Spring Festival Break: Pt 12. Chongqing And Our Yangtze Cruise

After three days in Chendgu, it was time to move on. The girls were working to a deadline and had now decided to try and fit both Xi'an and Beijing in before they flew home, so we wanted to press on. But we wanted to press on via a scenic route.

And what could be more scenic than the famous Three Gorges of the Yangtze River.

Firstly we caught a bus from Chengdu to Chongqing. Our days had been beginning earlier and earlier throughout our stay in Chengdu and at a 5.30am start, this topped it. I thought we were supposed to be on holiday! The journey was
uneventful and a few hours later we arrived at Chongqing city.

I was really keen to see this city. It is massive, and polluted as all hell (the bushes beside the roads as we drove in were all coated thickly with dust and dirt), but extremely interesting too. We only had half a day to explore though, so it was tough to see anything at all. After an unsuccessful trip to see the ancient (but rammed) village of Ciqikou nearby, we came back and I headed off alone to do some exploring. The city is built on top of a hill and there were alleyways and flights of steps criss-crossing the city as well as cablecars across the docks to the opposite shores of the two rivers that converge here. There was a nice mix of old and new, and I just love that juxtaposition so was in my element as I wandered through old markets and from the remains of the old city wall down towards the docks.




But evening was drawing on and all to soon it was time to board our boat. The first part of our trip was to be overnight, and although we had to be on board by 8pm, we didn't leave til 11pm. So we sat on the deck at the back of the ship, with a beer and our bags of dried fruit and seeds (I've said it again and again - China does 'healthy' far too well) and watched the ships come and go as it became night and the city began to glow. Sat on board I felt really relaxed and at peace, yet at the same time excited and full of anticipation.

Having said all that though, I had anticipated a little more in the way of accommodation. We
had paid about 750 yuan each for three nights in
a 4-bed 2nd class room with meals, entry to three sights and the bus to Chongqing included. We could have paid much more, and that was apparent from the smell, the leaky roof, and the fact that manoeuvring 4 people round in that room when one person wanted to change position was as tricky as trying to solve a rubrix cube.

Still, it was better than 3rd class and for just over 50 quid all told, we couldn't really complain. Some did though, and with good reason. A later boat had been cancelled so some had been accommodated on this sailing, but just shoved in wherever there was space. People with previous bookings for 1st class were now in 3rd, some were sleeping on the floor in two random rooms and there was just an atmosphere of real confusion that thankfully we weren't a part of.

The next day we woke up as the ship was docking. It was 7am as we were pushed off the ship and escorted in the pouring rain to our first 'sight' - the Ghost City of Fengdu. I wish I could say the place lived up to the image that name
conjures up in your mind, but it really was utter bollocks. It was barely light and we found ourselves wandering round a deserted 'souvenir village' up to a modern 'Palace of the Ghost King' which looked partly abandoned from the piles of rubbish lying around and the shut up buildings. The one thing that was open turned out to be some kind of...well, I don't know what it was really, but it was damn funny. Just take a look at the pictures. Something to do with the afterlife, torture, sin and whatever. It would have been morbid, had it not been so hilariously pathetic. Just check
out the layers of dust on these things.


Once we escaped from this wax-dummy nightmare we got lost in an old abandoned part of the complex. It was raining, it smelt of wee, it was just not worth it. I don't know if we were just in the wrong place, but, wow. Mistake.

Back on board we sailed onwards into the mist. We could barely see anything, but that lent a quite cool kinda atmosphere to it all. At least at that point we hadn't reached the really scenic part so could afford a cloud-shrouded view.

The rest of the day was uneventful. We spent most of the time making new friends - with three young British teachers from Nanjing, a few guys from Ireland, a couple from Bolivia and a Chinese guy called Charlie who had studied business in Cardiff. Actually both he and his sister had studied in the UK and their English was amazing. The family invited a group of us for dinner in the evening and we had a really cool time.

That evening we spent the night moored at a
town called Qipan, next to the second of our three 'sights' - Zhangfei Temple. This temple, dedicated to a famous general who was murdered by his soldiers, was moved from further down the valley, where it was below the projected level of the Three Gorges Dam reservoir. I'm not a fan of reconstructions generally. This one seemed ok, with some original materials, but didn't really feel right. It didn't help that the whole place was lit up in red and white neon like some shopping mall. I thought the nearby bridge was much more of a sight, but then, thats me...

I think I just had temple overload at this time.
There's only so many temples you can visit without having a clue as to why they're there before they all become much of a muchness. Anyway, we browsed the antique stalls outside then went back onboard and to bed, ready for the Three Gorges proper the next day.

