The city of waterfalls

Anshun, Guizhou
(安順, Ānshùn, 貴州 Guìzhōu)

1.8.2013
Spent seven hours in the bus today, starting from Chongqing, and travelling through Guiyang to Anshun. We mostly drove through a mountain area and the scenery was beautiful. On our month long visit in China in Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Guangdong and Chongqing (municipality) we saw mountains everywhere. Based on this you'd think China is just mountains, but then again large areas of land are taken over by agriculture and cities, even ghost cities.
On our visits to China we've speculated the reasons behind the development boom of these thousands of empty new buildings, located even in the smallest places. From what I gathered, China planned to move up to 300 million citizens living in rural areas into urban locations, but also the structure of property values in China played a role on development. Many new cities were built each year, which turned into ghost cities because people couldn't afford to live in them. This Chinese property bubble lasted from 2005 to 2011. You can watch a documentary called Chinese Dreamland (David Borenstein) on YouTube about this. These areas are surreal and make great places for photography.

Mountain views from the bus

We also passed by an area, where two - most likely manmade - dinosaur skeletons were on display on the side of the road, probably guiding to a dinosaur museum. Many dinosaur fossils have been found in China in many provinces. Dinosaurs thrived in the Sichuan basin 200 million years ago and one of the dinosaur museums of China can be found in Zigong (Sichuan Province), an area where dinosaurs have also been found.

Other dinosaur museums in China are;

- Shandong Tianyu Nature Museum (Shandong Province). The Guinness Book of World Records ranked Shandong Tianyu as the world's largest dinosaur museum on the planet. Its hundreds of Jurassic feathered dinosaurs collected here are the most impressive of any Chinese museum.

- Liaoning Paleontology Museum (Shenyang, Liaoning Province), with collection of over 10,000 paleontological fossils and remains, including the Liaoningotitan. A replica of the 12 meter long and 6 meter high Liaoningotitan is now on display until April 2019 at THE SQUAIRE at Frankfurt Airport, Germany. The herbivorous dinosaur has never been shown outside of China.

- Dalian Natural History Museum (Dalian, Liaoning Province). Has the first five dinosaur eggs ever discovered in China. Also holds the Psittacosaurus assemblage and specimens Endotherium niinomii and Teilhardosaurus carbonarius, which were thought to be lost forever.

- Beijing Museum of Natural History. Has one of the best collections of Jehol Biota fossils (all the living organisms – the ecosystem – of northeastern China between 133 and 120 million years ago, the early Cretaceous period). Highlights include the Lufengosaurus huenei (first dinosaur found in China), the 25 m long Mamenchisaurus jingyanensis, pterosaurs and ichthyosaurs (aquatic reptiles that dominated the oceans).

- Paleozoological Museum of China (Beijing). Includes Mamenchisaurus, the world’s longest-necked and Asia’s largest dinosaur, Confuciousornis, the world’s earliest beaked bird, and the best-preserved skeleton of Stegodon.

- The Geological Museum of China (Beijing). With more than 200,000 geological specimen, the museum covers all fields of earth science. Among the exhibits are dinosaur fossils such as Shantungosaurus giganteus and Sinosauropteryx.

- Beipiao Pterosaur Museum (Liaoning Province). The world’s only pterosaur - a flying reptile - museum.

- Sino-German Paleontology Museum (Jinzhou City, Liaoning Province).

- Henan Geological Museum (Zhengzhou, Henan Province). Highlights include the world’s largest nest of dinosaur egg fossils, the world earliest ginkgo fossils, dozens of feathered dinosaurs and the Ruyangosaurus; Asia’s largest sauropod dinosaur and one of the biggest sauropods in the world.

HOT LIVER MANNER

As always on a bus trip we stopped at a checkpoint. Sometimes the people on the bus are counted for keeping track about things. The busses also have recording cameras. We also stopped for a break, and now found the worst toilet on this trip in China, the pee smell was so strong that it felt like it burnt the eyes! You didn't want to breathe in the toilet.
The parking lot was full of cars and one bus, which all had been in accidents. The roof of the bus was totally crushed and the fronts of the cars. This sight is pretty common in China. Earlier we saw another bus that had crashed with a truck. The truck had completely destroyed the front of the bus. Warning signs of accidents are common by the road here. Some of the roads have a few uphill sideroads in case of an accident, like loosing the breaks. You just have to try and steer your way to those areas. Luckily - with our bus number being 666 - we didn't get into an accident.

