Visiting Chinese highlands - Part 1

China, October 2012

This is my tenth visit to China and my first time to the Tibetan plateau. My wife is Chinese and likes to go back to see her friends and family as often as she can. I tag along a few times and when I do we try to visit various places in China. This time Finnair had started a new route to Chongqing so we took advantage of the low introductory prices.

Chongqing

The city is popularly called the "Fog" city since it is foggy most the year, apart from the occasional rain. Trees and plants thrive here because of the mist and warm climate. Humans on the other hand does not appreciate the rain so much, although Chinese don't seem to not mind because they get fair skin when they're not plagued by sun. Fair, light skin is considered status in China, meaning you're a city person, not a farmer.

The city resides on the junction of the Yangtzee river and Jialing. Further down the river they built the Three Gorges dam, worlds biggest dam capable of supplying one third of China's power when it is filled up.

The official population is 40 million people, same as the taxi driver tells us, the worlds biggest city. Not, it is only around 6.5 million following the metro standard, far below Tokyo's 38 million.
This city has a beautiful monorail system connection most of the city's local transportation. Otherwise this city is mostly hillsides along the river, very beautiful and at night it is a spectacular view of lights. The governor here, Bo Xilai was very popular for how the city was prospering, bought a lot of trees which made the city look nice, but because of such spending the city also got a lot of debt. Unfortunately he was mixed up covering up his wife's murder of a British businessman and was ousted of Chinese politics.

Dazu grottoes

A Buddha sanctuary made in sandstone is amazingly well preserved considering this dates back to 650 AD. Because of it's design the rain and water would never fall onto the statues along the wall. The very little maintenance would be to carefully clear off mosses since the sandstone is fairly fragile.
I like the Chinese form of Buddha better than the Indian. In China, Buddha is fat and happy, always smiling and laughing.

Chengdu, Jiuzhai, Huanglong and Yancheng - Part 2

Then the trip went to Chengdu where we flew up to the highlands and visited the Jiuzhai and Huanglong national parks. This is for part two. Thereafter we visited my in-laws and friends in Yancheng and then returned to Chongqing for the flight back to Oslo.