disaster

ok so when we first came through Chengdu a few days ago, we arrived by train and took a 15-20 minute cab ride through the city to the bus station. On the way, we commented that the place looked like a real craphole… it didn’t have any character, and there were 3 KFCs  visible from the train station. Three separate ones… I don’t know what that says about Chengdu, but we weren’t really digging the vibe.

We both turned to each other and said something along the lines of “man, it would suck to get stuck in this place, so glad we aren’t stopping here”.

Can you guess where this is going?

Anyway we got back into Chengdu a few hours ago and after 2 cabbies refused us, we found one that would take us to our hostel using his meter. On the way, we both looked out the window, and again commented to each other… “there are many places we could get stuck for a day or two, if we missed a train or bus or something went wrong…. but damn I would hate to be stuck in Chengdu”… or words to that effect.

Have you guessed yet?

We’re stuck in Chengdu.

So we tried to get tickets on the overnight train leaving tomorrow night (the 6th)… only to discover the one we originally wanted is completely booked out. Both hard and soft sleeper. So is the backup one we had, which left a little earlier, but was still managable. Oh and the extra 2 they’ve put on for the country wide Spring Festival that lasts until February?? yeah those are full up too. We haven’t asked about trains leaving on the 7th because honestly, we know they are full too.

So we had 2 options… Option 01, we could get the hard SEATS. That’s 15 hours in a seat that doesn’t recline, in a car full of smokers… the cheapest tickets you can get. We passed. Option 02, the sleeper bus, which takes a minimum of 25 hours but has been reported to take as long as 42. How about no? So however we proceed, we can’t stick to our original plan of taking the train to Panzhihua then the bus to Lijiang unless we stay in Chengdu another day, and believe me, other than Pandas, there’s nothing to do here.

So we looked into flights from Chengdu direct to Lijiang, and there were some last minute cheapo seats for 320RMB. We jumped online and booked them, only to find out they were gone… literally while we were typing in our passport numbers. So we’ve booked the more expensive flight, which ends up being about $90 AUD each. We leave at 7AM on the 7th, which is a day later than our original plan, but will get us to Lijiang a couple of hours EARLIER.

So we’re back on track (although our last 2 hours have been way more stressful than it might sound in blog form).

Of greater concern is that we’re now having to plan out the whole rest of our itinerary and purchase ALL of our train tickets for the rest of the trip, in advance (tomorrow) before we leave Chengdu. We’ll be trading flexibility of itinerary for the knowledge that we won’t be stuck somewhere for way too long… which means we’ll probably have to cut our trip to the mountains that inspired the planet Pandora in the movie “Avatar” (you may have heard of it).

Ok that’s it….

Oh… I almost forgot… we ate at Chicken Wang last night… I wish I could say I had the wang but it wasn’t on the menu… regardless, the food was delicious.