Chongqing Archives - 4corners7seas

A Stroll in Chongqing: City of Bridges and Spices, Phlegm and Trash

Why are you even here? This wasn’t the plan at all. You were supposed to be in Tibet.

Crossing the road, you tuck in behind the old bloke bent under the weight of an enormous load of empty plastic bottles as a concrete mixer rumbles by, on its way to feed the new-growth forests of faceless tower blocks conquering the trees somewhere on the edge of this vast and booming conurbation, the truck belching a cloud of exhaust fumes into your face as it passes; holding your breath you sidestep back out past the bottle collector, straight into the cloud of cigarette smoke emanating from some gormless scooter driver’s helmet, from the kind of cigarettes they smoke here which reek like there’s a whole pack in every single stick.

At least the smog isn’t bad today, the air having earlier been scrubbed by the rain, but you’re coughing and spluttering as you find a crack in the railing and finally escape to the relative safety of the sidewalk’s cracked pavement. But now here comes yet another smartphone zombie, eyes down and glued to the screen, a walking accident waiting to happen; but you won’t be involved, turning your shoulders and adjusting yourself to avoid a collision, spitting an off-hand curse in his ear as you pass.

And that’s not the only spitting going on; far from it. You hear it somewhere close at hand, that awful sound of someone hacking and retching up the thickest phlegm from the deepest recesses of their respiratory tract; it actually sounds like they may even have managed to hawk a lump of lung tissue up into their own mouth… then comes the pregnant pause before launch, that brief moment as they savour the flavours of a mouthful of mucus while you try to spot the danger – and there he is, it’s the old timer a few feet to your right, you spot him just as he lets fly and you watch, horrified, as an enormous globule of sputum splats down on the street with a diameter of inches, not far from your feet. It doesn’t matter how many times you see and hear this little piece of performance art – you never find it any less grotesque.

A flash of colour catches your eye across the street among the greyness, distracting you from the bodily fluids you’re about to step around; a vendor hawking oranges off a hand-pulled cart he’s just parked right there on the pedestrian crossing that you should’ve used, piles of rubble visible in the wasteland behind the barrier beyond him.

Pausing to take a photo, you sidestep again as a leather-faced woman squeezes past between you and the traffic, a bamboo pole across her shoulder with a large bag of something-or-other on either end, her red coat another flash of colour. It’s a popular colour here, red, being associated with good fortune; red coats, red lanterns, red shoes, red cars, red boots.

And now you come to the source of the music you’ve been hearing wafting up the street, snatches caught between the blaring of horns and the low rumble of the city, getting louder and louder as you draw closer until it drowns out even this heaving metropolis; it’s a common sight, one you’ve seen all over the country, the synchronised troupes practising their dance routines in public spaces to bizarre trance remixes of pop melodies. This lot are mostly female, mostly middle-aged or elderly, and don’t have the snappy routines and well-drilled timing you’ve seen elsewhere; but they’re having fun and keeping fit, and holy shit are they cranking out the beats! The volume is deafening, like standing right in front of the speakers at some dance music festival, the vibrations felt in your very bones. A number of onlookers sit and stand around the edge of the little square, looking utterly bored despite the decibels, dawdling with hands in pockets and cigarettes dangling out the corners of their mouths. You catch one bloke’s eye and nod a greeting; he just looks back at you impassively as he draws on his cigarette.

Nod hanging unrequited in the air, you turn off the main road down the steps into this little preserved historical district of old Qing-era buildings within which your guesthouse is tucked, an island of old-world charm surrounded by a grim industrial modernity. Arriving by dark the night before it looked shabby, but even in the drab light of this dreary day it’s a pleasingly nostalgic district, having a faded grandeur that’s somehow reminiscent of a hillside town on the Mediterranean, or the pictures you’ve seen of Havana, Cuba.

Descending away from the thumping beats above, you pass between the crumbling facades of old merchant courtyard buildings and the Huguang Guildhall, the paint cracking and peeling, occasionally catching glimpses of the interiors through an open portal or two, glimpses of the hillsides and the mighty river over a ramshackle wall or two.

An old man stoops at a doorway, his shoulder bent to a length of bamboo loaded with bags of produce; a restaurant perhaps? It’s certainly a handsome building and would make fine surrounds for a meal. Beyond it, you find yourself looking up at one of this city’s many towering bridges as it spans the river, carrying on its double decks both a road and one of the light rail lines composing a gleaming new public transit system that wasn’t there on your previous visit but 8 years before; you also see people crossing it on foot, and would do likewise. How to get up there?

As you search for a way up and round onto the bridge, a scruffy little dog appears above you at the top of a flight of steps; you regard one another for a moment, before he canters past and pauses, looking back at you. Seems like you’re supposed to follow, and so you do, back up another flight of steps that leads back up to another road, this the one running over the bridge.

