Our second time in Chengdu

A 24 hour train ride brought us from Yangshuo to Chengdu. There is a choice of seating in the trains, hard seat, soft seat, hard bed – sharing a cabin with 6 people, or soft bed – sharing a cabin with 4 people.

We took the hard sleeper, which turned out to be a good decision. There were mainly Chinese people on the train. Those who speak English were quick to find us. Which was fun, as it kills the time and gave us some new views on what is going on in China.

Chengdu is a big, dirty town. The only reason we came here was the train to Tibet. The hostels in Chengdu sell group tours to Tibet. A bit of a bureaucratic thing really, but Tibet can only be visited in groups with a tour guide. Crazy, as groups of 1 are groups too...

In the middle of the city, chairman Mao's statue can not be missed.

We needed to find a 4th person to bring the price down, land cruisers take 4 people and the package is financially way more attractive. We found Charlie, a young man from Taiwan – really excellent match, he needed 3 persons to travel with and we, now, unexpectedly, had a person in our group who speaks Chinese as well as English. Maybe someone up in the skies IS looking after us...

We bought hats (see picture and don’t laugh too loud) haha. And we bought gloves. We had jackets, real fake, but very warm North Face jackets from Yangshuo already.

As we did 5 years ago as well, we went to visit the pandas, which is always entertaining.

We also re-visited the Sichuan opera, something we all enjoy. It had singing, dancing, face changing, 'comedy' etc in Sichuan style.

On our last day we had some cool Turkish food and bought our supplies for the train trip in the Carrefour (a French supermarket).
That was it for China, we are off to Tibet. Still, kind of China... but not really as per many Tibetans...