We found our hotel in Anshun quite fast, it was close to the bus station. The hotel staff spoke only a few words of English. Our room didn't smell the nicest, although this was supposed to be quite a new hotel. While checking the room I found a booger on the wall and the room had a yucky full carpet, which are germ and dust ridden and cause allergic reactions. The carpet hadn't been vacuumed, it had feathers and some toe nail clippings on it! Did someone plug a chicken here, and maybe cut its nails while at it? The bed was something we'd never seen before; it had a round area in the middle that was lower than the rest of the matress. Didn't understand its purpose at all. We had some laughs about the room, but the best laughs came from the hotel information booklet, which had hysterical translations. One of the hotel services was called "hot liver manner". What on earth that means, we can only guess.

ANSHUN

Anshun is a "little" city in the Guizhou province with a population of 2,297,339, among which ethnic groups, including the Buyi, Miao, Hui and Gelao, account for 39 percent. The city is at an altitude of 1,300 meters and features abundant rivers, waterfalls, gorges, caves, stone forests, lakes and underground rivers. It is home to over 100 waterfalls and around 1,200 caves. The Long Gong Dragon Caves, Wulong Temple, Wenmiao Temple, the mysterious writings Red Cliff Relics (红崖天书, Hóng yá tiānshū), Hongshan Park and The Getu River are some of its attractions, and the Chuandong Paleolithic Site in Puding county is reputed as "the civilization light of Asia". 80 kilometers from Anshun is the more than 80 kilometer long Huajiang Grand Canyon Scenic Area by the Huajiang River (花江大峡谷风景名胜区, Huājiāng dà xiágǔ fēngjǐng míngshèngqū), which has a spectacular cave and the valley has ancient iron bridges, ancient rock paintings, cliff stone carvings and paleontological fossils too. But surprisingly, Anshun is best known for its aerospace industry and has rich mineral resources.

Another attraction, the stone village of Tun Bu, built during the reign of Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD), is highly valued by experts as a living fossil of Han culture and as the last Ming Dynasty village in the world. A former military post, some of the villagers still live in forts and follow a simple and peculiar army lifestyle, retaining traditional Ming clothing and hair styles. Dixi Drama is an exclusive ritual dance of Tunpu people, involving elements of drama, sacrifice and entertainment. It is performed during Chinese New Year, at festivals and celebrations, and in the months after harvest.

We took an evening walk in the city, where people were playing all sorts of games everywhere, mostly shooting games, where you win stuffed animals etc. Everywhere in China you see people practising Tai Chi or dancing in the parks. People even sing there or play instruments.

Stuffed animals for the winner

Some of the well-known local snacks include broiled mini xiang pig, buckwheat cool bean jelly and fried egg cake (made from choice rice and soy beans, stuffed with meat). Genuine Anshun food can usually be found at local night markets. We ended up eating pizza at a local restaurant, because we didn't find other restaurants serving vegetarian food. At the restaurant the waitress was so excited about us that she pushed her coworker aside so she could serve us! That felt weird, and to top that, everybody stared at us while we were eating. The whole time we were in Anshun we didn't see other western people, and eventhough Anshun has a lot to offer for travelers, the city still seems more like a stop-over place.

HUANGGUOSHU WATERFALL NATIONAL PARK

Last night a Chinese group were fighting in our hotel. Don't know what was going on, but at times it sounded as if someone was getting a beating. The hotel guard came to calm things down, but it took a while to get things settled. We didn't sleep much because of this and woke up early to get early to the Huangguoshu Waterfall, which is why we travelled to Anshun for. We also planned to see a certain cave, but missed that one, because the waterfall area took many hours to walk. It was kinda crazy to arrange all the busses and tickets yourself in a country where hardly no one speaks English, so mostly we played a guessing game if things go smoothly or not. Sometimes we just followed people. This is what we did today and things went well.

