More China

Hongyadong is a touristy area on the river. We found an Irish pub there owned by a couple of American guys and spent and spent several interesting nights there eating dinner. This was during their annual Halloween party.

A couple of the cruise ships on the Jailing River near where it meets the Yangtze River, which flows through Chongqing then all the way to the East China Sea.

Hongyadong from the river level. Chongqing is a hilly city. Hongyadong is built into the side of a hill, you enter at the river level, it's 10 stories tall and you can exit the top floor onto a street at the top of the hill.

One weekend we took the high speed train from Chongqing to Chengdu to visit the Panda breeding and research center. It was basically a zoo just for Pandas.

Twin cubs named MengDa and XingXio (no, I couldn't tell them apart). They were about 2 months old and slept the whole time we were there.

This is actually a Panda, it's called a Red Panda.

China

I spent a month in Chongqing China last fall for work. I'm just now getting around to posting some of the photos.

The first weekend I had off I traveled a couple of hours from Chongqing to see the Dazu Rock carvings. These date as far back as the 7th century A.D. There are about 75 different sites and over 50,000 statues.

The carvings at this site are in the face of a cliff. Some are small but as you can tell from the people in the lower right, some are huge.

My tour guide and translator Li Na.

I was in the city of Chongqing and it has a lot of people, most places were very crowed, although none as bad as this. This was a historical part of the city we went to one weekend. There were so many people we walked half way down the first street then gave up and left.

China is a very interesting mix of very old and very new. Chongqing is also very hazy almost all the time. I was there a month and only a day or two were really clear.

A new bridge they are building near Hongyadong. The opera house is right across the river from here and was lit up at night.

The city is growing like mad, everywhere you look there are new buildings going up. On our short ride to work each day I bet we would pass 50 tower cranes on buildings.