The little dog vanishes as suddenly as he appeared, but he showed you what you were looking for, and now as the road gets up behind the old yellow buildings you see the garbage-strewn no-man’s land on the slope between buildings and bridge, a middle-aged lady rummaging down there with a bin liner, picking out and bagging the recyclables.

As you walk out over the Yangtze you’re battered by sporadic gusts of wind and flurries of the cold November rain which is starting to fall again, the girl in red boots walking up ahead holding her umbrella flat against her face like a shield; you don’t have one, so you just hunch your shoulders and walk, stopping to take pictures when the rain intermittently stops.

There, over on the far side of the murky waters, stands a double-towered skyscraper shining gold from head to foot. It’s the tackiest building you’ve ever seen; back there, a woman sorts through piles of trash to pick out a meagre living, and over there a gold-plated skyscraper stands like some garish beacon of nouveau riche kitsch.

You’re in Chongqing, the so-called “biggest city you’ve never heard of”, the City of Bridges, the City of Spices, the City of Phlegm and Trash, this ugly, beautiful city of hills and fog and rivers and smog; and it occurs to you that you’ve just experienced the most condensed ten minutes of early-21st China you could possibly imagine, an intense 10-minute microcosm of all the contradictions and juxtapositions you see when travelling round a country racing forwards in its development while its industrious people hustle and dance in the streets…

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Read about Chongqing’s awesome fiery cuisine

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See here for some history on the Huguang Guildhall

Down the Yangtze by hydrofoil through the Three Gorges

China, Chongqing, Overland travel

“The man made scenery of the Yangtze is spectacularly grim.”
– Michael Palin, Full Circle, 1997

“Marco Polo must’ve been pissed off by this point. It’s ‘orrible; it’s horrible. It’s a place to visit in a submarine this, this river. Look at it; it’s polluted to hell and back, innit? I know people moan at home, sort of saying “oh all our industries are gone and factories are gone, and people aren’t making things at home”; but they are here. I mean, everything you pick up’s made in China, innit, and look at what it does to the place, factories putting all this shit in the air. Let em keep it, honestly. We don’t want this at home; it’s depressing enough without having skies like this. You hear all the time, don’t you, you know; “we don’t do anything anymore, we don’t make anything. It’s all sort of coffee shops and paninis and charity shops”. But, at least we have blue skies. If you’re gonna be pissed off at home, be pissed off with a blue sky. Imagine being pissed off here!”
– Karl Pilkington, An Idiot Abroad, 2012

A grim industrial town on the banks of the Yangtze

Palin and Pilkington are two very different travel presenters to put it mildly, but on the state of the Yangtze they agree. The rather more eloquent Palin’s ‘spectacularly grim’ is a very succinct way of describing it; the cities along the riverbanks look utterly bleak, the factories ‘putting all their shit’ both into the air and into the waters of the Yangtze. However mighty a river may be, there’s only so much poison it can take; even with China having woken up to its environmental challenges and showing signs of starting to tackle them, this great river will take many decades to return to anything approaching good health.

As for Pilkington, he and his co-presenter Warwick Davis were so unimpressed with both their crappy boat and the Yangtze itself that they cut their river cruise short before they ever even reached the Three Gorges! I would say more fool (or Idiot) them, and that once on the boat you may as well tough it out until you at least see the gorges; I would say that, but to be honest, I don’t think I’d even get on one of the cruise boats in the first place!

Firstly, this is because I went through the gorges by hydrofoil, travelling from Chongqing to Yichang in one day rather than the three days it takes on a cruise boat, and my companions and I were happy we did it that way – the gorges were pretty spectacular, but not really enough to justify three days on a poisoned river in choking air just to see them. And secondly, with the completion of the enormous Three Gorges Dam (near Yichang) in 2012, they’re no longer as spectacular as they once were. When we passed through them the dam was still under construction and the waters had partially risen, but the gorges were still impressive – though they probably wouldn’t have been worth going miles out of our way for, or spending three nights on a shitty boat for, blasting through them by hydrofoil fitted nicely in with our route from Chengdu to Shanghai. With the water having risen so much now though, I’d say the gorges definitely wouldn’t be worth going miles out of your way or spending three days on a shitty boat for!

Qutang Gorge, most spectacular of the Three Gorges — The best bit of the Three Gorges (Qutang Gorge)

Hydrofoil Through the Three Gorges

Back when we did this the high speed rail network hadn’t yet reached Chongqing or Yichang (or the other big cities of Wuhan and Nanjing lying downriver towards Shanghai), the gorges weren’t yet flooded, and fast hydrofoil ferries still plied that section of the river to link up the riverside towns. We got up at the crack of dawn in Chongqing after this brilliant evening of fiery hotpot to take the hydrofoil to the Three Gorges Dam, from where a shuttle bus took us to Yichang (where we managed to catch the last bus of the day on to Wuhan). We were on the boat for about ten hours, and spent the time reading, watching the spectacularly grim man-made scenery from the hatches, chatting to some of the other passengers, and then finally passing through the Three Gorges.

