Blogs from Chongqing, China, Asia - page 16

I remember hearing of the Curse of the Yangtze some time ago, but, like most, dismissed it as a load of poppycock. I find, however, I have had to rethink my position in light of recent events. See what you think. The next item on our list of things to do was a Yangtze River cruise, so the place you go, where most of these tours start from is Chongqing. We had a 7.50pm flight out of Lijiang (on Wed 10/Oct) and after some concerned moments in our taxicab, where we thought "He's misunderstood, the airport can't be this far away!" we made it to the fairly new Lijiang airport. We were heading to Chongqing via Kunming despite the two being in opposing directions but finally reached our destination a little before 11.00pm. After the usual ... read more

Taking the train to Chongqing was another long ride, so we opted for the hard sleeper. It was much more comfortable than the hard seat - I was actually able to sleep! We arrived at Chongqing around 9am. It was raining lightly. The station was chaotic getting out; luckily the tour group that we signed up with had someone meet us at the train station. We went back to the tour office, settled up the bill for the cruise, dropped off our bags and had 9 hours to kill in the city. We were both getting a little hungry, so we headed out to find some food. During our trek we were able to see many interesting things in the city. The city is undergoing huge development everywhere. In the inner city centre there were many ... read more

Our plan was to arrive in Chongqing at 6:30, spend the day there and board the boat in the evening. On the way to Chongqing Josie was awakened by a huge thunderstorm. Not thinking too much of it we started to get ready at about 6:00. The train stopped but we were told that it is only 10 minutes left to Chongqing. Those 10 minutes turned into 10 hours! It rained and rained and rained... we did not know exactly why we were still standing but we guessed that it is because the rail track might be flooded. Luckily we had enough food and snacks as we already bought some for the boat. The hours passed and passed and we were getting ready to spend another night on the train and maybe miss the cruise. This ... read more

Got up stupidly early again (needing lay in pronto) And took the one hour bus drive to the Chengdu Panda breeding centre. It was a sunny but cool day. The Pandas were incredible, normaly they do bugger all and are quite placid apart from 2 days a year when its mateing time. Today was one of those days, all the adults were on heat and were wondering around, rolling around and generally doing active things that dopey Pandas dont normaly do. The most incredible part was the Baby Pandas. They were really mobile and playfull. They look almost unreal. The human like eyes (more so then the elephants) give the appearance of children in panda suites. I must have taken 100 photos of the baby Pandas allown. After a couple of hours and a museum we ... read more

Gruss aus dem Regen. Wir "haengen" seid fast 7 Tagen im Sueden von China fest und mussten aufgrund des ANDAUERENDEN Regens einige Highlights auslassen... Wir befinden uns jetzt in Kumning und werden noch ca. 6 Tage in China verweilen, bevor es dann nach Laos geht. 7 Wochen China... und das obwohl China eigentlich nicht im Programm war und anfangs auch nicht gerade sehr einladend wirkte. Das hat sich geaendert. Es ist zwar kein Urlaubsland im klassischen Sinne, aber es gibt wirklich viel zu sehen.... (kleine China Info 1 am Rande: die vielen Motorraeder laufen alle mit Elektromotoren. Das bedeutet, sie sausen ganz leise dahin. Schon komisch am ZebraStreifen, wenn alle stumm vorueber ziehen. China Info 2: das Internet wird deutlich zensiert, so kann man bspw. nichts ueber Tibet oeffnen und sogar Seiten wie Wikipedia sind gesperrt.... ... read more