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Published: April 25th 2008
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The answer is....32 million! I think it may be the largest city on the planet (or we were told so by a couple locals) and it is China's fastest growing city with the government pouring money into it for massive construction and design projects, helped by the fact that it's close to the biggest dam in the world (the three gorges dam) - dam, it's all big.
We flew in from Guilin and caught a shuttle bus into town. Once again, we arrived late in the evening and didn't feel up to wandering too far that late at night so we ended up in a hotel right near where the bus dropped us. After listening to the booming of the karaoke bar late into the evening and a strange smell in the room, we changed to the Super 8 just down the street the next day, which proved to be a nice upgrade, albeit without internet.
Chongqing (pronounced chongching) has a really nice light rail (i.e. skytrain sort of thing) that takes you right along one of the rivers into the heart of the city. We ran into a couple canadian guys, one who lives here, who were kind
enough to steer us in the right direction when we were trying to find our way. Eventually we made it down to the dock area where all the boats were lined up for cruising the Yangtze - from huge fancy cruise ships to run down cheap ships to hydrofoils to barges. We spent a lot of time wandering around trying to find information on the fast hydrofoil boats which only take one day to get down the river through the three gorges versus 3 days (and a lot more money) which is what is required on the fancier cruise ships. We finally found some information and eventually ended up going to a travel agent in a nice hotel (where they spoke some english) to book it. By this point it was dinner time and since we were right there, we took advantage of the hotel buffet special...tried some pretty interesting food, but they had some safe options too.
The Next day we got up really early to sit at some travel agency for an hour to be transfered to another for a half hour and then to the bus for another half hour. After waiting around for one and
a half hours our 7 o clock bus took off at 8:30. A couple scary bus hours later we arrived in another large chinese town where they were yet again tearing down the old and putting up new buildings like crazy. Here we jumped on a really old hydrofoil boat and started down the river. The boat ride was really smooth and much safer than the buses. The river had some gorgous views and amazingly the water looked fairly clear despite all the factory and coal mines that line the river...I still wouldn't swim in it though. Definitely a better deal for budget travelers to take the hydrofoil boat and have a day of gorge viewing versus spreading it out over 3-4 days and paying an arm and a leg. The seats weren't very comfortable and we provided our own food (gotta love the chinese ramen) but it really wasn't so bad.
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