One of our fellow passengers had a goat carcass stuffed in their luggage, its legs sticking bizarrely straight up out the top of the bag, and I had an interesting chat with another guy who, upon learning I was English, told me he was a firm supporter of the Welsh in their ‘war of independence’ against England… not sure where he was getting this from, but I guess he was talking about Ireland and didn’t have a completely solid grasp on the facts. The gorges themselves provided an awesome ending to the boat trip, and it was cool to see the engineering marvel that is the dam, although we couldn’t see all of it due to the heavy smog. It was a fun day, we made it to our goal of Wuhan in the evening, and the next day (after a lot of messing around in Wuhan) continued on to Nanjing by bus, then finally a train to Shanghai. Having left Chongqing early doors on day one, we reached Shanghai around 4am on day three i.e. we got down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Shanghai in about 45 hours. With the transportation available at the time, that was some pretty good going and some very hard work!

While not really not intended for tourists at all, the hydrofoils provided a faster, cheaper alternative to the cruises, enabling you to get from Chongqing to Yichang in one day instead of three. Although the advent of high speed rail and modern highways had already massively reduced passenger traffic on the Yangtze, the river still served as the main transportation conduit along the Three Gorges section up until 2015; the riverside towns were served by the hydrofoil boats, and that was how the locals got upriver to Chongqing or downriver to Yichang – a useful option for tourists too.

There was of course a trade-off when doing it by hydrofoil; doing a tourist cruise, you pass through the gorges nice and slowly on a boat with proper decks, and have time to take them in. Speeding through the gorges by hydrofoil though, we did wish the boat would slow down a touch, and it would’ve been good to have a deck to stroll around – instead, we were snapping photos out of the hatches at the side of the boat and we passed through each gorge in just ten minutes or so. It definitely felt a bit don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it, and we’d only opted for the hydrofoil because we were on such a tight schedule during that first frantic run through China, with my companions Ross & Mike needing to be in Shanghai for their flight home just a couple of days later; yet, we ended up being glad we did it that way. Although the gorges themselves were a little snatched, we were happy we’d not spent three days on a dirty boat on that ruined river just to see them. The hydrofoil sufficed, saved a lot of time, got us closer to our goal via some spectacular scenery (and some grim), and with it being so fast it was nice to stand at the hatches with the wind blasting through your hair. If I were to visit the Three Gorges again, I would want to do it by hydrofoil again.

However, with the completion of the new road serving the riverside towns in 2015, the hydrofoil was completely discontinued and no longer operates. The only option now is to take a Three Gorges cruise, and I personally really don’t think I would bother; I reckon the time would be better used to visit Zhangjiajie (not too far from Yichang i.e. only 5 hours(!) by (non-bullet) train), the spectacular area used as a backdrop for the movie Avatar.

How to visit the Three Gorges

Since 2015, the only option for going through the gorges is on a river cruise; if you do still want to do a Three Gorges cruise (even after listening to Karl Pilkington!), the best route is surely the shortest i.e. the 3-day (I’ve also read reports of 2-day cruises being sometimes available) cruise from Fengjie to Yichang (I wouldn’t fancy one of the long-distance cruises from Nanjing or Shanghai at all)

Be warned that there are plenty of horror stories out there about the boats, relating to the state of the toilets, the presence of non-human passengers (of the rodent and insect varieties), and so on; you get what you pay for, and if you want a nice(r) boat, you should probably stump up the extra for one of the luxury options. Also be aware that a boat tragically sank in 2015 and took 442 souls with it (it was doing a long-distance cruise from Nanjing and hadn’t yet reached the Three Gorges, but was the same kind of boat that does the shorter 3-day Gorges cruises between Fengjie and Yichang)

Fengjie is a 5-hour bus ride from Chongqing or a 3-hour bus ride from Wanzhou (Wanzhou can be reached by bullet train direct from Chengdu (3.5 hours) or Chongqing (90 minutes); at the other end, from Yichang the (approximate) bullet train times are 2.5 hours to Wuhan, 6 hours to Nanjing, 7.5 hours to Hangzhou, and 8 hours to Shanghai. These are all bullet trains, but there is also one daily conventional train running overnight on this new high speed line, leaving Yichang at 19:36 and taking 14 hours to Shanghai. (Departure time correct at time of writing, but of course may be subject to change; check chinatrainguide for train schedules, and you can search and book tickets on 12go Asia*)

These days to travel from Chongqing to Shanghai would be much less hard work than when we did it, so long as you’re okay with doing the river cruise. As you can now take a bullet train directly from Yichang to Shanghai in just eight hours, you could go from Chengdu or Chongqing to Fengjie on day one, do the cruise from there to Yichang, and from Yichang reach Shanghai the same evening or following afternoon.

