Cindy and Mike Do the World!: Chengdu, China

I didn’t know much about Chengdu when we booked the flight here but we decided to stay 2 nights before catching the train to Tibet. I’m so glad we did. This place has given me a better impression than Beijing by far. There is quite a bit of smog here but the city still feels cleaner than Beijing, the people seem friendlier and it feels quite modern. Our hotel has also helped my impression – we got a mini-apartment here for the price of a Holiday Inn at home, complete with a washer/dryer. The bed feels like I’m lying on a cloud.

We ate hotpot the first night we arrived and the restaurant managed to find someone who spoke English so that we could order…she tried to convince us to eat pig brain (!) but we resisted. We did try a couple of other interesting delicacies though, in addition to the beef and vegetables. In hindsight, perhaps we should not have tried those things either. Thanks Hedy – for giving us the intro to hotpot before we left. It helped!

We also got to see pandas in Chengdu and took a Sichuan cooking class. They kept laughing at us during the class, hahaha!

We’re now getting ready to board the train for Lhasa, Tibet, a 44 hour journey on the highest train in the world. We have soft sleepers on the train but we do share the compartment with 2 other people. I am definitely not expecting the Orient Express! :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinghai%E2%80%93Tibet_Railway

We’re heading into high altitude so Diamox is on hand just in case. We think we’ll see some spectacular scenery. We also expect some backed up and overflowing toilets, if tripadvisor is to be believed! I’m not sure how easy it will be to access the internet in Tibet. Our permits for Tibet came through in time so that's good. Internet access in China has been okay so far but sites like fb and blogger are blocked…in order to post this we had to use a different proxy. We’re then continuing onwards from Lhasa (after acclimatizing for 3 nights) and doing the overland journey to Nepal. All aboard!