China's tallest waterfall, Huangguoshu Waterfall (黃果樹瀑布, Huáng Guǒshù Pùbù), is 45 km (28 mi) southwest of Anshun City. It is 77.8 m (255 ft) high and 101 m (331 ft) wide. It lies at Huangguoshu Waterfall National Park, which first applied for UNESCO World Heritage status in the 90's and another application was left in 2017, waiting to be nominated in 2020. The application in the 90's was rejected because of the parks low forest cover rate, poor ecological environment and (now relocated) an unattractive artificial Banbian Street. With a focus on sustainable tourism, the forest cover rate has since been boosted from less than 15% to 43.5%. At key scenic sites the coverage has increased from 20% to 73% in 2015.

The park has many rock formations and 18 waterfalls, including Dripping Shoal Waterfall (composed of 3 waterfalls, with the height of 316 meters), the 105-meter wide Doupotang Waterfall (陡坡塘瀑布, Dǒupō táng pùbù), Luositan Waterfall, Dishuitan Waterfall and the hypnotical yet small Yinlianzhuitan Waterfall (银链坠潭瀑布, Yín liàn zhuì tán pùbù, Silver Chain Waterfall), which is only over 10 meters high with the upper part shaped like a funnel, and the pond in the bottom like a trough.

Yinlianzhuitan Waterfall

The Huangguoshu waterfall, also known as the Baishuihe Waterfall, is very beautiful. It took 100,000 to 500,000 years for such awe-inspiring scenery to develop! At right conditions and somewhere between 9 and 11 o’clock in the morning, majestic rainbows can appear in its mist above the Rhinoceros Pond in front of Huangguoshu. Huangguoshu can be viewed from above, below, front, back, left and right.

Huangguoshu waterfall viewed from far

Rhinoceros Pond below Huangguoshu waterfall

Huangguoshu waterfall

View to surrounding areas

The Water Curtain Cave (水簾洞, Shuǐ lián dòng) is a 134-meter-long naturally formed corridor behind the waterfall. We queued to get inside the cave and were walking amongst what felt like hundreds of Chinese, the mass felt impermeable! Some people would get hysterical about being sucked inside such a mass of crowd, but we just moved with the mass. Good thing we had earlier experiences about masses from our earlier trips to China. It was actually so crowded that I didn't see my feet at all! The Chinese always seem to be in a hurry and the crowd was also pushing you forward. Many people were even taking risky routes to get past other people and some were even stepping on peoples heads, using them like paths, and I'm not kidding!
Inside the waterfall we were able to walk by ourselves (not pushed by others) and got a foggy view through the waterfall to the surrounding area. It was a wet and noisy experience, because the fog was everywhere and the waterfall was very loud inside. If you wanted to talk to someone inside, you had to yell. It was an interesting walk overall, we've never seen anything like it, although have been inside a waterfall earlier, but just a small one with natural rocks behind it. Huangguoshu has a manmade path inside.

Inside the Water Curtain Cave

On another side of the Huangguoshu waterfall

Afterwards we took an escalator in the middle of the forest! Who on earth came up with the idea of building escalators in the middle of nowhere?! I wondered, if monkeys like to use them as well. It was a weird experience, because your mind sets on going to a shopping mall, but you end up in the middle of a forest instead of a mall! Chinese are sometimes gloriously mad with their inventions. The escalators are about 76.8 meters long and in two parts.

Forest escalators

TIANXINGQIAO SCENIC AREA

The Tianxingqiao Scenic Area (天星桥景区, Tiānxīngqiáo jǐngqū) is close to the waterfall park. We visited this too. The scenic area is quite large and has beautiful mountain views with a lot of ponds, bridges, stone formations and paths, beautiful forests and rivers.

