Day 56 (9th July) Xi’an to Chongqing
The admirable Mr Jones, the concierge at the Hilton, booked the train tickets for us to travel from Xi’an via Chengdu to Chongqing. He really is called Jones: Jones Zhai. Unfortunately, we had to go first-class for the first leg to Chengdu because the second-class carriages were full. That is a rip-off because the seats are only slightly softer, the leg room is only slightly more but there are no standing passengers shoving their massive suitcases in our faces. I would have thought that, at very little cost compared with the price of the ticket, they might have provided a simple meal. We were starving by the time we got to Chongqing.
The transfer at Chengdu nearly ended in disaster because we only had 16 minutes to get from one platform to another. We were unable to pass through the barrier from one part of the station to another because the barrier only worked with Chinese ID cards, not our passports. A huge crowd built up behind us with people shouting at a station official (hopefully not us) to come over and help us and a woman came running to put our passports through a special machine and let us through. We got to the section where we had to go through a barrier and waited until a passenger came over and showed us where to go. My fault because I didn’t ask. We got to the platform and one of the carriage officials hurried us aboard just as the doors closed. The train left precisely on time, and we then discovered we were in the wrong carriage. We couldn’t get to our carriage because there was an engine between the first and second class sections of the train. These enormous trains have three engines, in the front, middle and back. We had to sit on two upturned plastic buckets for 45 minutes until the train reached its first stop at Foping. A carriage guard then lead us to our seats
We saw very little of the countryside because the train passes through the range of mountains which runs from west to east across most of China. Most of the time was spent in tunnels separated by narrow valleys with villages of smart white two- or three-storey houses with red tiled roofs. A welcome change from the high-rise blocks of the cities. Every valley had a river running through it and every square inch of land was cultivated. In the area between Xi’an and th mountains, the villages were connected by narrow concrete paths used by motor bikes and large pools of water served channels for the distribution of water to the extensive paddy fields.
On the train from Chengdu to Chongqing, we met two lovely people. David is a 25-year-old postgrad student at a university in Chengdu who lives with his mother and grandmother in Chongqing and Orange is a 35 year-old-lady who works for a company exporting Chinese herbal medicine. On arriving at the enormous Chongqing-West station, David took us in a taxi (wich he refused to let us pay for) to his home and then in his car to a hotel which he had found on the internet in the upmarket Chowtienmen area of central Chongqing. It is where the Yangtse and another river meet and where the cruise ships leave from. I don’t know the name of the hotel because everything is written in Chinese and I suspect that its a hotel only for Chinese, but nobody bothered us. Our room is on the 22nd floor; it is clean and comfortable with a stunning view of the Yangtse, 60-storey office blocks and a beautiful complex of Buddhist temples.
Old and new tower blocks, Xi’an
Seafood restaurant near the Hilton
View from the window of our room showing the Buddhist temple compex
Our hotel