Chongqing

On our own again. We headed off the boat in Chongqing, got our luggage into a taxi and headed for the Chongqing Hotel. Hu at CITS had told us that the Chinese 3 star hotels were better than US 4 star hotels. Well, the lobbies are beautiful- completely remodeled with air conditioning that stuns you when you walk in off the street. Then you get to the rooms. You walked through dingy hallways with stained carpeting and very little lighting to get to your tiny box with worn furniture, stained carpets and A/C that barely worked. We immediately asked for the next step up in rooms and got to a larger, brighter room (still badly stained carpeting- rust and blood).
We headed out to explore the city and walked to the center. Chongqing was amazing. Everywhere you looked there were new construction projects going up- huge skyscrapers and major developments of office complexes, hotels and housing. It is a major supplier of rice, grain, cotton, silk, coal, iron and natural gas. It’s called the Shanghai of the west- and sometimes compared to Hong Kong. As the 3 Gorges project progresses, it’s expected that it will be a major powerhouse in manufacturing and trade.
The driving style was wild- like Wuhan, a game of dodge-em for cars, bicycles and pedestrians (in that order) and chicken. We found the Harborside Hotel- a brand new 5 star hotel and sat down to watch the scene outside on the pedestrian mall. The contrasts were stark- the name brand stores selling everything under the sun, huge video monitors flashing more advertising to encourage more buying- then the old men carrying boxes of DVD players on poles straddled between their shoulders.
We explored some more of the city, darting between air-conditioned shops and discovered the Marriott Hotel- another brand new 5 star hotel. The depressing thing about these new 5 star hotels was the price- about $65 – while in our 3 star dump, we were paying $55. When we got back to our room for a siesta, we woke up to a non-working A/C and we were sweating. That was enough for us, we checked out of the hotel and took a taxi to the Harborside and checked into our beautiful room with CNN and working A/C.

We stopped for dinner at the rooftop restaurant in the Marriott- only to find that their A/C wasn’t working- (While this may seem like a trivial issue, Chongqing is known as one of the three “furnaces” of China- the heat was unbearable. The other two cities are Nanjing and Wuhan) so we found a local Chinese hotel with a revolving restaurant and had a few warm beers and tried to find something on the menu that was edible. We finally walked out and got room service- great tomato soup and CNN.