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Published: August 15th 2007
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Chengdu
no comment So here we are in Panda country. This is our last night in Chengdu, situated in the Sichuan province of western China. In total we spent 8 nights here, mainly because our guesthouse (more on that later) was just so warm and welcoming. We arrived here on Wednesday 1st after our first experience with the joy that is the "Hard Sleeper" train. Tomorrow we leave on yet another jet train. I'm starting to think we could write our own book on Chinese train travel. God knows how many thousands of kms we have travelled.
Here is the rundown on the train situation. There are 4 options in total-"Hard Seat", does what it says on the tin-You have a seat and it is damn hard. We experienced this on the Beijing-Xi'an leg of the trip and all I can say is never again on an overnight journey. Cheap as chips yes, but hard on the body. The other options are "Hard Sleeper", "Soft seat" and "Soft Sleeper". Being the poor unemployed Assis that we are, Hard Sleeper is now our mode of choice. It's all about the money and not the luxury 😞. Hard Sleeper is basically an open plan wagon
Chengdu
The great Mao......... with about 50 bunk beds arranged in groups of 3 (top, middle and bottom). The whole wagon is completely open so there is no privacy Generally (but not always there is aircon) and they provide you with slightly grubby and used blankets-Nice. Thank God for sleeping bags! Also if you fork out a few Yuan more to get the bottom bunk (only bunk with enough headroom to sit) the world and its mother will sit themselves down without so much as a Hello how are you. The Cheek! Again I shouldn't complain considering how cheap it is-you get what you pay for. There are train staff constantly running up and down the carriage trying to flog you something. Their offerings include pot noodles, hot food (of dubious origin), hair accessories and tv screens on which you can watch the latest Chinese box office hit (sans headphones so everyone else gets to hear it as well).
Interestingly there is also a sign in each wagon asking passengers to kindly refrain from spitting or smoking-but judging by the smount of heed some people paid to this I think it was more of a suggestion than an order.
Anyway back to
Chengdu
City Centre Chengdu. We both felt it was the nicest Chinese city we have visited so far. It's yet another sprawling metropolis. The city proper has 4 million inhabitants, and the entire city limits upwards of 10 million. There is no other way to say it-China is full. Everywhere is crowded. In fact I'm surprised they still let people in :-). Having said that Chengdu seems almost laid back. The area where our guesthouse is located is near a temple, surrounded by lovely little backstreets with charming renovated wooden buildings. The city centre has the requisite number of Starbucks, McDonalds and interestingly enough-KFC. It seems the Chinese can't get enough of it. Mind you they also eat dog ;-)
Chengdu is probably most famous for being the home of the Giant Panda, so naturally we had to pay them a visit. Our guesthouse organised a tour which left at 7.30am! It's ojnly a half hour drive to the Panda Reserve but we needed to get there early to be in time for thei morning feed. Basically all pandas do is eat and sleep so we wanted to catch them having theur breakfast. They were every bit as adorable and fascinating to
Chengdu
City Centre watch as we'd imagined. Mathias got some great photos of the releuctant young pandas being coaxed and dragged down from their tree-top sleeping places. Although we were very impressed by the Forbidden City, the pandas were the best sight so far.
After the pandas the best thing about Chengdu was our fantastic guesthouse-Sim's Cozy Guesthouse. We can't recommend it enough. It's my favourite place so far (Mathias is torn between here and the 1 million euro apartment in Moscow or possibly the Mongolian Assi hotel which we think was a front for a brothel). Anyway we found it to be a relaxing welcoming place where we could recharge our batteries and get some good western food. We spent a lot of time just chilling out, sleeping in and watching our new bargain DVDs (just 50 cent a movie and perfect quality ;-0 ). You may wonder why I'm so excited about western food. Well I've been sick for the past week, since Xi'an-poor me. Also Sichuan cooking is super spicy and very oily. Mathias is a big fan!
Another highlight of the trip was hanging out with a lovely German couple, Dani and Volker who we originally met
Chengdu
Souvenir Shop area near Sims Guesthouse back in Bob's (not so cozy) guesthouse in Xi'an. They're on a 2 and a half year world trip, the lucky beggars and have inspired us to finally start our blog and maybe even travel for a bit longer. It's all about the money of course, but so far China has been surprisingly cheap, we actually managed to halve our budget. we're reliably informed that SE Asia gets cheaper so we'll see... Watch this space!
Tomorrow we go onwards and southwards to Kunming. Apparently our train has no aircon. Oh well, maybe we'll sleep...
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