Leg One: Sydney to HK
We fly out of Sydney on Wednesday morning, and arrive in HK approximately 9 hours later. We are collected at the airport by Mat and are whisked away to his apartment where we meet with Kammy and Mat's dad, Michael. Mike is an interesting guy and a real talker, but we manage to all get out of the house for dinner at a HK style cafe before heading back home to sleep and prepare ourselves for the real adventure to begin the next day. We will be returning to HK later in the trip and will do more on HK then!
Leg Two: HK to Chengdu
The next leg of our trip, is not one that I would recommend for others. It was a long and tedious part of our journey and have no doubt that it has contributed to me needing to consume cold drugs out of a box with only Chinese characters on it. We depart for Chengdu the next morning, a short 2.5 hr flight away.
Shenanigans start straight away when we meet our driver for the next two days - a certain Mr Li, who does not any speak ANY English. We drive two hours to Huanglongxi old town and are dropped off for some sightseeing. We really don't know much about the area and wonder relatively aimlessly through the town.
Being tourist attractions themselves (our group with two white guys in a town with no other white guys), we ignored the stares from the locals and indulged in some of the local cuisine, which included some spicy tofu and local snacks. We thought we might have been putting our health at risk with the sure to be crazy spicy Szechuan food. It ended up being relatively mild, delicious and not vomit inducing so all in all quite good!
After visiting Huanglongxi, it is another 2 hr drive to Qin Tai Road where it was time for some traditional Szechuan face changing Opera. We arrive a couple of hours before the show and our driver simply drops us off, tells us we can have dinner anywhere along the road before meeting outside the theatre just before the show. We stroll up and down the street and pretty much find one place to go to. We walk in, ask for a table for three and are seated. We are given a menu in Chinese and have to ask for one in English. The translations are not very good but we figure out the we're at a hot pot restaurant. We manage to order a range of food which turns out delicious! Rather than a spicy soup, it is a herbal soup made with what appears to be a base of black chicken, dates, prunes and Chinese spring onions. Together with a range of meats and vege, it fills our stomach and helps to warm us up from the cold winds.
After dinner we head to the famous face changing and fire breathing show. This show is made up of a series of acts including shadow puppets, Chinese opera and music, Chinese comedy and the headline act "face changing". This is basically a magic act where the performers are wearing a series of masks and magically (instantaneously) take them off and put them on again without showing the audience how they did it. The show was pretty awesome and we were equally entertained by the in-show tea service, where a grumpy gentleman would serve tea to a person sitting in any seat, using a teapot with a ridiculously long spout. It was definitely over a meter long. Other (presumably) in-show services offered were massages and "ear cleaning". We didn't see anyone accepting theses services so don't actually know how they would have been delivered.
Finally, it is another 2 hr drive to Yaan, where we check in to the Ibis Hotel for the night. The beds are nice and firm, the bathrooms are clean. Unfortunately, most hotels in China are still smoking hotels. Despite having requested a non-smoking room, we don't get one. It's late, well past 11pm and we are too tired to care about going back to the reception where we know that they can hardly understand us.
Breakfast the next day is a quick go at the hotel buffet. I decide to be adventurous and try some of the local breakfast food - congee and some picked condiments. Congee was fine, condiments not so much. Then it's 8am and we're off to Bifengxia to "volunteer" at the Panda sanctuary. Arriving much later than we were expected, much of our work was already completed by the local staff. We did however get to undertake the much anticipated sweeping of panda poo out of their feeding cage. After completing the sweeping and heaving around 20kg bunches of bamboo we had the pleasure of hand feeding the pandas. This was good fun and extremely cute. One particularly entertaining sight is of one of the pandas lying on his back while eating, food in each hand. Just before leaving, we were offered the opportunity to get a photo holding a panda for a "donation" of 1,500 yuan (just under AUD$300) per person... we politely declined.
Then, it was back in the car for a four hour drive to the Chengdu airport where we say goodbye to Mat as he heads back to HK and we push on to Beijing. With the benefit of hindsight, we would have visited the Panda Zoo in Chengdu and checked out some of the other local sites rather than travel all the way to Bifengxia. However, if you are keen to hold a panda, we are told that despite being expensive, Bifengxia is cheaper and less crowded than Chengdu.
So the next stop for us was Beijing via Air China. We weren't particularly excited but once on board the flight, Air China is decent, with video on demand, even for short domestic flights like our one to Beijing.
Hopefully, we will have a post on Beijing up shortly!
Much love,
Tim and ness
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