This is Chongqing, a city of 8 million, center of a "Municipality of Chongqing" that has 38 million. I cleaned the skies a little in Photoshop. This is the Jialing River, that a few miles below merges into the Yangtze. It's on hills, with high-rise apartments everywhere, almost like Hong Kong. We also went to see giant pandas in the zoo, see below. Click to see a large image.
The old Ciqi Kou town is listed, in guidebooks, as 9 miles West of Chongqing, but it has been surrounded by the growing city. Lovely shops and restaurants, strange smells, on a hill over the Jialing river. Click to see a larger image.
Old town of Ciqi Kou one side of the Jialing river and modern flats the other side ... Click to see a large image.
... driving along the river highway, back from Ciqi Kou, 9 miles of scenes like this one, towers and towers of new bolcks of flats going up everywhere. Click for a large image.
 The old China, and new, behind. The Baolun Si temple, the only one of five left in the old Ciqi Kou town, on a steep hill, overlooks the Jialing river and blocks of newly built apartments on the other side. Just below, with a cement post in the river, is the current start-point of the (landscaped) riverside motorway, which will soon be extending to the left, under and past the old temple. Click to see a larger image.  |
On top of the hill at the confluence of the Jialing and Yangtze rivers, there is a nice park with views. Click to see a large image.
In the Chongqing Zoo, there are several Giant Pandas. Mainly, they eat a lot of bamboo, and sleep when they are done, click on a larger image.
We saw several pandas at the Chongqing Zoo. It was blazing hot! The pandas just sit and eat lots of bamboo, or sleep. Click to see a large image.
At the same zoo, this was the "lesser panda", a cute animal lika a badger or a raccoon. Click for a large image.
Overlooking Chongqing. 8 million people in the city, 13 million with the suburbs and 38 million in the "municipality". Wow! The whole country of Guatemala is much smaller than greater Chongqing! Click to see a large image.
Enjoying Chongqing's specialty, "hotpot" ... and it is hot and delicious! Click to see a large image.
Click here to see photos from Seoul and Daegu and Gyeongju, South Korea, Beijing and X'ian, Fengdu "City of Ghosts", Yangtze River and the "Lesser Three Gorges", the Three Gorges Dam, Wuhan, Shanghai, Suzhou, or go back to Barbara's narrative of the trip.