As for the hydrofoils, just to reiterate in case you’ve skim-read and missed it; as of 2015, the hydrofoils no longer operate on the Yangtze. If you want to go through the Three Gorges, you have to join a cruise from Fengjie to Yichang (or vice versa). Do your research on the cruises so you know what to expect, and be aware that the Yangtze is in a pretty sorry state so it may not be worth three days of your trip just to see the gorges. To sign off, I’ll quote Palin again; “The man-made scenery of the Yangtze is spectacularly grim; ancient power stations belch fumes, a permanent smell of sulphur hangs in the air.”

And here’s Karl Pilkington’s miserable take on it again!

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Hotpot Carnage in Chongqing

China, Chongqing, Food, Travel tales

We got off the bus at some shithole bus station in a grim city that felt about two decades behind Beijing, under a smothering blanket of dirty brown smog so thick we couldn’t even see the tops of the faceless concrete blocks lining the hillsides. So this was Chongqing, the biggest city you’ve never heard of, the fulcrum of development for the Chinese interior, and the only city I remember for how absolutely hilarious it was to eat a meal there…

A brilliant meal in Chongqing! — Simultaneously dying of laughter, overeating, and extreme spice!

A curious crowd gathered as we attempted to tell a taxi driver we wanted to go to a hostel or cheap hotel; none of them spoke English, the three of us didn’t speak Chinese, and this was back before mobile internet and wifi made it so easy to check maps and book accommodation on the fly. Eventually we got in the cab and were on our way somewhere or other; the taxi ride took ages and he seemed to go over half a dozen bridges and drive up and down a whole series of rivers and steep hillsides, none of which could be clearly seen through the smog. Maybe he was going round in circles to run up the meter, or maybe this city was just absolutely massive.

Chongqing’s massiveness is evident in its sprawl, its crowds, and especially its architecture, which seems to consist of the same hideous tower block design repeated over and over, these ranks and files of concrete monoliths looming up ominously behind each other on the steep slopes of the city. The official population of Chongqing is 26 million, though this is an exaggeration as it includes the large rural hinterland that was carved off the corner of Sichuan province along with the city proper when Chongqing was designated one of the country’s four Special Municipalities (the others being Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin). The city proper contains perhaps half of the official Chongqing population; still pretty huge by any standards, especially for a city so little-known outside China.

All we knew about it was that this city was where we needed to go to take a boat down the Yangtze through the Three Gorges (as part of our mad first dash through China), and also that Chongqing hotpot is famous for being the spiciest version in all China. I love my spicy cuisine, and one of the guys I was travelling with, Mike, is a total food fanatic, so we were all about hitting up the Chongqing hotpot. We arrived in the evening (from Chengdu) and would be up at the crack of dawn to head downriver, so the plan was to find a hotel, dump our bags, and head straight out to a restaurant.

Somehow or other our man took us to a hotel (of sorts) that fit the bill, a weird place that seemed to be one floor of an anonymous apartment building. It was odd but it was cheap, and we didn’t fancy any more messing around so figured it would suffice; however, upon seeing us in her lobby the receptionist spontaneously combusted into a helpless puddle of hysterics from which she was completely unable to recover sufficiently to check us in. We had to wait for the manager to come out! A room was arranged for us with an extra mattress on the floor next to the double bed… there were no twin or triple rooms at this place, only doubles. And it felt really seedy… and why was it so funny for the three of us to be there, anyway? Well, later that night there were some vigorous ‘noises’ from the next room, and we eventually twigged that we were staying in some sort of love motel or maybe even a brothel, hence the young lady’s amusement.

The fiercely hot Chongqing hotpot — Chongqing hotpot… so much chilli it’s almost black!

Anyway, after a quick shower & change we headed out in search of this famous hotpot, ready to test ourselves against China‘s hottest dish (Chongqing and neighbouring Sichuan province are said to have the hottest women in China, but even more famously, the hottest food). We wandered around and eventually found a hotpot joint; it didn’t look great, and it was quite big but mostly empty which isn’t usually a good sign, but it was getting late and we hadn’t seen any others so in we went.

