Chengdu to Chongqing

(19/11/2006-2/12/2006)

When I got to Chengdu at 5 in the morning it did seem warmer, which was to be expected being a few hundred kilometres south of Xi'an, but the temperature gradually dropped and then it started to rain the next day. For the next week I did pretty much nothing, as I was recovering from my cold and on the Monday put my passport in to get a visa extension, which meant that I couldn't leave the city. Luckily the hostel I stayed at, Mix Hostel, was really good: as well as having weird Maoist propaganda themed promotional material and an unexplained obsession with donkeys (which Sally and I found particularly amusing, as once in Mongolia Luca had been explaining what animals he had, and he described his donkey as "she's very funny - and you can eat him!"), it had a DVD room, good food, electric underlay in all the rooms and dorms, and a nice courtyard. I was also not alone: Bart was staying there, having left Xi'an the day before me, and so was Nina in a different hostel.

Sichuan, the province Chengdu is in, is famous for it's spicy food, so as I like chillies I wanted to try the hotpot. Unfortunately, Bart and I managed to find the overpriced place with a ridiculous amount of staff (at one point we had 5 at our table), and it wasn't even that great. The chillies were weak, and the famous "Sichuan pepper" wasn't really spicy, it just tasted weird. After that Nina and I had great difficulty finding somewhere not selling hotpot. We tried the vegetarian restaurant in the monastery near the hostel with Bart, but we arrived late and it had closed, so then had to spend three hours traipsing across town to the Tibetan quarter.

On my fourth day both of them left, so I spent the day watching DVDs, including one called "And Starring Pancho Villa As Himself" which was actually pretty good, while I waited for Sally who arrived that afternoon, having returned from Japan. The next day we also did nothing as it was still raining heavily, but the following day we ventured out to the vegetarian restaurant I'd previously failed at, and had among other delicious dishes one called "eel". There we met a Swedish guy staying at our hostel, and once I'd picked up my passport we went with him looking for an amazing sounding theme ride in one of the city parks. The Lonely Planet described it as involving aliens, cowboys, and ending by going through the mouth of a shark, but we couldn't find it, despite wandering all around the park.

However, we did find something else. A couple of official looking guys stood at the entrance, we had no idea what we were going into but as it was only about 5 yuan we paid and entered. At first it was just some dimly lit corridor, apparently a disused bunker for high up party officials judging from the decor and rubble, but soon we were walking past bizarre ghost exhibits that started when we walked past and emitted crazy noises. There were demons, people being tortured, people rising from coffins, and a couple of rather disturbing ones featuring laughing pigmen. Half of them weren't even lit, but luckily Sally had a torch, so we could wander around Resident Evil style until we finally got tired of them.

The next day we went to the pandas, the main reason we had come to Chengdu, and in Sally's case, the main reason she'd come to China. For this we went to the panda breeding centre and saw them at feeding time. They were very cute, and also very lazy as they didn't do a whole lot except eat, some not even bothering to sit up to do so, despite having pretty huge areas to roam around in. One we saw was perched in the tree asleep, but woke up as we passed and proceeded to scratch himself for a full 10 minutes. We also got to see the babies they'd managed to breed in captivity. Unfortunately my camera hadn't been mended as it cost too much, and the rubbishy cheap film one I'd bought didn't work either, so I got no photos.

After that we had lunch at the vegetarian restaurant again, this time we tried the fantastically named "Dance of Dragon and Phoenix", a tasty tofu dish. Then Sally went to buy jeans while I spent a couple of hours in the two huge buildings known as computer street, eventually buying a nice little Nikon camera to replace my broken Fujifilm one. I also got a nice fake fur hat, as we had booked to go horse trekking in Songpan the next few days, which promised to be a bit chilly.

So the next day we had a horribly early wake up, left most of our stuff in the hostel luggage storage, and got the bus to Songpan. We were joined on this by an Israeli girl by the name of Ila. The journey took something like 8 or ten hours up windy mountain roads, the air getting steadily clearer the higher up were went until finally we could see miles into the distance, as Songpan as about 4000 metres above sea level. On the way we passed yaks who had been all dressed up in colourful clothes, although I missed this as I was asleep most of the time. Once there the route for the next few days was explained to us: the first day we would trek to the base of Ice Mountain, the next day we would go up to the top of it's 5500m+ peak and back again, and the last day we would come back.

