Chengdu - boy

Our 45 hour 'highest in the world' train journey from Lhasa to Chengdu was pretty much like any other long train journey we'd taken. We luckily had a whole compartment free for the entire journey so it was a very comfortable 45 hours but it was still, after all our excitement, a long train journey. A read on how the engineers overcame the 'annual thawing permafrost buckling the tracks' problem on Wikipedia is probably more interesting than the ride itself and definitely shorter.

 

I had thought that Chengdu would be the first developed city, infrastructurally speaking, since Dubai but since the Chinese have developed Tibet (from many angles both positive and negative) out of recognition I hadn't the usual shock of seeing, for example, clean unbroken pavements for the first time in a couple of months. In turns out that our sequence of travelling from India to Nepal to Tibet to China to Hong Kong and to Japan will seem like stepping through stages of development, on the surface at least. Chengdu looks like it's currently at the smog covered stage but the presence of many electric scooters suggest the cleanup is underway so the sky should be clear in no more than <insert guess here> years.

 

There isn't as much touristy stuff to do as a city of four million might promise, but we nevertheless managed to fill our time with interesting activities. We acquired some cooking skills making household favourites like sweet and sour and even fish flavoured dishes without fish. We took in a Chinese opera, which in this case was several acts rolled into one show; including puppets, quick mask changing, incredible hand shadows and (the less comprehensible) comedy all performed with colourful costumes and bright music. Very entertaining.

 

The 'People's Park' was the perfect place to see just how 'noise' tolerant the Chinese are. There are literally dozens of singers and musicians with their microphones cranked up so high the speakers distort and crackle. The whole effect is a cacophony of overlapping mutually exclusive sounds bordering on white noise which would have the average Westerner screaming at his neighbour to turn it down but these guys seem totally oblivious to any kind of interference. How on earth do they filter out the invading sounds and enjoy their own music which must be barely audible in their own space? Previously, in the compartment of the train, I had wondered why the position of the TVs is such that the sound from each TV interferes with the others. How do they all watch different programmes at the same time? Now I have my answer.

 

On the non-noisy side it is great to see everyone involved in these park activities, especially those who are completely lost in their own world dancing as though (as the cliché goes) no one were watching; or waving hands like clouds doing Tai Chi on their own; or belting out their favourite patriotic song and judging by the singing, as though no one were listening. We managed to find an empty outdoor table by a tea-house in the park where the noise waves cancelled each other out and sat there in almost silence watching the spectacle and playing Scabble.

 

About 100km away is a small town which accommodates an extremely large Buddha carved into a cliff face (largest in the world in fact), with an extremely large queue down to see its feet and some world-class pushing and shoving to get to the bottom. There are temples too (course there are) and one houses an appealing display of a thousand colourful terracotta celestial beings with unique and interesting expressions and was mercifully free of people.

 

C did mention some national habits that she found irritating the first time she graced these shores. One was queue jumping - not impressed; good technique but I've seen better by old folks in the Czech Republic. Another was spitting - this is very impressive; on planes, trains and restaurant floors, there's nowhere these guys don't hock up and no floor is too clean or germ free to be spat on. Full marks. And another was staring - good lengthy gaze even at spitting distance but a seemingly disinterested one and not a patch on a good Rwandan stare.

 

That said; my (and my stomach's) predominant memory of Chengdu will be the Szechuan spicy oily hot pot - a vegetable and meat fondue where you cook the ingredients yourself in the stew provided and cool it off with garlic and herb flavoured oil. I would have thought all restaurants could offer a similar quality of stew but we managed to pick restaurants at both ends of the Szechuan spectrum; the ultra spicy mouth-numbing flavoursome kind that can rarely be paralleled in any eating experience and the grotesque appalling 'what the hell kind of stew am I cooking my food in?' kind with all sorts of crap popping up to the surface, like fish heads and spam.