Sichuan - China - Chengdu - Chongqing - March 2013 - Page 2

I was up early, out before 7 when it was still dark, the internet tells you to get their early before they get sleepy. The internet also told me to go to a bus station south of the city, to take the only public direct bus, 902.
It is not easy to get there, despite it being the most popular tourist attraction in town, basically its assumed you will go with a tour group.
So After a 30 minute speed walk I stride confidently into the bus station, which is a hive of poor people with all their worldly belongings.
All the busses seem to only go to the other side of the country. Theres an information booth with a young girl, I ask in Chinese for 902. She informs me in perfect English that 902 has not run since they started building the subways to reduce congestion, you must go on tour bus!
I ask how a Chinese person would get there, she gave me instructions to take 3 busses....challenge accepted.

Getting on a bus at this time of morning was really dangerous. They barely stop, are all 100% full and you charge into the street before it gets there and hope to not get run over.
If you dont do this you will be at the back of the scrum and never get on one. It took me 2 goes to get on my desired bus, but they come every couple of minutes.

After a nail biting ride, sometimes at great speed, I arrived at a bus depot. Now what.
The bus I thought she told me to get next was nowhere I could see, no numbers on signs or the ground.
Time to employ a new tactic, follow the cute looking girls with panda merchandise. This proved a succesful tactic.
The reason the bus I was told to go on doesnt go at the moment is because of the construction around the Panda Research Base, you drive around it and then back to the gate which is currently somewhat hidden.

Up until now, I had no idea if I was going to the pandas, a Sewerage factory or an Engine plant. Various bus signs that had English listed such things as destinations.

And now we get to the Pandas.
As mentioned the small ones are about 6 months old. There are maybe 20 small ones throughout the park, some are rotated into duty to be petted by the few American tourists who are prepared to make a $200 donation for the experience.
I think they are too big to hold currently, so I am not sure what the VIP experience currently is.

There is a heap of new, fancy looking architecturally unusual buildings under construction, with the associated noise levels. I think there has been a lot of recent attention to this facility that has seen funds pouring in. Various celebrities seem to have sponsored facilities under construction.

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........ I am using dots to count where I am up to.
There are 2 distinct areas, I guess they are working on a Disaster recovery strategy so that they dont all die off at once due to disease, fire etc.
The area closer to the main gate, the sunshine nursery, is roughly 10x busier than the moonlight nursery at the back of the park, which seems to actually have more pandas.
My top tip, go straight to the moonlight nursery.

Its me, in my signature purple shirt, commando shorts, clown shoes, a winning combination.

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*** astericks this time

The park is rather nice, away from everything. Off in the distance here you can see a new style upmarket Chinese suburb.

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### last one!

Apparently red pandas, also called the lesser panda, are more ferocious than the big ones. Theres warning signs everywhere, but strangely no real fencing.

I didnt bother with many photos of the lesser panda.

Still in the Panda park is this nice looking lake.

Which upon closer inspection has a terrifying swarm of gold fish making life difficult for swans.

The photo doesnt capture it, but the fish literally climb over each other to get out of the water and try and get the food!
The girl screamed each time but kept doing it anyway because her boyfriend kept stuffing up the photo.

Getting back again, an even bigger challenge! I got on a random bus that came assuming it would go somewhere like say, the city.
Instead it went a differnt way and I became confused as to which was North or South. The sun was too far over head to know precisely and blackberrys famous GPS failure was indeed still a failure.
I changed bus but couldnt find out where I was, time to go on foot to get my bearings!
After about an hour, I worked out where I was based on a river that ran through a really impressive nice park I found myself in.
I was nearby the Northern train station which is the last stop on the metro.
That blue building sits on top of the metro, to get there I walked across construction sites, fields etc. I had my doubts but other people seemed to be making the trek.

Judging by the buildings nearby, its an area due to be demolished soon!

Back in the city now, I got off a stop early.
Tomorrow I am going to Chongqing for 6 days, but then I am back in Chengdu, in a different hotel. This is it (the middle building), Celebrity Ruicheng. Its enormous!

