Chongqing, August 2-4

We hadn't planned on coming to Chongqing at all, but we sorta got stuck in Chengdu - there was no train onwards to our preferred Yunnan destination for the next few days, so we decided to make a little eastern detour... And now we like it so much we wish we could stay longer! I can't say what it is, but Chongqing has a really cool vibe to it. It's insanely hot though, 36 degrees during the day and 29 at night. In contrast to Chengdu it's sunny (well, hazy), which makes it seem even hotter.

"Green" seems to be his city's new "thing" :) Our hotel is "green," meaning they encourage you to save water and they turn off the Christmas light-like decorations at 11pm (or did I miss something?), the Intercontinental's restaurant has a green special - organic pork, chicken, fish, veggies... I guess it's because Chongqing has already been through all the growth and modernization (as one of the special development zones), so they need to find something new. It does have a very "Manhatten" feel to it - skyscrapers and narrow roads - but even more vertical. I guess it's the fact that the peninsula is very hilly that makes for the charme of it - there are many small winding lanes full of tiny old house hugging the hillside and on top of the hill you suddenly find yourself looking into the 10th floor of a new apartment building that is built right into the steep hillside. The new is just built atop the old, the city seems to be endlessly growing upwards. Older buildings are swallowed by the muddy waters of the Yangzi (which has risen in the last few years because of the Three Gorges Dam). It all feels very SciFi but real at the same time.

Chongqing's setting is quite spectacular, the city center lies on a peninsula between the Yangzi and Jialing River, from the tip of the peninsula you can watch the "jade green Jialing river meet the less photogenic, brown Yangzi." It was more of a "yellow-brown meets dark brown" at our time of visit, but to be fair, this might be due to heavy rains that wash a lot of mud into the river. We got a pretty frightening demonstration of that on our way through the mountains in northern Sichuan.

Our hotel is quite... special :) We seem to live in Disneyland :) It's a hotel/restaurant/shopping complex built into the cliffs facing the Jialing river. The lobby is up on the street on the 11th floor and we live beneath on the 8th. We have our own private balcony with a stunning view - if you ignore the plastic pirate ship and fake waterfall it's really quite scenic. There's a restaurant street on the 4th floor and "folk art" (translate "tourist kitsch") on the 3rd. It's really weird to have your hotel exit onto a street in the middle of the building, so to speak. On the other side of the river we can see a huge, ship-shaped new building. No idea what it is, but they project commercials on it at night. Very spacey...

We watched the sun set from a bar on the 39th floor, sipping sake-cocktails and quite liked the city...

And the interior designer of our hotel certainly had a good sense of humor! :)