The flight out from Shenzhen was a piece of cake.  The return flight, some five long days later, was not quite so simple.  But more on that later.  In what seems to be the fall fashion for inland cities, we landed in Chongqing in the morning, greeted by a blanket of fog and smog.  Tori is more adamant that this is simply fog, I am far more skeptic.  At any rate, the first sibling trip of 2009 was off to a rousing start as we found, haggled, then checked into a hotel once we were able to see the room and be assured that it did indeed have two beds.  Americans are finicky about that sort of thing.  Then it was time to get out on the streets to explore Chongqing.

The city is the capital of a great expanse that, for technical considerations, is the world’s largest city.  Silly municipality-derived titles aside, the city is the focus of major investment from the federal government to spur investment in the interior of China, where the economic reforms have borne less fruit than in the blockbuster coastal cities (ahem, Shenzhen!).  This is immediately evident downtown Chongqing, a maze of skyscrapers and construction and generally speaking an extremely pleasant place to while away the times.  The docks that line the riverside are still actively used by traffic going up and down the Yangtze, making Chongqing similar to Chicago in importance and Pittsburgh by geography.  I quite like the city overall and wished that had been a little more time for exploring before we left for the countryside the next day.

The term countryside is used loosely because here, it simply means not a major city.  Dazu, the town we stayed in, is I’m sure well over 100,000 people, including at least 5 working at a hotpot restaurant that has no qualms about grossly overcharging foreigners for their food.  A meal that should’ve topped out at 25 kuai ‘became’ 122 and it set me loose on them.  In the end, the agreement was to pay 80, hard earned after chastisements were handed out freely on my part.   I also hope that they will be a bit more careful in the future about cheating foreigners.  Not all of us are helpless monolinguists.  I also know that in the future I will not even argue, but instead drop my money, leave, and let them call the cops if they want.

Fun culinary adventures aside, Dazu as a town was nice enough, with an enjoyable main street free of cars (yes, China, more of this!) that made for good strolling before the next morning.  Here, we awoke early to get out to the Buddhist cliff carvings north of the city.  These carvings are some thousand years old, give or take, though there is a considerable range between the first and last carvings.  They are set in the forest, blissfully removed from the flurry of construction and (for now) spared the awful onslaught that is mass tourism in China.  Tori and I had the place nearly to ourselves, the only others really there being some university art students doing sculpture studies.  It is also impressive that these carvings escaped the wholesale fervor of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.  Back in Dazu, we settled in for the long, long bus ride into Chengdu.

Chengdu is the capital and largest city of Sichuan province, from which Chongqing was partitioned in the 1990s.   Chengdu was, from my perspective, an impressive Chinese city.  It was clean, well-tended, and about as relaxed as these places get.  The drivers weren’t even horrible.  It is famed in China for its tea culture and Tori and I hung out over some green tea at the People’s Park on a nice day, shooting the breeze and checking out a dude with an amazing buzz cut mullet.  This was about as nice as our weather would get, and the remainder of the time the city was mostly obscured by fog and haze.  Nevertheless we continued our culinary exploration of Sichuanese cuisine by stuffing our faces at local restaurants whenever we could.  Careful to balance our nutritional needs, we also ate a lot of Chips Ahoy from convenience stores.

The main tourist attractions are the giant pandas to the north and the Leshan giant Buddha to the south.  We of course saw both of these.  The first was organized by our guesthouse easily and cheaply, and we spent a morning watching pandas do stuff.  Principally they sit, or eat.  Sometimes they walk around.  Oh, and they sleep too.  I’m not quite sure what to make of them, but I did get a kick out of the tourists wetting their pants over them.  It’s China, you don’t need Chengdu for pandas.  There are other zoos for a fraction the price.  The one thing they were able to pull bragging rights over was the baby pandas.  And justifiably, because these little buggers are just adorable.  They lie in a big nursery crib, a few months old, looking like little toy pets.  It’s the sort of cute where whatever they do becomes instantly endearing.

The tour aspect was a little tiring, and when it was time to go to Leshan, we decided to go on our own volition.  We can hack China, we told ourselves.  So after some buses, we were eventually arrived in front of the ticket office.  Unlike the Dazu carvings, both the pandas and Leshan were bombarded with tourists.  Most of these were Chinese, pushing eachother as they plodded in line and taking pictures making cute poses or grim faces.  I’m over Chinese domestic tourism at this point.  If I never see a tour guide with a flag and a hip-mounted speaker and mic, I’ll be a happy man.  At any rate, the Buddha himself was quite large, 71m tall, carved into the face of the cliff over the river.

The scale and setting is pretty dramatic and impressive.  The larger area of the site is also littered with numerous temples amidst an enjoyable bucolic setting that would be magical without the hordes.  Instead, Tori and I effected our escape, heading back into town for an overdue lunch.  While riding the local bus, I played various games with a highly energetic two-year old girl in the seat behind me who happily showed me her monkey face over and over again while I pretended my hand was a spider, sending her into fits of laughter.  Remember that when you take the taxi you miss out on these sorts of interactions.

By day’s end we were both tired.  It seems that with only five days to cover the ground we did, we did pretty well.  And it definitely meant that we spent more time active, going, and busy then during our ‘work weeks’ over here.  Particulary the case when considering our early mornings and bus rides.  The last morning was, of course, the earliest of the bunch, kicking off at 5am as we made our way to the airport to fly home.  Now, to tie things all back together, this flight was the issue.  Instead of a 7.30am departure, we were grounded by obscene fog until noon.  So I missed my classes that afternoon and got home absolutely sick of being in airports.  They aren’t the most charming places.  Sichuan and Chongqing however are great.  Go if you can.