Again, our mere presence here produced quite the reaction; there wasn’t any music playing, but if there had been it would’ve stopped abruptly with a scratch of needle across vinyl. The staff and customers all seemed to freeze, beers half-poured or with chopsticks halfway to mouths, and all eyes stared at the three of us as we made our way to a table. It felt super-awkward at first, but things soon warmed up; a young woman not in staff uniform (who we eventually figured to be the manager and perhaps also the owner’s daughter) eventually came over to deal with us, and we were handed a sheet of paper covered in Chinese characters with check-boxes next to them. Apparently this was a list of ingredients, and we were to tick the items we wanted in our hotpot – while this is surely a convenient and efficient approach, you’ve got a slight problem if you can’t read Chinese! These days I can semi-competently read a Chinese menu, but at that time it was a case of complete guesswork. We laughed and gesticulated and pulled faces with our hostess, and ended up just ticking a bunch of random boxes. She took the paper and gave our selection the once over, evidently realised it was ridiculous, and came up with an effective alternative system – she beckoned us to follow her to the kitchen where we could just point at all the items we wanted.

Some of the staff at the hotpot restaurant — The girl on the right took us into the kitchen to point out what we wanted to eat!

Mike and I went with her, Ross (rather foolishly!) leaving it in our hands. We followed her into the kitchen, and that was a bit of an eye-opener to see – while the front of house looked reasonably clean and presentable, the kitchen was carnage. None of the shiny stainless steel surfaces and worktops I was used to seeing in professional kitchens in my bartender days; here were hacked up animal parts and bowls of blood sat around in grimy fridges, dubious-tapwater-washed vegetables lying in grotty sinks, and assorted disorganised crap everywhere… we are gonna get so sick, I thought. (But we didn’t – it was fine. I’ve definitely become far more blasé about travel food hygiene worries over the years since, perhaps starting that night!)

She threw the fridge doors open and indicated we should point to whatever we wanted… I chose a bunch of safer-looking items, making sure to include plenty of tofu and veg for our vegetarian companion Ross… but Mike the food nutter was in his element, like a kid in a candy shop where the candy’s been replaced with animal gizzards, running around the kitchen pointing at basically all the weird shit. Bowl of blood (duck? pig?!), check! Some animal’s intestines, check! Random unidentified internal organs, check! And what the fuck is that? No idea – check! The man went apeshit and probably ordered enough for a table of six – but seeing as he has an appetite for three it wasn’t too over the top!

Food ordered we went back out to the table and got stuck into some bottles of Snow beer (a Chengdu brew), while the waitresses set up the hotpot. You have a big round hole in the middle of your table, with a gas ring set into it, and they stick the hotpot on top – basically, a big round pot full of oil, in this case with so many chilli peppers in it that it was almost black – and crank up the heat. Then your chosen ingredients are placed on the table in individual bowls, the oil starts bubbling, and then… and then…

The woman who force-fed us Chongqing hotpot! — Our mother hen for the evening

And then what are you supposed to do exactly? We had no idea… do we just dump it all in and let it cook in the pot? Meat first? Veg first? Are we supposed to do it in a particular way? We weren’t sure, but the entire restaurant staff, the owner’s daughter, and now a round old lady (the owner herself, we think) were watching our every move most intently. We decided to just shove a bowl of some sort of meat in to start with and let it cook for a few minutes, but this brought a quick rebuke from the old lady. She came and stood over us, barking instructions in Chinese and making us giggle nervously. Realising we didn’t understand a word she was saying, she simply took charge of our meal, starting with a demonstration of the correct technique; you pick up a piece of meat with your chopsticks, and you dip it quickly in and out of the oil, one, two, three, four, five times, and then straight in your mouth (it’s very thinly sliced, so it cooks quickly in the boiling oil)… but this demo didn’t end with her miming the food going in our mouths, she actually literally shoved this piece of meat straight into Mike’s gob! Then she had a another piece, one, two, three, four, five dips, and then boom! it was in my mouth, ready or not… and then Ross copped a slice of some animal in his face before he could protest his vegetarianism, and with no way of spitting it out with so many pair of eyes on him he decided to just make a good fist of eating it. After all, it was only one little slice…

…except it wasn’t. Like a mother bird feeding her hatchlings, this woman had clearly decided that we were incapable of doing it ourselves and so she was going to feed the entire meal to us! She continued to stand there, dip-dip-dipping slices of tripe and liver and chunks of congealed blood and then ramming them straight into our mouths, never skipping a beat no matter how hard we were laughing or whether or not we’d swallowed the previous mouthful yet. She was like a merciless food delivery machine, and once I had a piece of food in my mouth I had about 15 seconds to chew and swallow it while she force-fed Ross & Mike a piece each, and then I was getting another piece… some of it was really tasty, but I’m not a big fan of internal organs as food and the tripe especially was like chewing a leather belt! Not only that, but this stuff was hot! It was being dipped in a bowl of the fiercest chilli oil you can imagine and our mouths were lit up on fire and searing with a brutal heat, the oil lining the entire mouth and throat and making our eyes, ears and noses burn. It was a race against time to get it down before the next load came, laughing and spluttering and gasping for cool liquid, and it felt like being on some sort of mental game show on late night Japanese TV, doing a crazy eating challenge in front of a live audience, guzzling cold beers to help lubricate the mouthfuls of food and in a futile attempt to ease the burning.