The beautiful rock formations and ponds in the area

Tianxing lake

You find beautiful plants next to the path

Chain bridge

The Tian Xing cave with its mild and cool temperature was a refreshing place to visit after the Chongqing heat. The cave was formed by an underground river and features stalactites, stalagmites, dripstones, grapefruit like formations, stone disks and plates and the largest hall is more than 50 meters tall with a diameter of 150 meters. The hall has four stone columns over 20 meters tall. Visiting caves is exciting, because each cave is unique and in China most caves have coloured lights to highlight the caves features.

Tian Xing cave

Tian Xing caves spectacular lights bring out the caves
special features

The huge stalagnites (dripstone columns) of Tian Xing cave

An underground river at the cave

A huge column stands a few meters tall

Beautiful "curtains"

The largest hall is more than 50 meters tall with a diameter of 150 meters

From the cave a path leads along the river bank, where one can find a stone bridge over the river, a pond and waterfalls, before reaching the cableway, which offers beautiful views over the park during its short ride.

It's easy to understand why parks are so popular among Chinese. Like everywhere else in the world, they serve a great relaxing contrast to the busy city life, and eventhough some parks aren't too close to the city, it's not a big effort to take the bus there and forget all your worries for a while in a paradise like this. Unfortunately we had to return to the city and continue our journey the next day towards Guilin.

Walking next to the river bank, with the stone bridge on upper
right side

Tianxingqiao Scenic Area

Tianxingqiao Scenic Area

Leaving on a ropeway with beautiful views

Melting in the skyscraper city Chongqing

Chongqing, Yuzhong District
(渝中区 Yúzhōng Qū, 重慶 Chóngqìng)

30.7.2013
After our mountain adventure we headed to the central disctrict and capital of the municipality of Chongqing, the Yuzhong District. Our day started already at seven am by getting bus tickets to Chongqing. The busses often leave when they are full, but also on schedule, so it's better to be on time if you have any idea about the schedule. Sometimes the seats are numbered in the tickets, so it's best to take the seat given to you. Like most Asians, Chinese are also very keen on sitting at the right seats. It's another story of course if you asked for a certain seat.

Like most busses in China, the bus isle had a few rubbish bins where people were able to spit and throw any trash like animal bones from their snacks, but people still threw trash like nuttshells on the floor. It was very messy. Now - besides the nuttshells and watermelon juice on the floor - we even had a duck on our bus. Someone also ate something really stinky, so the whole bus stank rotten.

Our bus

After about an hours ride it was time for the first break. Usually it's for a quick toilet break, but sometimes for lunch or breakfast. If you don't speak Chinese and don't read it or interact with the people on the bus, before getting out of the bus take note of who the driver is, who are in your bus, the bus number, colour, etc, just to keep an eye on so the bus won't leave without you. It's also good to try to speak with someone, at least something, so someone knows you are on that bus. The driver usually checks the people on board, but as happened to a lady on our bus earlier, she was running to catch our bus and his husband was yelling inside to the driver that she is still out there. On longer breaks the driver usually locks the doors and gets the people out of the bus to keep the luggage secure.

I've mentioned about Chinese toilets before, but the toilets by the road are the most terrible you'll ever see in your lifetime. As in most places, they are holes on the ground, but these often don't have doors so you end up staring at other people while doing your business. There's never toilet paper either and chicken, mosquitos, flies, spiders, biting ants and even leeches can harass you. While on the toilet break we saw someone drying corn close to the toilets on the dirty street and a chicken went to eat the corn. No wonder diseases spread, hygiene still seems an unknown thing to some people.

Drying corn close to the toilets

The bus ride was supposed to take anything between six to eight hours. We hoped for six, as there is a good highway all the way from Leshan to Chongqing, but the highway was closed. So the bus drove small roads through every town. Getting back on another highway took four hours. The ride took seven hours with two breaks, one being a lunch break. At Chongqing's first bus terminal we weren't sure if the bus continued to another terminal close to our hotel, so we asked a young couple about it, who said it would go there. But then an older lady working in the bus came yelling at the young couple and showed us to leave with some taxi driver. The young couple stayed silent afterwards, so we figured it was a scam. Maybe the lady had a deal with the taxi driver (there are various tourist scams in China), so they both get money from tourists. We decided to leave the bus, the situation was unpleasant enough, and passed the taxi driver showing he wasn't getting money from us. We took another taxi to the hotel and paid much less than the earlier driver was asking. It was a good thing we weren't catching a flight or a train, we would've missed the connecting rides with this hassle. People who scam tourists don't care where you end up at. Our taxi driver was very nice and smiling, even talked to us a lot, but we couldn't understand him, so we just smiled back nicely and thanked him for the ride, xièxiè.