The journey so far...
Days: 20 Distance: 4400km (but who's counting..)

Spring Festival Break: Pt 11. The Embodiment Of Cute

Need I say anything more.

We went to the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base and saw a lot of Pandas. I never got why so many people love them before, but now I do too. In one enclosure there were about 9 baby Pandas running around, climbing trees and play-fighting, while in an adjoining nursery, two more were happily playing together on a see-saw. Cutest thing I have ever seen. I could have stayed all day.

I'll let the pictures say the rest.

Spring Festival Break: Pt 10. BIG Buddha

Chengdu, and Sichuan in general, has some pretty amazing sights. I'm fairly sure I will have to come back at some point to make the most of them, but at least I know I saw the two most famous.

On New Years Day itself, we caught a bus to a small town two hours from Chengdu, called Leshan. This town's main attraction is a 70m high (can you see the people next to his head in the above pic?) seated Buddha carved out of the sandstone cliffs above the river. It is a really magnificent sight. The photos speak for themselves really. We came upon the Buddha

level with his head and, after queuing for about an hour, walked (slowly) down a congested staircase lined with further carved niches to get a fantastic view of this massive creation as we wound our way down to his feet.

It's quite a difficult sight to comprehend really. Bloody huge. And bloody old. Coming up to 1300 years old. Amazing.

The rest of the day was uneventful. We went to an awful restaurant and once back in Chengdu were unfortunate enough to get in a taxi driven by the world's worst taxi driver. We gave the woman the address of our hostel only to end up being dropped off at some random crossroads - not at the hostel as we wanted. We hadn't got a clue where we were but she was adamant we get out, so we stood around for a bit looking lost, and were about to get into another taxi to see if they could take us all the way to our destination when our original driver swung round in her car and pointed us down
the road. Okaaay. So we walked a bit further, tailed the whole time by this woman in her empty taxi, shouting out further directions as we came to each junction. Finally we came to a place we recognised, gave her a thumbs-up and she went off on her way. Ok so we got there, but I mean why?! Would it not have been easier to just take us to exactly where we wanted to go?! Sometimes I just don't get people.











































The journey so far...
Days: 17 Distance: 3860km (give or take the usual crap)

Spring Festival Break: Pt 8. Lijiang to Chengdu

It was a Wednesday that James, Julia, Ursula and I left Lijiang for Chengdu. We arrived three days later...

We took a bus early in the morning to a town called Panzhihua, just inside Sichuan province, from where we hoped to take a train onward to Chengdu. Like most other journeys in this part of the world it was long, 8 hours, and incredibly scenic. A short distance from Lijiang is a place called Tiger Leaping Gorge. This is where the young Yangtze flows through one of the deepest gorges in the world, and is a sight not to be missed. I'm sad to say that I did miss it however.
The weather was getting worse, time was dragging on, and I was certainly not prepared for any kind of hiking.

Still, I did get to see something along the lines of the gorge through the bus window as we wound our way up and down steep valley sides to cross the river and continue our journey. The view was impressive.

8 hours and a Jackie Chan film later, the landscape began to change. From green fields, farms and terraced slopes we went to mines, chimneys and heavy industry. Hello Panzhihua...

I've not been to too many industrial cities in China (with good reason) so it was interesting to see the contrast here, but we did not plan on staying long.

We went directly to the train station to get our tickets. We went up to the counter, asked for 4
tickets to Chengdu and were told there were none.

No tickets available for two days. All the trains were fully booked due to the volume of traffic at this holiday time. Hmm. Bit of a problem...

Luckily there was a tourist information centre by the station, so we took shelter there from the hecklers and touts while we planned our next course of action. Interestingly enough, the touts were offering taxis to Chengdu, but for 2000 yuan. We talked to a few and tried to negotiate, but they outnumbered us greatly so we bid a hasty retreat. Back in the office the lady recommended we fly - at about 800 yuan each and a tidy commission for herself. We asked about buses, but were told there were no buses because the roads were so bad. I found this a little hard to believe at first, as I'd read that Sichuan was investing millions in a new Expressway network, and as the woman was starting to book hotels for us anyway, we made a quick getaway before we had to start paying anything.

Back in the city centre we weighed up our options. Neither of us fancied spending two days of our vacation in a town whose main sights include an opencast mine and half a dozen power stations, and while flying was certainly too expensive, a taxi began to sound more and more appealing. Either way, there was not much we could do that night, so we booked ourselves into a hotel and got a good night's sleep.

