Another 19hour hard sleeper took us all the way to Chengdu, not nearly as bad this time though, we knew what to expect, booked a night journey so we could spend the majority of the time asleep and took supplies of noodles and drinks to tide us over!

We were booked into the 'lazy bones' hostel, a lovely central hostel with a little outdoor courtyard area and the nicest rooms we have stayed in yet (every dorm has an en-suite and curtains around the bunks) and bumped into Simon the Swiss guy we had met in Beijing and xi'an when we arrived. I sat for a while catching up and getting the low down on the city as he had already been here 6 days and was leaving the following morning. I didn't know much about the city other than it was famous for the panda sanctuary near by but Simon got me pretty excited for it! He gave me some names and numbers of places to go and things to see for day and night, mainly at night judging by the massive hangover he was nursing.
Unlike every other Chinese city ive seen so far Chengdu is very modern, clean and hugely developed, there's hardly any dodgy back roads or street vendors, small family run restaurants or brothels, just loads of designer shops expensive department stores and expensive car garages. We looked in vein for some grimy little street restaurants we had learned to love but the only option seemed to be up market restaurants or the odd local place that only had Chinese menus so were no good to us anyway! We ended up eating in a really nice Japanese restaurant on the first night, probably our most expensive meal out yet but well worth it!

We'd heard about a good little reggae bar (the hemp house) not far from our hostel so went to check it out on our first night and it was a proper little rasta bar with red yellow and green everywhere and bob marley playing :) we met a Chinese girl called fernanda and her mates before long and spent the rest of the night chatting dancing and having a laugh with them, I like this city already! Fernanda is a student with plenty of free time so offered to show us about the city the following day, to be honest we were all pretty wary at first as we'd heard too many horror stories about foreigners being scammed and ripped off but it's now 6 days later, we speak and see each other everyday and she's a really lovely genuine person .
Obviously the pandas are the biggest draw to what us one of the top 5 biggest cities in china and our hostel, like every other ran expensive, daily tours to the sanctuary and we were planning on doing that later in the week but fernanda had offered to take us the local way which sounded like a much better plan! We went the next day with zhe zhang (fernanda) and her mate on local buses and had a right laugh, plus we saved some dosh compared to the hostel tours, and I have to say the pandas were actually pretty impressive! It's not usually my thing but we had a nice sunny day and spent hours around the huge sanctuary and lakes getting up close to the pandas and watching them being fed, they're now one of the rarest animals in the world and it's pretty much the only place in the world where you can see so many and so close.

The night we met zhe, for some reason she was convinced that az was Arabic, Chinese people in my experience are very reserved and shy but couldn't be more the opposite! She relentlessly takes the piss out of Az (at least once every 5 minutes) about how many wives he has, where his camels are or what it's like in his Arabic country haha for a Chinese person she's bloody hilarious and comes out win some cracking 1 liners, In return shes adopted the name of 'chinese' - it's much easier than even attempting to pronounce her actual name.

Chengdu is famous throughout china for its 'hot pots', they say you can't leave china without seeing the great wall, the terra-cotta warriors and when in Sichuan, trying a hot pot! So after we ha visited the pandas and Chinese had taken us to a beautiful part of the old city, it's name actually translating to 'wide and narrow alleys' where old traditional buildings and courtyards line the sides of a maze of alleyways, she took us for a real Chinese hot pot, which as you can imagine I was bloody excited about! I would have been near impossible to do without being able to speak chinese or being with a Chinese speaker as the entire menu was in Chinese character and theres a certain etiquette to eating at these restaurants that doesn't exactly come naturally ( there a loads of 'hot pot' restaurants about that have English menus and simplified dishes but it's not the real thing!)
The idea is basically that you cook the food yourself in a huge metal dish, sunk into a pit in the middle of the table that has a burner beneath it keeping it boiling, our dish was divided into 4 sections so that the broth inside each section could be different strengths of chilli, or flavor. It was great as Chinese was keen to show us how it was all done and introduce us to a true Chinese meal though we made the mistake of telling her to order for us all, and the bigger mistake of saying that me and Az were feeling pretty adventurous.... It wasn't just for show, this is genuinely what every other person around us was eating and is deemed perfectly normal, but she ordered - pig brain, duck intestines, duck blood, lotus flower stems, shrimp, quails eggs, 2 different types of beef, noodles and veg. I can honestly say that there was not 1 thing there that I didn't enjoy eating, it was all so tasty and the experience was just something else, my favorite meal in china by far!
When Chinese people go out for a hot pot, usually with huge groups of friends and family, they take 3-4 hours to eat their meal, you just sit, chat, drink, laugh, smoke and eat. And that's exactly what we did. Al the food comes raw ( you need to see pics of the pig brain ) and you just pick up what you want with your chop sticks and hold it in the boiling broth until it's cooked, the potatoes and veg etc just get thrown in and you fish for them later ( super chop stick skills are needed ) everyone has their own individual bowl of oil flavored to your own taste with coriander garlic and chilli, and everything that comes out of the pot goes into your oil before eating. If you ever find yourself in china this is a must do, though try and find yourself a handy Chinese guide, if these are the things she chose to order I can't imagine what you'd end up with ordering at random! (oh, and you cant be chinalized until you try one, brain included!)

After chengdu were making our way to Chongqing where we'll be getting on a boat where we'll stay for 5 days, following the Yangtze river all the way to yichan through the three gorges, then on to shanghai. We spent days researching which tours and boats were best to get on and found it best to book a western run tour on a larger boat, this wasn't our first choice as a smaller local boat was more appealing but the tour we have now booked has an English tour guide, westerners on board, has all inclusive meals and is a 5star boat. A bit of a cheat, I know, but the prices compared to a local Chinese boat were similar and besides, I think i deserve a bit if luxury :) The only draw back is that the boat doesn't leave for another week, so we're stuck in Chengdu for a total of 8 days! I can think of worse places to bs stuck though, I think this city has a lot to offer, we've got our tour guide, Halloween is coming up, accommodation is 30 qwai a night and since coming down with a cold I could do with a few days of not-alot-ness before moving on!
Our nights, like our days are pretty chilled, and mostly consist of going in search of somewhere nice to eat or finding some street food, getting litre bottles of good Qingdao beer for 25p a pop and drinking them with a few games of cards at the hostel, this is pretty much due to the weather suddenly turning bad and it getting pretty cold out but that is of course with the exception of a few very drunken nights, consisting of me and Az being the drunken entertainment for the night and generally making fools out of ourselves in front of a nice group of English girls, Chinese people and anyone else that made the mistake of crossing our paths! Gooood times ad the result if the 2 of us somehow managing to see away beers, a bottle if wine and a litre of whisky :)