Skyscraper city Chongqing

Chongqing (or what we lovingly called John King, not pronounced this way though) is a large municipality, its maximum width is 470 kilometres (290 mi) and the maximum length is 450 km (280 mi), so it is the size of a small country. Chongqing borders the following provinces: Hubei in the east, Hunan in the southeast, Guizhou in the south, Sichuan in the west and northwest and Shaanxi to the north in its northeast corner. The former capital city of China during the WWII has a history of over 3,000 years and is the birthplace of Ba and Yu culture.
There are many sights to see, but as with China, usually the distances are huge and most sights are further out of the city. Some of the sights in Chongqing are the Luohan Temple (罗汉寺, luóhànsì), Great Hall of the People (人民大礼堂, rénmín dàlǐtáng), Dazu Rock Carvings, Diaoyu Fortress, Shibaozhai hill with a temple and a pavilion, Huguang Guild Hall, Chaotianmen Square by the river, the river cruises that take you to the Three Gorges of Qutang, Wuxia and Xiling, Eling Park, Ciqikou ancient town (磁器口, Cíqìkǒu), Chongqing Tiandi urban architectural etc area, Hongyadong (洪崖洞) scenic site with huge 11-story wooden stilted house complex on a cliff, Jiefangbei CBD business district around the People's Liberation Monument, hot springs, Wulong Karst National Geology Park and so on.

Luohan temple

Hongyadong has many restaurants and shops

Chongqing is built on mountains and is partially surrounded by the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. The Yangtze-river covers a course of 665 km (413 mi) and cuts through the Wu Mountains at three places, forming the Three Gorges. Chongqing is known as a "mountain city" and a "city on rivers", because it covers a large area crisscrossed by rivers and mountains. The Daba Mountains stand in the north, the Wu Mountains in the east, the Wuling Mountains in the southeast and the Dalou Mountains in the south. Karst landscape and stone forests are common in this area; numerous peaks, limestone caves and valleys can be found in many places.

Some of the mountains surrounding Chongqing

Also known as one of the "Three Furnaces" of the Yangtze River (along with Wuhan and Nanjing), Chongqing summers are long and among the hottest in China, with highs of 33 to 34 °C (91 to 93 °F) in July and August in the urban area. Chongqing is China's third largest centre for motor vehicle production and the largest for motorcycles. It is also one of the nine largest iron and steel centres in China and one of the three major aluminium producers. Natural resources are also abundant with large deposits of coal, natural gas and more than 40 kinds of minerals such as strontium and manganese. The "Fog City" is among one of the ten most air-polluted cities in China with over 100 days of fog per year. The polluted city might not sound too inviting, but with so much to see in this large area you can always leave the city on foggiest days to see something outside the urban area.

Chaotianmen harbour area

Our stay in the city was short, just two nights. We didn't want to stay too long in a large, polluted and very hot city. When we arrived to Chongqing we noticed the terrible heat. A heatwave blasted over China and on our arrival day Chongqing had 38 °C! The news even showed someone frying an egg on the asphalt! It was very exhausting to be outside. We went for a walk in the evening, but it was still too hot to stay out long. Even the local men had rolled their t-shirts up to their chest, showing belly, to get cooler. Not all approve the style which even has a name, Beijing bikini, disparagingly also described as “bang ye” (roughly translates as "exposing yourself like a grandfather").

Yangtze River International Youth Hostel turned out to be a nice place to stay by the Dongshuimen bridge and close to the city center. Hostels often serve tourists better than hotels - depending of course on the rating of your hotel -, but for budget travellers hostels have a lot to offer, for instance English service when hotels might lack it. We've even had our own room with a bathroom and TV in hostels. Also, most cheap hotels don't offer laundry services in China, but hostels do. It was sometimes hard to get our clothes cleaned. Sometimes we washed them ourselves but for larger laundry, like after hiking, you really need a washing machine. Besides all this, you also meet a lot of people from around the world in hostels and it's easier to make new friends there than in hotels.

