June 2014 (by Pat) Itinerary Link
CHONGQING
Chongqing is one of four special municipal districts in China. It has a population of 30 million. Chiang Kai Sheck made it his capital after the Japanese drove him out of Nanjing. The dense fog that hangs over the city protected it from Japanese bombers. It is a mountain city. Lots of steps. Little level ground. Very difficult to get your bearings. We discovered the bearing issue very quickly.
We left the Yangtze cruise ship on Thursday the 12th and went on the city tour and to the lunch offered. After lunch, we left the group and caught a cab to our hotel. After settling in for a bit, we decided to head for a central square and look for a railway ticket office near there. It was not quite a mile away and I thought it would be nice to walk there and explore the city along the way. This proved to be a mistake.
I had looked up walking directions, but, before long, we found ourselves in a long automobile tunnel. Emerging from the other side, we saw no streets, just various expressways. We did see a bus stop turnout and crossed over to it to get a bus headed in the general direction we wanted. As soon as we got on the bus, it turned onto a bridge over the river in exactly the opposite direction of what we wanted. We got off the bus, found a cab and the driver managed to bring us to the square.
My walking directions more or less worked from there and we eventually found the ticket office. We were buying tickets for three separate train trips planned for the coming days. YK gave the agent the itineraries, he rang it up and then asked for our passports. China is crazy for passports. You need your passport for the strangest things. I had mine, but YK did not have hers. No tickets. As we walked away, she remembered she had a photocopy. We went back, he accepted the photocopy, and we got the tickets.
The next adventure was getting back to the hotel. I thought it would be easy. We hailed a cab and showed the guy the hotel information. He puzzled over it and said something to us in Chinese. We just pointed back to the hotel info and he eventually took off. After a while, it became clear something was wrong. It was taking too long, the trip was only a mile or so, and we seemed to be going to the wrong area. I tried to point this out to him, but, by then, he had picked up another passenger, a young woman, who was getting his attention. After a while, he pulled over and seemed to indicate that our hotel was “over there.” I was just glad to get out of the cab.
Of course, our hotel wasn’t there. We found ourselves on a wide pedestrian street or mall with many high-end shops – Armani, Cartier, etc. We explored for a while and then found a cab which successfully brought us to the hotel.
The specialty cuisine of Chongqing is hot pot and YK had found a hot pot restaurant she wanted to try. We took a cab to the restaurant and, after dinner, walked around and found ourselves in the same area we had been dumped in the afternoon. It was there that YK fulfilled one of her goals for the trip – buying a 10Y watch.
It was the next day, as we traveled to Gongtan, that the adventure really began.
Small Wide World 