The next day, as we watched the morning smog lift (see pic above!), we talked to the hotel's travel service and got ourselves a taxi. Still 2000, but that didn't matter so much anymore. We were on our way!
We were lucky. Our driver was a nice guy. His name was Zou, and you can see him here with his taxi at our lunch stop, a couple of hours out of Panzhihua. Julia had been studying Chinese in Beijing, and between her and James' manic gestures we managed to communicate quite well. For the first half hour he was phoning everyone he knew and we could tell the conversations were all along the lines of 'Guess what I'm doing? Driving four foreigners to Chengdu!!'. Not the usual job for sure. One of the first questions he asked us in the car was whether we were all 'together'. He asked Julia if I was her husband or her 'didi' - her little brother. She said didi. And all of a sudden that was it. We were a family! I had a new mother, father and elder sister. You can't blame the poor guy. We looked a pretty convincing family unit. From then on, everywhere we went people automatically took us for family, at least until they asked where we were from and got the names of four different countries in reply!

The first part of our journey was spent driving down small tree-lined roads through intensively farmed countryside. It was really beautiful. We soon came to the expressway I'd read about, and a sign saying 'under construction - opening 2008'... Great. A year too early. It was then that we considered this may take a little longer than we'd thought.

We kept on going, and going, climbing upwards,
until very quickly we went through one mountain pass and the scenery changed. We went from sub-tropical fields of peas, strawberries, bananas and oranges to a quite barren treeless landscape of dead grass, rocks and goatherds. The difference was considerable.




























Now, the landscape was simply astounding. Whether tall snow-capped mountains, broad open plains or narrow winding valleys, you never got bored with the view. And no matter where we went through this landscape the roads were bloody awful.

A good proportion was unsurfaced, sometimes dry and dusty, sometimes thick with mud but at all times rutted, pitted and strewn with rocks. A four-wheel drive would have been perfect. In our city taxi we just prayed that the thing wouldn't break down before we got there.

8 hours into the trip we came to a large-ish town that we could find on the map. We weren't too happy with what we saw. We weren't even half-way. Maybe a little more than a third. We knew then this was gonna be long-haul.

We drove on into the night. Zou reckoned we could make it by about 3am. We weren't so sure. The roads weren't any better and of course were not lit, so we'd be right on top of the pot-holes before we saw them, slowing down to a crawl to negotiate the way before speeding up again. It just seemed to be getting worse and we had severe arse-fatigue, so after stopping for dinner at about 9pm, we persuaded Zou to stop somewhere for the night. He said he'd like to try and make a certain big town first, maybe only an hour away, and that we could stop there. We agreed, but had driven no more than a few minutes before we came upon a police road block. We parked a little way from the barriers themselves, because I'm sure what we were doing anyway was not entirely legal, and Zou went to have a look. He came back with bad news. We couldn't go through. It was so late by now that turning round and finding another way just wasn't an option, so when someone ran out of a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant across the street and offered us a room, we took it.






This was no four-star hotel. We were four to a room (for safety more than anything else - no door locks here) and it was basic, but comfortable. We had to go outside to brush our teeth and use the toilet (pictured!) and didn't even bother asking if they had a shower. And the price for one night? 10 yuan each. To put that in UK terms, about 70p. Breakfast included.

Bargain.

Next morning we were up bright and early, the roadblock was gone, and we continued on our way. This time we were going straight up. Soon
enough we drove into low-lying clouds and wound around this mountain in almost zero-visibility for about an hour before we reached the other side and began to climb down again. It was cold up there. All the trees were covered in a thick layer of frost and I couldn't help thinking that we were lucky to have stopped where we were last night. Attempting that in the dark would definitely have been a bad idea.

This stretch was bleak. Misty, wet and impoverished. Some of the small towns we passed through looked so desperate, but in the larger ones, everyone was out at the markets busily getting ready for the festival. It reminded me of what I was potentially missing out on right now in Lanshan.

We soldiered on for another 7 hours before we finally arrived in Chengdu. But not before a quick toilet stop at a random farm along the way. I have to mention this because it was just bizarre. The facilities were, well, not...really...there. It was situated in a tumble-down outhouse and consisted of an open pit, with a plank, a bucket, a god-awful smell and about ten enormous white rabbits watching you from hutches lining the wall. Julia was brave enough to stay in there long


enough to take a photo, which I'm very pleased to share with you lucky, lucky people. You don't know what you've got back home...

So anyway, three days later, we arrived in Chengdu. We payed Zou his 2000 yuan (which he'll probably need to buy a new taxi with) and we'd barely said goodbye before he raced off to try and get back home in time for the new year. Pretty exhausted, we didn't do much more than dump our stuff and get some food. The cafe we went to had a guest book, and we decided to contribute. James drew a picture of our taxi and I wrote a small rhyme to go with it. If you ever go to Chengdu, check out Dodo's cafe next door to the Loft youth hostel and take a look for yourselves.