Yangtze River International Youth Hostel

Yangtze River International Youth Hostel

Chongqing is one of the places in China where they eat dogs and we saw small dog skulls sold on the street with meat still on them. They were probably sold as food. Chongqing food is part of Sichuan cuisine, which is known for its spicy, numbing food, caused by the use of Sichuan pepper. Local specialties include dumplings, pickled vegetables, Dandan noodles, deep-fried spicy Sichuan-style chicken, hot pot, spicy rabbit head and fried silkworm chrysalis, to name a few.
Different from many other Chinese cuisines, Chongqing dishes are suitable for the solo diner as they are often served in small individual sized portions. Because it was hard for us to find vegetarian food, we once ate at Pizza Hut, where a woman customer got excited about seeing western people and asked her husband to take a photo with us and their son. We had completely forgotten about this side of China, since nobody had photographed us since Dali.

31.7
THE PECULIAR FOREIGNER STREET

Because of only two nights in the city we didn't have time to travel anywhere further in Chongqing for sightseeing (which means at least 100-200/km of travelling one way), so we decided to see the Foreigner Street (美心洋人街, Měi xīn yángrén jiē) on the full day. It is on the other side of the river near a ferry terminal. We took a taxi there though. The peculiar entertainment and amusement park opened in 2006. It wasn't meant to be an amusement park at first, but a place that celebrates multiculturism and where foreign people were encouraged to put up shops and restaurants. Eventually the place, which seems like time forgot, turned into a tacky mix of everything, where one can find a Christian church, an upside-down house, an Australian bar, a small train, a pyramid, a few house of horrors, little New York, water park, all kinds of rides, the world's largest public restroom (!) and many other weird attractions. Many people get married here in various strange kinds of settings. We just broused around the area and didn't go for the rides, they seemed very rusty, outdated and scary to try out and I wouldn't want to shoot off 150 meters to the air from a rusty Space Shot.

Foreigner Street ride

Gaudi-style entrance to the world's largest public restroom, the Porcelain Palace. It has over 1,000 toilets, some uniquely shaped!

Like Park Güell in Barcelona

Asian area in Foreigner Street

Hillside area with church. People get married here.

A restaurant at Foreigner Street

New York in Foreigner Street

The house of horrors also seemed like a bad idea on the very hot day when your heart already beats rapidly from the heat. It could've been a good place to have a heart attack that day. Otherwise, for fans of horror, one of those houses seemed really interesting with pictures and dolls from movies such as The Ring, The Grudge and some unknown Asian horror movies. I wasn't looking forward to experiencing the same horror as I did years back in Thailand. A guy dressed as the Leatherface from one of the most disturbing horror movies of all time, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, scared me to death. He jumped on me and started chasing me in the horror labyrinth. Imagine someone doing that to you on a hot day! Instead of horror experiences we ate some ice cream, and as with all sweet stuff in China, it is nothing compared to western delicacies. It is the same thing with McDonalds´ ice cream and flurrys, they're quite tasteless in Asia. Asian desserts are often overly sweet and you mostly taste sugar in them. We don't eat much sweet stuff in Asia because of this.

House of horrors

Happiness is...a crashed bus and an oversized octopus?

Foreigner Street

Tree houses

After the Foreigners Street we took a short cable car ride across the Yangtze river. Chongqing is the only Chinese city that keeps public aerial tramways. The view was great to the city. Chinese build huge buildings in even the "smallest" cities, and when it comes to huge cities like Chongqing (population of 30 million), you see mostly skyscrapers so high you get dizzy looking up at them. The bridges are huge too and the river cruise ships, which have to accommodate a large amount of people. America is known for - and boasts with - having the worlds largest things, but they've got nothing against China. For a girl who comes from a small country such as Finland with less than six million people, where nearly everything is built on small scale, all these huge cities are amazing. Finland could also have more skyscrapers, which save landspace.

