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