Oops – we got trapped on a boat on the Yangtze River with effectively no Internet access, so I couldn’t post what I had about Chongqing and Hong Kong, but better late than never.

We spent a couple of days in Chongqing essentially as a stopover before heading to Hong Kong for Mark’s arthroscopic knee surgery. Since I first saw the city on a map I’ve been intrigued with it. My mother, you see, worked in the cafeteria at the Chun King factory – the vile prepared Chinese food available in grocery stores in the 1960s and 1970s – in Duluth when I was a boy. Although the city is pronounced “chong-ching,” it looks as though Chun King would be a poor Americanization of the city. And while I unable to find anything online indicating where Jeno Paulucci (the company founder and noted Iron Ranger) got the name, we did find a Grand Chun King Hotel, which makes me even more suspicious.

At any rate, we wanted to see what is kind of a poster child for fast-growing Chinese cities. While technically Chongqing has a population of some 29 million people, that figure represents many millions of people who live outside what we would call the city; the urbanized part is “only” about seven million. Still, coming into the city on the bus from Langzhong, the construction underway or recently completed is just staggering. The number of 30-story buildings (or in that range) must be phenomenal; you just pass mile after mile of these new or new-ish buildings. So yes, Chongqing is a center of the growth of New China.

Getting to Chongqing was something of an adventure. When I went to put my bag in the storage area of the bus I got a bit of a surprise to see two live geese in there; a woman was taking her geese from Langzhong to Chonqing and I suppose I should be grateful she didn’t just bring them on the bus as her seat mates.

From there it just stayed interesting. The roads in China are really wonderful, wide, new, in great shape, easy to make good time. And everywhere you see huge bridges, long tunnels, new construction – really just a lot of engineering marvels. And – and this is important – they’re always on time. Our experience so far is that buses often leave a few minutes before they’re scheduled to. Can make for easy travel.

But then there are the things that make travel in China – or just being in China – challenging. Like when I noticed the little five-year-old boy sitting behind me peeing into what I naively thought was an innocent waste basket on the bus. Given the lurching of the bus in traffic and his little boy-ness, it wasn’t clear his aim was so good. But the floor was messy enough that I’m not sure it would have mattered.

And the noise. God, the noise. Chinese just have no sense of an “inside voice,” for children or even adults. And the bus companies – and we’ve seen this in other Asian countries, too – love playing loud smash-em-up movies while you’re traveling. Just awful.

As long as I’m on the subject of annoyances: cigarettes. Oh my. Apparently I’ve gotten pretty used to Western approaches to cigarette smoke, an attitude not shared by the Chinese. Everywhere you go – restaurants, bus stations, lines you have to wait in, you name it – there is smoke. Even nice hotels have smoking floors. Strange.

OK, enough complaining, and back to the things we like. As Chongquing is right next to Sìchuan Province, and in fact was a part of Sìchuan until it was split off administratively in 1997, food was again a highlight of our visit. Along with the visit to the über-crowded Ciqikou neighborhood, this was mostly a quick stop to sample some more great food. There is a cable car that crosses the Yangtze that would have been a good secondary tourist stop, but the weather was pretty crappy so we didn’t do even that.

After our quick two-day stop in Chongqing we were on a plane to Hong Kong for Mark’s surgery. The good news is that all went very well; the doctor cleaned up whatever it was that was torn and less than a week later Mark is recovering quickly.

Mostly we just laid low while Mark rested his knee, but I did spend one day taking a boat to Lamma Island, one of the outer islands that make up Hong Kong. Lonely Planet indicated there was a nice walk from the port to another little port and the authors were right. Just a nice little boat ride to what felt surprisingly Mediterranean, a few miles past a cute little beach, then up and over the island. Nothing too exotic but a great chance to sample rural Hong Kong.

And that was it. Four days after the surgery we checked out of the hotel, Mark left his crutches behind, and flew back to Chongqing to catch a boat down the Yangtze River. More on that soon.

What brought us to Langzhong? It’s a pretty small city, certainly by Chinese standards, just a little over 100,000 people in northwestern Sìchuan. But we had a few days to kill before heading back to Hong Kong and wanted to get a little off the beaten track. It’s got a reputation as a place to see great, traditional Chinese architecture in its old town – the real “old China” that’s quickly disappearing beneath massive new development projects – so we hopped on a bus and took the four-hour ride.

And yes, the old town was attractive and atmospheric; lots of activity and color and traditional architecture. The only problem is that it only takes maybe 45 minutes or an hour to kind of walk through the whole thing and we were here for three days. We’d debated whether to spend two or three days there and settled for three. The good news was that the weather turned really nice on the third day, after some pretty chilly and damp weather the first two days, so we got to enjoy just hanging around the last day.

One of the challenges here was the very limited English spoken. There was precisely one person at our hotel who spoke English at all and if he wasn’t around we were pretty helpless; the rest of the staff didn’t understand even when we asked for something pretty simple, like a taxi (we were a couple miles out of town). Restaurants were even worse; typically no English whatsoever. Here, then, more than most places we’ve been so far, Mark’s rudimentary Mandarin came in really handy. By the time we got to our last dinner Mark just ordered the stuff we wanted – Kung Pao Chicken, eggplant, and a traditional Sìchuan beef dish – without relying on a menu or pictures at all.