Cable car ride across Yangtze river

Cable car ride across Yangtze river

Today we didn't eat Chinese food either, but at a good Indian restaurant Cacaja, which you can also find in other Chinese cities. Their menus are also in English. We became quite Chinese on this trip when it came to eating habbits. The most important thing in every place we went to was to see that we eat properly, because you never knew where and what the next meal was going to be. They say that when Chinese meet each other, instead of asking how are you, they ask "have you eaten today". Nowadays it's mostly used by the older generation in China, but we pondered every day are we going to eat well today. A good article about the greeting "have you eaten today" and its history can be read here;
Why Do Chinese People Ask Have You Eaten

China would be much more tourist friendly if they had signs, menus etc in English too. You find some other western junk food like KFC and McDonald's from Jiefangbei Pedestrian Street too, which is where the expensive brand shops are at. With mostly the brand shops it doesn't take much time to check the street out. It's amazing how many brand shops are rising in China and every time we visited a mall these shops lacked of customers.

Jiefangbei Pedestrian Street

In the middle of the same street, near Times Square, lies the 27 meter tall People’s Liberation Monument. It was built in 1945 to commemorate the victory over the Japanese in WWII. Inside its wall is a memorial steel pipe with the monument blueprint, newspapers, stamps, notes, photos and books from the 1940s. A letter from the former US President Roosevelt to the people of Chongqing at the time of victory of World War II is also inside. A spiral staircase takes you to the top of the monument and a circular balcony above the clock has the capacity of 20 visitors. The monument doesn't look like much outside - and among the skyscrapers - and we didn't go in as at the time we didn't even know it's possible. And instead one might want to visit the tallest building in Chongqing, which would be Chongqing World Financial Center, rising to 339 m (1112 feet), with 73 floors. When finished in 2019, the Chongqing International Trade and Commerce Center will be the highest, with 99 floors and height of 468 m (1,535 ft). Chongqing has 26 buildings taller than 200 meters, all of them built in the last decade, and its skyline is ranked among the world's twenty tallest.

People’s Liberation Monument

Chaotianmen harbour and square is the place where you can see the two rivers Yangtze and Jialing meet. In the early summer, green Jialing River and brown yellow Yangtze River with the rolling whirlpools forms spectacular scenery of both colours meeting. We only saw brown yellow water on both rivers, so there wasn't much to see. On our walks we passed by temples in the city center, such as the Nengren temple and the Luohan temple, but didn't try to go in, as the whole center seemed to be under construction. There were construction areas everywhere. Chongqing is a trade center for businesses, and our hostel was in an area where you passed by loads of cargo boxes and wholesale shops. In the cargo area we even saw pet animals in boxes in this terrible heat, and the boxes were lying under the frying sun. A few hamsters had died in their small cage, probably from the heat. The animals were treated like objects. China can be tough to travel for an animal lover.

At Chaotianmen harbour you get views to Jialing and Yangtze rivers

River cruise ships

Mural in a Chongqing building

1.8
ONWARD TO ANSHUN

Our stay in Chongqing was short and sweaty, but we did enjoy the skyscraper scenery even if we didn't get to go to the countryside at all and see more. In the morning we went to the railway station where busses also leave to get bus tickets to Guiyang, from where we would continue to Anshun, a little town of two million people. We got tickets for the eleven o'clock bus and had to wait for two hours for the bus to leave. We spent most of the time at the nearby McDonald's, mostly just people watching. The bus stations in China have airport style luggage screenings, so it was a hassle with a heavy backpack and two other large bags lifting them from one place to another. It made our trip easier though, that we were able to leave our dive gear in Lembongan, Indonesia, so we didn't have to drag that bag along too. This day was a travel day, so one of the joys we could get out of it was watching the scenery go by during the seven hour bus ride. The travel days were plenty and I don't know how many hours we actually sat in a bus during the year. This is one of the downsides of backpacking and even more so when you prefer trains over busses and there is no train option available.

View to a cute pedestrian street from the railway station

Caiyuanba railway station scenery

Scenery on the road