Chengdu

It is funny when you thing a city like Chengdu (that most people never heard of), it has the population of Greece (that here in China most people never heard of).

This is the hub for travellers to visit other major cities in west and central China. Here is one of the few places that you can fly to Tibet which is the reason we came in the first place.

Still no confirmed plans about what we are going to do next, as most options add another $1000 per person. We are struggling to get to Delhi from any Chinese city on the day we want and after spending 6 hours on the internet planning and discarding various plans, we finally got to the end.

We have officially dropped Tibet ☹ from our itinerary and we will stay here a few more days to see some interesting places. Then we will fly to Xiamen in south-east China and from there we will find our way back to Hong Kong to get a flight to Delhi.

Chengdu is almost as colourful as Xian, and a clean and happy city. There is a very nice bamboo forest and a park that people do tai chi every day. There are no many famous historical places in the city but nearby there are 2 of the “best things to do in China” as described on all guidebooks.

The biggest stone carved Buddha (71m) in Leshan which is a town 2 hours south, and the famous mountain Emei that is said to have the most magnificent views in China.

Everybody praises the cuisine here and one of the famous cooking styles is called “hot pot”. We did the mistake to order the “spicy” version and the chef did not show any mercy to the stupid and ignorant foreigners. This was the hottest food I have ever eaten. Our lips gone numb for hours and there was a queue in our hotel room toilet the next day. I have no scale to describe this but it should be illegal for restaurants to serve it and forbidden for people to eat it.

Vegetables and meats dipped in boiling thick red oil that had more chillies and pepper that I have ever seen in my life.

You could not distinguish between our tears and sweat on our red faces with lips so swollen you would thing we just had walked out of a lip enhancement plastic surgery.

The next days we walked around town eating from food stalls as we tried to avoid restaurants. I think we have been mentally and emotionally traumatised by that hot pot.

The extra days we planned to stay here also gave me time to recover from a combination of food poisoning (I probably got from a street snack) and a cold with fever.

Highlight of the trip in the city was the classic opera with the famous changing masks.

The last day we travelled to Leshan. Unfortunately we had no time to climb to the top of Mt. Emei but we hiked for a couple of hours to see some temples in the middle of tropical bamboo forests.

We are now off to Xiamen, back to the sunny weather as we drop to the same elevation as Middle East...