Chengdu

A miserable night with barely working A/C. We had their engineer trying to convince us that it was working. We headed out with our taxi driver for our day tour. He took us to Dujiangyan irrigation project about 60 km NW of the city. The project was undertaken in the 3rd C. B.C. by an engineer, Li Bing, to divert the Min River into irrigation canals. It was a brilliant project, made even more amazing by the date it was accomplished.

The park surrounding the dam project was beautifully done. Inside was the Fulong Temple, erected in 168 AD and supposedly a cable car to take you to the Two Kings Temple. We walked- and walked – and walked and finally determined that the cable car was defunct. We did provide a fair amount of amusement for the local Chinese tourists who obviously hadn’t seen too many Caucasians (and probably found our dripping, sweaty bodies fairly amusing.) We’ve decided that Asians don’t sweat. We’re not sure why- John claims that it’s the rice diet absorbing all the sweat.
After Dujiangyan, we drove back to Chengdu and Liao took us to a Sichuan restaurant, the Shu Geng Yuan. The food was spectacular. It was truly the best Chinese food we’d ever had- and spicy hot. And, as the brochure says, “Welcome a honoured guest. Let’s get happiness, please”.
John was developing a fever and so we decided to cut our touring a bit short. We took a short trip to the local antiques market- what a find. Stall after stall of our kind of “stuff”.

Then we made an executive decision to move to the Traffic Hotel- with real A/C and we dropped John off and got him situated for a rest while I went back to the Chengdu, checked out and made a stop for some Chinese medicine to “get the hot out”.