the 4th of February. Yesterday I was talking to Simon Cockrell, the specialist for North Korea.

Today, I have the specialist for China, none other than Wendy Wu herself. I think you've got

some breaking news about visas. At the moment,

getting a Chinese visa, I know from experience, is very long-winded, it involves visits to consulates,

it's expensive, it's tricky, real tangle of red tape, and we'll come on to transit visas in a moment

because that's another possible route.

So tell me how this special visa works.

How it works, that is, we will send you a link.

You just need fill in much simpler thing rather than the 12 pages of the proper form and just

do this link, fill in and upload a photo copy of your passport photo page.

That's all.

Once you're done that, 15 days before your departure, our China team will actually get all

this information go apply for you.

We will get to the visa in maximum of three days.

Then we will post it to your home, like normally take three days as well.

Then you will get it, off you go. And all the airlines

are familiar with it, you just take that special piece of paper to go to China. Very smooth.

This sounds miraculous, and I can't wait to try it out. There's also, for some years,

it's been possible to get into China using a transit visa, which is very different from a transit visa from anywhere else.

It was saying you could stay up to, I think, six days in a particular location

as long as you were going from, say, London to Beijing to Tokyo.

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