Chongqing

Nov. 2

So, the secret to beating the traffic in China is to get on the road at 5:30 a.m. At this time, we zipped to the airport in short order.
The weather hadn’t lifted much, but the one-hour flight via China Eastern to Chongqing went without a hitch.

Arriving in Chongqing - pronounced Shong-shing - we quickly discovered that we hadn’t come to a smaller city – at 8.5 million, it’s right up there. Now, however, they have gone to regional municipalities like we have in Canada and this one is the largest municipality in the world, weighing in at 32 million.
The difference between Chongqing and other Chinese cities we’ve visited so far is that this is a mountain city. There isn’t a flat section other than the 2 rivers – one of which is the Yangzte. Due to the hilliness, almost no-one rides bikes in this city, which puts more motorcycles and cars on the road. They do have monorail public transit which helps.

We met our local guide, Huix and started our visit at the Chongqing zoo. The highlights here are the pandas and the South China tiger – aka Siberian tiger. Both of course, are endangered species but efforts to work on improving the panda population are working, even though the males don’t seem too interested in mating and the females are very picky about their choice of mates. Efforts to increase the tiger population have not been overly successful, however and they expect them to be extinct within the next 40 years.

From the zoo, we went to lunch, followed by a visit to a couple of American-type tourist destinations. First we toured the home of General Stillwell, the head of the allied efforts to free the Chinese from the grasp of the Japanese during WW2. Then we went to a museum dedicated to the Flying Tigers – American WW2 volunteer fighter pilots.

The highlight in Chongqing was a walk we took through a market and the surrounding streets. On the main floor, you could buy everything from live ducks and bunnies, to all sorts of organ meats, live eels and frogs and - wait for it – DOG.

They also sold beautiful looking vegetables on a second floor, including lotus root and many things we couldn’t identify.

For dinner tonight we upgraded to a hotpot dinner. We had all manner of fondued vegetables and meats cooked at our table in a choice of either mild or hot broths. We discovered that what they gave us for hot-broth, was nothing compared to the rocket fuel that Chinese use. A waitress fed the hotpot with raw ingredients and served them when they were cooked, which saved us from struggling to get the food out of the boiling pot.

Then, we boarded our boat, the President 1 for the start of a cruise on the Yangzte. We quickly upgraded to a VIP room on the starboard side of the top floor, which gave us more room and things like a desk to where I could write. Most of us, myself included were absolutely bushed after the early start and long continuation to the day.
Night had already descended, but some views from the boat were quite astounding, like the modern opera house across the river from us and the city stretching up from the Yangzte above us.

Sometime in the evening, the boat set sail to the east.