It was absolutely hilarious. Just brilliant. I’ve never laughed so hard while trying to eat… I was laughing so hard I kept almost choking on animal parts, and whenever I looked over at poor old Ross he was turning an even deeper shade of green. There was absolutely no way of stopping her, she was as remorseless and relentless as the Terminator and she absolutely would not stop until it was all eaten… Ross’ only escape was to make regular extended trips to the bathroom, taking a full mouthful of half-chewed fire meat each time to be deposited in the toilet bowl. Meanwhile Mike was loving every second of it, taking on whatever came his way, and the watching staff obviously thought the whole scene was fantastic fun – so much so that they almost completely forgot about serving the rest of the restaurant, even when a large group of businessmen came in halfway through our meal.

This guy came over to take two of the waitresses back to his table! — This guy came over to drag two of the waitresses back to his table!

Eventually, with Ross looking completely shell-shocked, me completely numb in the mouth from the chillies and with fire coming out of my ears, and even Mike’s bottomless stomach apparently nearing bursting point, our mother bird saw that we were more or less destroyed and decided her work was done. More cold beers were ordered to douse the flames, and we fell to laughing around and posing for photos with the staff… meanwhile, the businessmen on the other side of the room were getting fed up with us having five waitresses to ourselves while they only had one for their whole group, and one of them walked over and literally picked up two of the girls and carried them back to his table (in comedy fashion, not being an asshole about it).

This led to a cheer from their table, to which we responded in kind, and then we all mingled and it was all handshakes and ni-haos and nice-to-meet-yous and clinks of glasses and group photos, I think I even signed a couple of autographs in there bizarrely enough, and we finally left that restaurant grinning from ear to ear, stuffed to the gills, a bit tipsy, still burning and buzzing from the chilli peppers, and went to find a bar or club for a few more beers.

After a couple of seemingly random people on the street tried to take us into dodgy-looking massage parlours, we finally found a lively club and had a couple more drinks… I had the feeling that it would’ve been another eventful night (after this carry on in Beijing) had we stayed the course, but we left after an hour as we had to be up at the crack of dawn for the Yangtze river boat.

And up we were in the pre-dawn dark, checking out and leaving the receptionist in one last fit of hysterics, to make our way down the slopes to the river to head through the famed Three Gorges of the Yangtze. Despite all its pollution, its brutal architecture, and its rough and gritty edge, Chongqing (and its food and people) was a real highlight of the whole trip and we would’ve liked to check it out a bit better (I did return 8 years later and found it fascinating, with massively improved infrastructure but with its gritty, slightly bonkers, and intensely Chinese character still very much in evidence). As for the verdict on Chongqing hotpot, it was certainly one of the hottest things I’ve ever eaten (but not quite the hottest – that honour goes to Goan vindaloo), and while it wasn’t the highest quality meal I’ve ever eaten, it was definitely the most fun!

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Make sure to sign up for a VPN service before arriving in China so you can use the internet as normal – see here

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An action-packed first overland run through China

Beijing, Chengdu, China, Chongqing, Overland travel

Beijing's Forbidden City — The Forbidden City, Beijing, China

I’d been to Hong Kong & Macau the year before, but when we arrived in Beijing at the end of our Trans-Siberian journey, it was my first time in mainland China (and for my two companions too). Mike and Ross had flights booked back to England from Shanghai two weeks later, and we’d set out an ambitious itinerary to cover as much ground as possible in those two weeks.

China trip map — We covered this route in 10 days, which was some serious overlanding without bullet trains yet available!

After spending the weekend in Beijing, the plan was to visit Xi’an, Chengdu, Chongqing, and the Three Gorges, en route to Shanghai. This was years before all the cities on this route were connected up by bullet train, so we were looking at three night trains, a river boat, and as it turned out also a bunch of buses… it was a lot to bite off in just two weeks, but we just about managed to chew it!