Eager to get back and edit and upload my photos, I bought a sandwich and portugese tart from an upmarket bakery. Its in a box but it is made on site.
It wasnt good, sure it was fresh high quality ingredients, but they put so much mayonnaise on it that to me it becomes almost inedible. The portugese tart however, fantastic.

I hope you all (all? I think no one reads this!) appreciate the effort I made editing all these photos!

Around the corner from my hotel I found this market. Its a labyrinth down many back streets.

I had no idea this existed, its still under construction. The buildings that surround it are enormous, mixed use residential and commercial.
Its worth mentioning that all this construction is happening at the same time as at least 4 metro lines are being built, as well as 2 full elevated ring roads, more on that shortly.

One of the above mentioned ring roads. It boggles my mind to think that you can walk under it whilst its being built, as I did. You get showered in sparks from people welding sections together, hot dip bolts are being put in place and plasma torches are cutting things to size.

Australia take note. This is a supermarket in what many of us consider to be a third world country. I WISH we had these in Australia. Coles and Woolworths have a lot to answer for. Also, I love supermarkets.

This is the Mix C megamall view from the roof. Its eerily similar to a place I visited in Nanjing, which may have also been called Mix C but I cant remember.

Also like the one in Nanjing, it has an ice skating rink.

My dinner was average. It came from the food court. I chose poorly. I got excited when the plastic version had lots of nice looking bok choy. The real version did not live up to the plastic.
Also I ordered and pointed at the one that had roast pork as well as bbq pork, yet instead of roast pork I got duck, which is fatty and full of bones.

Also Australia, this is how you make a food court. Note that its large, clean, has a variety of non chain stores and every one of them makes the food in front of you to order. Also everything is $3 or less.
Now if only I could figure out how to still pay Australian wages of say, $25 an hour to achieve this.

Heading back now, and this is the impact a metro line under construction has. What would normally be a very busy road is blocked, and hence it becomes a great space for people to enjoy themselves in relative peace and quiet.
It was excellent to walk down here, it went for miles with almost no cars, just people eating out, dancing, skateboarding, whatever.

And a bit further up the street, you get to where the metro is actually being constructed. They just dig a trench, lay the tracks, build the road over the top of it again. Same thing I saw in Hangzhou. I climbed up someones fire escape to see this, they sure looked surprised to see my head appear out their window.

Long exposure.

And a random neon shot, because I didnt do any on this trip yet.

What at first appeared to be just one of many minor traffic accidents was somehow different. The 2 guys involved didnt just drive off. Instead they argued. A crowd formed, the police were called.
Now if the police came to an accident here, you would stand just out of view and try and listen in and observe. Not so in Chengdu, you crowd around the scene as close as you can.
As I was taking the photo it did occur to me that no one else was filming, and then it occured to me that even in our 'westernized' countries the police have been known to arrest or shoot people for filming them.
I dont know if its illegal to film the police in China or not.

The new Chengdu East station. Much like all the other new stations. It is modern and efficient. They are a bit too the same though, even on the inside the same fast food options, the same supermarket that doesnt sell any food to eat now, just freeze dried package goods to take home.

The inside of the station, a sea of grey.

The journey traversed countless valleys, you go from being on top of a viaduct then into a tunnel, every few seconds.

Occasionally you get to a satellite city being built to utilise the location of the new rail line. If you look closely on the left here you can see a fun park.
No doubt built to entice families to move here.

Terraced farming started to appear in places. Not sure what they were growing.

But of course the pace of progress is rapid, even out in the countryside theres massive infrastructure.

In the 2 hours you cross probably 6 vast rivers such as this. I poorly timed the photo, it looked much more impressive if I took it 3 seconds earlier.

Nearing Chongqing, it gets smoggy, and you can see ridiculous amounts of construction.

And another big river, this one being mined for something.

Once off the train, the scene is chaotic. I am in no hurry so hang back for 5 minutes whilst the crowd clears. Chongqing North station connects directly to their metro which is a mix of elevated monorail and subway. This system connects basically to the door of my hotel

Outside the door to my hotel is this strange scene. A demolition site, being used as a carpark, with 3 temples, at least one of them being the real deal.

