Xinjiang Trip Day 27 (15-4-2007)
I took a morning bus to Chongqing. The trip took around five hours along a high speed road and was fairly uneventful. I sat beside a girl carrying a massive backpack on her lap. The pack was so big she couldn’t see above the top of it. Since she seemed to be traveling I asked her about her trip. She told me she was not really on a trip, but was just going home to Chongqing. She said her backpack was a new one she had just bought to take on a company vacation to Europe in a couple of weeks time, and she was just taking the bag on a mini-trip to Chengdu and back to get used to traveling with it. It seemed a bit odd but she was making her first trip outside China and I suppose she wanted to be well prepared.
Arrival in Chongqing was confusing, with the bus station being well outside the center of town and filled with taxi drivers trying to scam new arrivals. I walked through the touts and out to the road where I found a normal taxi. The driver took me to strip of cheap hotels in the center of town and I booked into one. The place was a little sleazy and run down and I ended up moving to a better and slightly more upmarket place the next day.
The lay out of Chongqing was very unusual for a Chinese city. Most Chinese cities are flat and laid out on a square grid, but Chongqing’s location on a narrow peninsula in the Yangtze River makes this impossible. Chongqing thus is similar to Central in Hong Kong, comprising narrow winding streets set on steep slopes. The city is very compact and interesting to walk around, but also easy to get lost in.
I walked to Jiefangbei (解放碑) in the center of town, wandered around the shops for a while, and ended up having some Sichuanese food in a hole in the wall restaurant. The city was far more developed than I’d expected, with plenty of big brand name stores in evidence.