The journey so far...

Days: 15 Distance: 3480km (give or take shitloads - I'm measuring on a small scale map with a piece of string...)

Spring Festival Break: Pt 7. We Met On A Mountain-top

Day three in Lijiang started late. We really didn't know what to do with ourselves that day and while watching a load of old Naxi women dance ('sway and...step') in the town square, we were approached by Li, a large Naxi woman, who has a very persuasive manner and excellent English. She wanted to take us on a tour up some mountain to some remote village. We resisted for a while, but bumped into her another three times around town that morning and eventually agreed to go with her on the assurance that we would pay later and making sure we left all our valuables in the hostel safe beforehand.

We needn't have been so apprehensive. She was an honest woman and took us on a fantastic trip up a nearby mountain to a Yi minority village that has no road access. The weather was again beautiful and the scenery breathtaking. We climbed to over 3400m above sea level, well within the range that altitude sickness can have an effect (we're pretty near Tibet and the Himalayas here) and nearly three times the height of the UK's tallest mountain.

We had no problems, and neither did the 69 year old man who walked with us the whole way, only stopping for the occasional fag break.

We soon made it to the Yi village, where we paid a visit to one household and were given tea and potatoes in one woman's new house while she changed into her traditional costume for some photos.

When I say her 'new house' I really mean it. Only a few years old but constructed of mud bricks in the traditional style. For all the poverty the place displayed, they still had satellite TV. They mainly grow potatoes, some corn and marijuana here. They're not pot-heads, much to James' disappointment, but make oil from the seeds
instead. It was all very interesting to see, but a little too much like a human zoo, so it was completely ok when we left soon after to climb back down.

On the way down we met up with Richard, Li's husband, who had taken two other tourists on a tour further up the mountain. These were Ursula and Julia, mother and daughter, from Switzerland and Germany respectively. I dug up my slightly rusty German and we were chatting the whole way down.

At the bottom Li had arranged a discount horse
ride for us all to the shore of the lake below, and in the evening sun we rode around rather pointlessly for about 20 minutes as the promised rare waterbirds failed to show up.

We were all pretty hungry by now and as we were all getting on so well, we went with Li and Richard to have local Naxi Hotpot at a small place they knew. This was where, in addition to James, we discovered that Julia and Ursula were also vegetarians. Bit of an issue in China at the best of times, and certainly an issue when the hotpot came out piled high with steaming ribs of pork. When they protested, our Chinese friends helpfully pointed out that there were vegetables underneath...

It took a good five minutes of explaining and insisting, using such ridiculous comparisons as '...just as the Snow Dragon mountain is so sacred to you that no-one can climb to it's summit, so these people cannot eat anything that has touched meat...' before we finally managed to get a second
hotpot with just vegetable stock and a selection of veggies to add. You can eat damn well as a vegetarian here - I've never seen so many different types of veg before in my life - but you'll find a lot of them cooked with meat products or with a little meat just thrown in as a favour, because if you order no meat they'll assume you're too poor and may take pity. Warm-hearted a gesture as this is, it's been the downfall of many a veggie here.

I have found the Chinese to be very close-minded when it comes to certain ideas (we've been told off many a time for peeling oranges 'the wrong way' - as if there could possibly be more than one way to peel an orange) and vegetarianism is one idea that many just don't get. All the way through the meal Richard and Li just kept looking over to the vegetarian's table and shaking their heads or laughing to themselves in disbelief. I had to field a lot of questions that night...



I had an absolutely excellent time though and we were looked after so well. It was so much better to eat with locals in a recommended restaurant than to sit in one of those touristy places where sex with fruit is encouraged.

I promised them that I would spread the word of their service and so here is a link to their website. They can do anything you want, and always visit places outside the tourist's traditional realm.

Another cool outcome of the mountain trip were our new travelling buddies. We managed to persuade Julia and Ursula to abandon their
planned trip to Hainan (too busy and commercial anyway) and come with us to Chengdu.

Yep, by this point I had lingered in Lijiang for too long, and had just 5 days left until the Spring Festival, which I had said I'd spend in Lanshan. I worked out I'd need about 3 days to get back, and with the possibility of not getting any tickets, it wasn't looking too hopeful. I didn't fancy spending my Spring Festival in a station waiting room so decided to keep on travelling.

The next day therefore was spent chilling and preparing for the next leg of our journey - the
most interesting by far...