With little else to do, then, our days centered around eating and reading. My book right now is amusing. I’m reading a biography of Charles de Gualle and it’s pretty rare to read about such a heroic, historic figure and find yourself constantly thinking “What a dick.” It appears to have been a pretty universal reaction to him. When I search my Kindle for “son of a bitch” a number of quotes from American officials pop up.

As we hoped in our attempt to get off the grid a bit in Sìchuan Province, the star of the show was the food. The peppers – the Sìchuan peppercorns and the various green and red peppers – are becoming addictive. We had a particular green bean dish a few times, always with lots of peppercorns and red peppers and garlic, that was just the best bean dish I’ve ever had. Some dishes I wasn’t entirely sure what part of the animal I was eating and was probably just as happy not to know, but boy was it good. The prices, meanwhile, were unbelievable. We’d order maybe four dishes for dinner, along with tea, and it would come to under $15. For a really good meal. That’s why we came to Langzhong!

And so that’s Langzhong: great food, a quaint old town, lots of time to read, and a chance for Mark’s Mandarin to blossom. From here we have a quick two-day stop in Changqing and then a three-day detour back to Hong Kong for Mark’s surgery before we come back to Sìchuan for a three-day cruise up the Yangtze River. We’re pretty excited about that (the river part, not the surgery part).

From Hainan we flew up to Chengdu, a city of seven-and-a-half million people and the capital of Sìchuan Province in Southwest China. Mark’s had a fascination with Sìchuan cuisine for some time and Anita in particular really wanted to see the giant pandas to be found there, so it seemed a pretty appropriate place to spend our last few days with by brother and his family.

The highlight of our couple days there was definitely the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base. We got to the center before 8:00 AM on a Monday morning and had the opportunity to watch them with only a few other tourists around. Highly recommended!

Giant pandas – now the symbol of the World Wildlife Foundation – are among the rarest animals on earth; there are only about 1,500 of them left. A big problem is that they are described as “sexually reluctant,” and thus incredibly difficult to breed. Then even when they successfully birth, the infant pandas have high death rates. A movie we saw at the breeding center showed the newly born pandas: blind, completely unable to do anything for themselves, and about the size of a stick of butter. The mothers – 1,000 times the size of the infants – are clueless on how to take care of something so tiny. One wonders what evolutionary forces led to such a bizarre reproduction cycle.

Along with the giant pandas at the center, they also have a number of red pandas. I’d not only never seen a red panda before, I’d never heard of them. They look more like a slightly oversized – and very cute – raccoon than a bear, and in fact are not particularly closely related to giant pandas. As arboreal animals we saw a bunch of them up in trees, eating, napping, and just in general hanging around. Very cute, but I have to say no where near as impressive as the giant pandas.

The other big excursion for us was a day trip to Mount Qingcheng, described variously as one of the key centers of Taoism for over 2,000 years and even as the birthplace of Taoism. Either way, it’s a beautiful retreat with trails and pagodas and temples and lots and lots and lots of Chinese day-trippers from Chengdu. Part of the fun was just figuring out how to get there and then to the top. Travel included subway, a big bus, a little bus, a little tour car to the entrance, a little boat ride at one point, a cable car, and many, many steps up to the main temple. Then, to my enormous surprise, we stopped for lunch right outside the main entrance. The restaurant was very homey, not bright or fancy at all, but the food was fantastic with enough choices to satisfy the variety of tastes assembled at a table with little kids, adults who don’t like spicy foods, and me and Mark, who do.

One of the things that we’ve noticed a bit in China, and we saw in spades in Chengdu, is how easy transportation is. The highways, for instance, make the freeways in Massachusetts look like third-world disasters. The subway in Chengdu was incredibly fast, efficient, clean, and easy to follow. We were amused at 8:00 AM on Sunday morning as we were trying to get a subway to the bus station, to just miss the train we wanted. We looked at the monitor and saw that the next train was coming by in three minutes. At 8:00 AM on a Sunday, all for just 50 cents each! And if all that weren’t enough, the taxis are super cheap, too; a 30-minute ride up to the northern suburbs to see the panda breeding center ran us about $6.50. There are definitely things to like about traveling in China.

Finally, a word about the food. Sìchuan food is hot. Really hot. In some ways, though, our limited experience so far is that it’s not exactly or not just the spiciness. They use a peppercorn here that gives a unique and fascinating tingle to your mouth. Hot, yes, but more than that, something I’ve never experienced with any other food. And the good news is that it’s hot enough that there is only so much I can eat; no matter how much I want to keep going, my burning mouth keeps me from overeating. That, and the fact that my last night there I had an awful reaction to something I’d eaten earlier. After saying goodbye to my brother and his family Mark & I went to dinner at a place we’d eaten our first night that has spectacular Sìchuan food and I couldn’t eat more than a bite of it. It didn’t last too long, though, so I’ll be able to enjoy more of it over the next few days before heading to Hong Kong for Mark’s knee surgery.

The only sad part of the experience was saying goodbye to Al & Anita and the kids. We spent two weeks with them here and had a really great time. The kids were real troopers when the walks were too long and the food too weird for them; they’re either just really good kids or really good at acting that way around their uncles. Either way, it worked for us. Now we have to start planning a couple weeks with them in a year or two in South America or Europe!