Great Wall, Simatai section — The Jinshanling Great Wall section, near Beijing

The weekend in Beijing was pretty mental, probably the most full-on weekend I’ve had when travelling overseas – we managed to cover most of Beijing’s major tourist attractions while also partying hard, including an all-night bender with a knife-wielding nutcase, eating a load of fried critters, getting acquainted with the Beijing tea house scammers, visiting Mao’s mausoleum while still drunk, and trekking round the Summer Palace on zero sleep… a brilliant weekend! (full story here)

From there it was a night train to Xi’an, the ancient capital during several imperial dynasties and one of China’s most historic and atmospheric cities. There we visited the Terracotta Warriors, climbed nearby Hua Shan, walked the 600-year old Ming dynasty city walls (one of only a few fully extant city walls in China and said to be the most impressive, though the people of Nanjing would disagree), and ate the awesome street food in the Muslim Quarter. Climbing Hua Shan was a particular highlight for me, and was one of the best things I’ve done in China:

View from the top of Hua Shan — Hua Shan’s dramatic scenery is well worth the trip from Xi’an

Another night train took us from Xi’an to the sprawling, choking city of Chengdu, famed in China for its friendly people and panda bears, its hot women and even hotter food, where the plan was to visit the panda sanctuary and sample the spicy Sichuanese cuisine. We only had one night there, so after an evening of hotpot and beers Mike and I got up early to go see some pandas while Ross got his beauty sleep, and we were on our way again on an afternoon bus to the megacity of Chongqing.

If you’re not familiar with China, Chongqing is perhaps the biggest city you’ve never heard of. It was chosen by the government to be the focal point in the development of the Chinese interior, which is years behind the modern China of the more affluent coastal cities; to this end, the city and a large chunk of surrounding countryside were carved off the corner of Sichuan province and designated as Chongqing Metropolis, i.e. one of the four cities in China carrying province-level status (along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin). As a result, the official population of Chongqing is 26 million, although this is a little misleading as it includes a massive rural hinterland larger than many countries – the city proper is perhaps half that.

But with that said, it’s certainly a huge city, massive in its sprawl, in its crowds, and in the scale of its monolithic architecture; we got off the bus at some shithole bus station in a city that felt about two decades behind Beijing, under a smothering blanket of smog so thick you couldn’t see the tops of the ranks of concrete hulks lining the hillsides.

On a subsequent visit in better atmospheric conditions (8 years later, after trying and failing to visit Tibet), I was able to see that Chongqing holds a striking position in the hills along the Yangtze at one of its major confluences, and is a very attractive city location-wise (though still very much a city of phlegm and trash); but on that first visit we were only able to make out the grim facades of the rows of faceless tower blocks fading away up the steep riverbanks.

We had no clue where we were or where we were to stay – this was a little before the internet and wifi everywhere made accommodation so easy to book ahead, back when you just went there and found somewhere to crash. A crowd gathered to stare at us as we attempted to communicate with a taxi driver, a complete gong show of a scene, and he eventually took us to a cheap-ass hotel (as requested) tucked away on the mid-upper floors of one of those faceless blocks, somewhere downtownish… at the sight of three western blokes walking into her hotel, the receptionist immediately collapsed into a fit of such hysterics she was rendered unable to speak or even function; she was so completely paralysed that we actually had to wait for the manager to come check us in!

We continued to have this effect on her for the remainder of our short overnight stay; it was pretty baffling, but that night I heard some, er, noises from the next room, and put together with the somewhat seedy and tucked-away nature of the place we eventually realised we’d stayed at a love motel or maybe even a brothel, hence her great amusement at three lads sharing a room (though really her spontaneous combustion was still a tad over the top)

Anyway, we were in Chongqing as it is (or was) the jumping-off point for boats down the Yangtze and through the Three Gorges; but we were also hellbent on trying the legendary Chongqing hotpot, renowned throughout China as the hottest dish in the land. The previous night’s hotpot in Chengdu had been good, but the one we had in Chongqing was some seriously, mind-blowingly spicy stuff – it was also the most hilarious meal I’ve ever eaten, with the rotund proprietress force-feeding animal gizzards into our burning mouths while poor vegetarian Ross turned green…

After the hotpot we managed a visit to a mad little nightclub (after a couple of near-misses with ‘helpful’ locals trying to get us into ‘massage’ parlours), before grabbing a few hours sleep (reception girl waking up and peeing her pants again when we came in), then got up in the predawn dark for the boat down the river (leaving reception girl in hysterics one last time).

We didn’t have time for a full 3-day Three Gorges cruise, so we opted for the public transport hydrofoils that used to blast up and down that stretch of the Yangtze (cruises are the only option these days). You can read about that in more detail here, but basically we were glad to do it that way – while a bit more time to take in the spectacular gorges themselves would’ve been good, I’m not sure a 3-day cruise would’ve quite justified the time.