My hotel is very impressive, I will talk more about it later, its an executive apartment and cheap, but has the greatest view ever. The street below with the people is the main pedestrian area of the city, Jin Fang Bei

And out my other window I get a view of one of the rivers that encircles the city centre.

I was out around dusk, the best time for photos. The city is mostly cool shadows. If you dont like skyscrapers, bad luck.

These 2 are either side of the pedestrian street.

And looking back from the descent into the river area.

This isnt finished yet and I couldnt find a spot to get a clear shot of it. Its a homage to the Shanghai expo China pavillion, only much bigger.

This blew my mind. The scale of this is not really understood in the photo. Its a double decker bridge for a start. Its probably a hundred metres off the water. And on that, wheres the water? Somehow they have diverted it whilst they make the bridge.
I have seen photos, theres normally A LOT of water in this river, as the height of the banks suggests.

Looking up river, you can see another bridge, and a sea of skyscrapers, and a lot of sand where a river should be.

The cliff top restaurants are rather funky. Lots of statues etc. such as this pirate ship.

Russian tourists have been catered for with plenty of high end shopping. I still dont know who actually buys stuff from here, these shops are always ghost towns.

And heres what I bought to prepare my dinner, pork belly, various vegetables, with shredded garlic and ginger and some chilli. I also bought noodles to prepare to have with it, but it made too much food so I skipped the noodles.

Ready.

Served.

The view from the monorail revealed an inner city zoo, somewhere in the fog. Amusingly, when I looked out the window this morning I thought the sky was a dark shade of copper shrouded in fog and pollution.
I was concerned how I would handle that, it was far more polluted than anything I had seen. Until I stepped outside and it was fine. It was then I remembered my room windows have dark tinting.

Ok, lets get this out of the way, the lesser or red panda. The walls to this enclosure are low, and theres only one. Low enough to put your kids on to look over. What could go wrong?

Now for a series of panda photos. This one looks particularly happy. I think he might be the world champion breeder.

Mostly they just eat, I have only included one photo of each panda. They are all starting to look the same.

Too lazy to sit up whilst eating.

This one looks like me, constantly stretching its back.

Only a couple more, people seem to appreciate panda photos.

Last one (for now...)

Elephants, there were baby ones but they were inside the house thing. The field they have is really quite large, if they wanted to they could run around etc.

Same goes for the giraffes, but they mostly just want to stand right by the people.

These are baby lions. Not sure if they are dead or asleep, they wouldnt move. A human baby used all its powers of bashing on the glass to attempt to wake them, all to no avail.

Presumably they breed food for the other animals in the zoo too.

The infamous drop bear. Feared by blonde tourists visiting Australia.

KFC has decided to get in on the panda craze. I think I would rather eat the dog head soup.

Would you eat Korean food in China?

Of course you would, because its cheap and has lots of vegetables.

A photo of the impressive (to me) raised monorail tracks. Im aware no one cares and really just wants more panda photos.

The Sha Ping Ba pedestrian areas claim to fame is that they have re created the three gorges damn system, up the middle of the mall. The three gorges damn (I am just going to keep typing damn instead of dam out of habit) is just down river from here, with most cruises through it departing from here.

My dinner was 5 chillis on the menu. Most things only had 1. It was bright red in the picture. I think I got round eyed because it was more like 1 or 2 chillis.

The streets are littered with people trying to sell stuff which its hard to imagine anyone would want.
If you owned a legitimate store whos entrance is now blocked by these people, you would be annoyed. They leave me alone though, only hassling locals to buy a pair of spongebob squarepants 'quallity' ear buds for 20 cents.

The square / line dancing is so popular you might just need to book.

Due to my lack of photos, bonus photo of tonights snack. It is like a sesame crisp, only much thinner and lighter due to being full of holes.
Of course I ate the entire jar of them in one go. They are more savoury than a similar thing would be in Australia, most things are.