They gave us a room in the hotel and then we went wandering around the town for supplies such as food, waterproof clothes, and poncho blankets. Songpan is quite a nice town, the centre is in an old wall and full of tourist shops, but it is set in the mountains. It was very very cold though. When we weren't moving we huddled in our beds under several layers of blankets, and outside had to wear most of the clothes we'd brought at once. And it turned out we had two nights there, as the next day Sally was ill, almost certainly due to the pancakes from the restaurant known as Sarah's, so we moved everything along one day.

The day after she was better though so we set off, accompanied by a guide each. Again we had little horses like in Mongolia, and these were loaded with blankets, our bags, and other equipment so that our seats were much more comfortable than if we had been on bare saddles. This was lucky, going up snow covered mountains on little horses isn't that much fun, as you're constantly in danger of falling off as they slip all over the place, and Ila did so twice. I did too, hurting my hand (which continued to hurt for a month or more afterwards), although this was more my fault for being too eager to get off the standing horse to go to the toilet and not realising that I was affected by the altitude than the horses.

In some places when we had to go down steeply we had to get off our horses, which is lucky as I saw one fall off the edge as it went down the path. It landed on its feet and trotted on, but it wouldn't have been fun to be on it. The longest of these breaks must have been very high up as I felt very weak and dizzy, trudging down in a daze, so I didn't notice that the two girls fell behind and got lost until I had to wait for ages with one of the guides while the other two went off to find them. The fact that it kept snowing didn't help matters either, so we were all relieved when we reached the small village where we'd be staying the night, although it was very picturesque riding through the snow, I kept thinking of the beginning of "The Great Silence", and the landscape was stunning. The wooden, drafty house we'd be spending the night in was also home to a family, including funny little boy who kept pretending to want his photo taken and then hiding. To keep us warm the guides offered us long, Tibetan style coats, which I tried on but found my coat was warmer. Everything we didn't wear at night we piled on top of the pile of blankets and sleeping bags the three of us would be sleeping under.

The next day we decided it was too dangerous to go up a high mountain with the weather that there was and the equipment we had, so we asked the guides if the next day we could instead just ride around the area for a bit. This proved much more relaxing, as we weren't going up and down too many steep slopes and could stop whenever we wanted to admire the view (so we saw Ice Mountain), look at goats, or whatever we felt like. We were back in time for lunch and were asked if we wanted rabbit for dinner, meaning the dead rabbit we'd seen on the balcony, which Sally and I agreed to. After lunch the two of us went off wandering, looking at the frozen stream and some temple we found, we tried to build a snowman but the snow was too powdery so instead had a snowball fight with the little boy, and also admired the pool table outside the pub. The rabbit was OK, but nothing special.

The trek back was along a different route, which didn't go quite so high up, and no one fell off, so it seemed like a success to me. we stopped at a monastery which wasn't too exciting, although the constantly mewling cat in one of the houses which was tied to a stove was rather disturbing. Back in Songpan we went to a different hotel, as the previous one was too cold, this one with an en suite bathroom and electric underlay., and in the evening we played cards with an English couple and their crazy Israeli friend who were to go on the same trek the next day. While Ila was going somewhere even colder, Sally and I were heading south, back to Chengdu, which took all day and was not tremendously exciting, apart from the bit when some villagers just dragged a pig into the street, killed it and proceeded to wash and shave it by the side of the road, and the amazing horror B-movie "Mosquito" that was shown on the bus between the usual dreadful karaoke pop.

We only had one night in Chengdu though as the next day we had another early wake up to get the bus the Chonqing where we would get the cruise down the Yangzi river in the evening. The city was a typical modern, skyscraper laden Chinese city, built on a hill, but we managed to entertain ourselves for the afternoon, first with (finally) a good hotpot (though we avoided the chicken feet) and then scrabble cards and tea in the park where everyone else was playing normal cards and tea. Scrabblecards, if you've never encountered them, is the same as scrabble but the letters are on cards instead (plus a few other minor differences), and it certainly intrigued the Chinese as we soon had an audience, including a policeman, crowding around trying to work out what we were doing.

Once we'd bought supplies for the cruise we headed back to the office of the tour company, who tried to get us to go on their tour of the Zhangzhajie national park at the other end of the cruise, and then with a handful of others were escorted down to the dock where we had to pay for a "cable car" to the boat, which turned out to be a funicular railway down a slope that had steps running parallel to it we could easily have walked down had we known. Anyway, we got a view of the city at night, which was much prettier than by day, and finally got to our second class cabin. It was quite nice, reasonably spacious with two bunk beds, a TV, sofa and en suite toilet, and we shared it with a friendly Chinese couple in their early thirties. Going out on deck we watched the lights of Chongqing fade away and then went to bed.