Going through the Three Gorges — The best part of the Three Gorges

After disembarking at the Three Gorges Dam (an impressive structure, from what we could make of it through the smog) we took a shuttle bus to nearby Yichang, and from there we just managed to catch the last bus of the day to Wuhan (we almost got fleeced out of a handful of cash by the driver of the first bus, who took our payment for the Wuhan bus and then jumped back on his own bus and tried to drive off! Mike stood in front of the bus at the station exit with his arms out wide and thankfully the guy stopped instead of running him over, and I got round by the door and got the cash back…)

Arriving in Wuhan late at night at another shitty bus station in another bleak-looking town, we checked into a fleepit hotel and went out to score some street snacks. The spicy grilled skewers of quail eggs, squid tentacles, tofu, and some random animal organs for Mike, were delicious, but the area was a dump – I’ve never seen so many people sleeping rough in China as we did in Wuhan that night. We snatched about five hours of sleep before getting up early doors to try and catch a train onwards to Shanghai; by now we had about 48 hours left until their flight out of Shanghai Pudong, and wanted as much time in Shanghai as possible. However, getting out of Wuhan turned into a ridiculous run-around; the city of Wuhan is actually a fairly recent (20th century) amalgamation of three formerly separate cities standing on the three corners formed by the confluence of the Yangtze and Han rivers. Each of the three sections has a different train station, and the one we went to was completely the wrong one; I couldn’t read or speak Chinese yet at this point, and without mobile internet we couldn’t work any of this out. After messing around at the train station unsuccessfully for a while (and using the horrific toilet – think turds floating in the urinals), we managed to find a bus, but it wasn’t leaving for hours; we spent those hours trekking around a couple of other bus stations looking for an earlier departure, and ended up back at the first station again buying tickets for that first bus. This was made all the more difficult by the complete lack of a subway in Wuhan at the time, and I think after checking out at 7am we only managed to leave that damn city at 1pm!

(Eight years later I visited Wuhan again for a couple of nights en route to try and visit Tibet, and while I still didn’t really warm to the place much at all, the improvements in infrastructure must be acknowledged – with a brand new subway system with half a dozen lines, and a big new main Wuhan station to handle the bullet trains, the kind of tedious morning we experienced that day is unlikely to be experienced by future visitors to Wuhan. China’s rapid development can literally be seen and experienced by making visits just a few years apart, and it’s quite an astonishing thing to witness)

Anyway, that bus took us to Nanjing, where we had to wait around in Nanjing station for a few hours before we could get on a midnight train to Shanghai, and we finally arrived in Shanghai around 4am that night. I remember the three of us sitting there in that brightly lit, uncomfortable, jam-packed train, flitting in and out of sleep, surrounded by other passengers doing the same, when suddenly the old lady next to Ross hawked, and hawked, and absolutely hawked up the most almighty mouthful of putrid phlegm you can possibly imagine, and gobbed it loudly and proudly on to the floor right in front of her. The splat zone had about a 6-inch diameter, Ross looked good to puke, and Mike and myself just totally lost it at that point, deliriously tired and laughing our heads off at one of the most unpleasant things I think I’ve ever seen!

All in, we’d got down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Shanghai in about 45 hours, including the Three Gorges, with nothing pre-booked, which with the transportation available at the time was pretty Herculean! Doing it now of course, the bullet trains (and improvements in the internet situation) would make it much less punishing, but we arrived in Shanghai dead on our feet. Still, the next day was the lads’ only full day in the city, so we got up, saw the sights, ate a bunch of awesome street food, drank most of the next night, and then Ross and Mike got their hungover selves on their flight back to England and slept it off on the plane.

As for me, I slowed the pace down a bit (I needed to after England to Shanghai overland in 5 weeks!) and chilled in Shanghai for a couple more days, then went down to Yangshuo (which was awesome), before making my way (via hikes at Huang Shan and Tai Shan) to Qingdao for the ferry to Korea, and ultimately on to Japan and the approaching ski season in Hokkaido.

These days the route we covered would be doable entirely by bullet train (except the 3 Gorges, obviously!), which would’ve made it pricier but would have given us a useful bit of extra time in each city; it’s really been quite amazing to witness China’s infrastructure boom through repeated visits over the last decade. Another thing that’s improved is the booking systems – buying train tickets used to be a complete pain in the ass, but these days you can simply book online and pick the tickets up before travel. If you don’t have a Chinese residency number (required for using the official booking site) the easiest way to do this is 12go Asia* (lines can still be long for picking tickets up though, so if you know your dates it makes sense to book several tickets in advance and pick them all up in one go)

Have you travelled overland around China? How was it? Leave me a comment below and I’ll get back to you.

Make sure to sign up for a VPN service before arriving in China so you can use the internet as normal – see here

For more China posts, click here. Also check out my China overland travel guide

(*this is an affiliate link i.e. if you use it to book a ticket, I’ll score a commission; this comes out of their profit margin at no extra cost to you. Thank you in advance should you choose to use this link!)