One of the small sampans that we went on.

Day 9

Today we disembarked the ship shortly after breakfast. I got up very early this morning to repack and attend my 7am tai chi class with Dr Wu. Today he showed us some shadow boxing.
Our boat arrived in Chongquin last night. It sailed down the river and dropped anchor in the middle of the river and we had a magnificent view of the city and this fabulous bridge that everyone agreed looked just like Sydney Harbour bridge. It was covered in coloured lights that changed colour every few minutes, red, blue,green and yellow.

Chongquin is the largest city in the world. It has a population of 30 million people. I have never heard of Chongquin.

The port is also very large and there were many boats docked there this morning which is why we didn’t get our own dock. Much to my horror we had to moor up to a barge that was connected to a series of very small barges that were joined by these metal planks which jostled about and bobbed up down precariously and were wet and slippery just to add to the fun. There were about 8 of these barges before we were finally on solid ground. Then it was up more than 100 steep steps to ground level. Fortunately we didn’t have to carry our suitcases. There were stick men for that.
Stick men are people, men and women, who have come to town from very poor rural areas of China. They have no education and are in need of a job so with a bamboo pole they carry on the shoulder they get work down on the docks and around town carrying things balanced on the poles or in large baskets they hang on either end of the pole.
Chongquin is hot and humid in summer. The temp gets in the mid 40’s with 100% humidity. There is a very thick fog/smog and they only see the sun about 100 days a year and today wasn’t one of those days. The ground everywhere was wet with the humidity and smog but fortunately it wasn’t hot. Our guide told us that it is so unusual to see the sun that when it does come out the dogs go crazy barking at it.
The city is huge. There are many sky scrapers. They have a copy of the petronas towers of Kuala Lumpar, the empire state and Chrysler buildings of New York and our Sydney Harbour Bridge. There are millions of apartment buildings, some new and some really shabby run down looking ones. Some of them are at least 30 levels high.
We pass many slums. Lots of building sites with rubbish and rubble and in there are some makeshift dwellings, these belong mostly to the stick men. There are 3 million stick men in Chongquin.
We see small housing developments where people are living in derelect old buildings and the mud is unbelievable. Here and there are road side stalls selling watermelons and oranges mostly but occasionally hot food on sticks.
We arrived at the zoo and went straight to the panda enclosures to see the giant pandas. They are so cute. They were all very active climbing up trees and one female called Ya Ya was fast destroying a Banyan tree, just ripping branches off and eating them. Others were lying on their backs with pieces of bamboo on their tummy and lazily eating them.
We also saw the rarer red pandas that are related to racoons and really don’t look like pandas at all. I took a large number of photos. I will put some on the end of this.
We left the zoo and we went to a local restaurant for lunch. Chongquin is famous for spicy hot pots so that is what we had. In the middle of the table they put a container divided in two,on one side boiling oil to which has been added a large number of chillis and other spicy ingredients and on the other side a milder broth, also boiling. To this you add, meat, fish, vegetables and tofu till it is cooked. You then attempt to retrieve the food from the hot pot then dip the cooked food into a bowl of sesame oil which helps to cool it as well as add flavour and then eat. It was an interesting experience.
After lunch we then went to the airport for our flight to Xian (pronounced She Ann) and we arrived there at about 5pm.
Tomorrow we are having a full day excursion to see the Terracotta Warriors.