Chengdu 18 February – The Year of the Pig!
The last few days in Chengdu have been rather lazy, but that is what vacation is supposed to be about, right?
We arrived via airplane on Friday morning. Our friend and co-worker, I., a local Sichuanese, picked us up from the airport and took us to a hot pot place (we got the not-so-spicy broth – take a look, what do you think, hot or not?)
and to an old street that has been done up for tourists. We visited a memorial park and tomb of a famous guy. (Sorry, I’m short on details!)
We’ve been staying at a sweet little hostel called Sim’s Cozy Guesthouse. It is a great place with warm and friendly people and I give it a very high recommendation. Part of the rooms are located in a 100-year-old building that was once the home of a German Administrator. The owner, Sim, is from Singapore and his wife is from Japan. With their two small children, (and local Chinese staff), they run and live in the guesthouse and try as hard as possible to make travelers feel at home. One afternoon we spent hours working on some proofreading that we needed to complete for work, and Sim stopped by several times to make sure we were comfortable.
The DH “working”
The guesthouse has a mix of dorm rooms, twin and double rooms with en suite bathrooms and even a few family rooms. The price is very economical and there are lots of places to relax. They have a travel agency for tours, train, bus and air tickets, bike rental, laundry, Internet (it was free when I was there) and a welcoming atmosphere. There was a mix of European, American and Asian backpackers on our visit. It is located only steps away from the Wenshou Monastery complex which includes several streets that have been done up in an old style. Because we were there during the Spring Festival, the streets were full of food vendors. Street Food!!
If you visit Chengdu, Sim’s is the ONLY place to stay.
This evening we are boarding the train for Lhasa. I will be incognito until we arrive, hopefully (you never know if there will be delays) on Tuesday evening.
Unfortunately, our trip has been cut a bit short as the DH must get back to Linyi for important meetings. We will only spend four full days in Lhasa. So, for our first trip to Tibet we will only see Lhasa and perhaps a few monasteries close by. We will have to save Everest Base Camp for another trip.
Something that is frustrating about working for a Chinese company is that we only get the Chinese holidays for vacation. Not such a big deal if you are traveling outside of China, but traveling within the country over the Spring Festival is rife with difficulty. Crowded trains, higher prices, crowds, etc. We had a bit of bad luck getting air tickets out of Lhasa to Shanghai. Because we couldn’t plan ahead far enough, we are paying at least four times what we could have paid had we known our travel dates weeks ago. Oh well, such is life.
More from Tibet…
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I’m so excited to hear about Tibet! And I know what you mean about traveling during national holidays. I heard somewhere that Chinese New Year is the largest movement of people on the planet. I would not want to be traveling somewhere in China, or with a large population of Chinese people during those days! Last year we went to Laos for that exact reason. KL is completely dead this weekend because basically everyone in the city went home (“outstation”) for the holiday.
Back in Germany we had only the German holidays – it was terrible. Flights were booked out years (literally, years) in advance. We had to arrive at the airport hours and hours before the flight we had managed to snag departed because the rest of the city would be there too. It was such a pain in the neck…