CHINA TOUR, 1983

June 25: From the airport, we went for an hour by bus along mountain roads, mines, and farmfields to the rather large (6 millon) town of Chung King, which served as National China's capital during WW2. I recollected Generals Stilwell and Chang Kai Shek and the Burma Road. We also saw some of the caves used as air-raid shelters against the Japanese.
On my 2003 WWW search for "Chungking", Google listed 53,700 links and 760 images, one of which showed that since our visit the town and its suburbs had grown to 30 million inhabitants by 1998, making it the largest municipality in the World!

We saw red sandstone, limestone and shale, numerous excavations and large trucks and earthmoving machinery. Thus it was a pleasant surprise to drop into the beautiful and quiet Zoo to watch the five pandas and their antics.

In the late afternoon we negotiated the last switchbacks and saw our first close-up of the Yangtze (Changjiang) River, in the middle of the crowded and lively town. We stopped near a steep set of stone stairs leading down to the dock where our boat was moored; some of us took the funiculaire down, others climbed. We were given a marvelous welcome by the crew. Though the boat could sleep 64, this time it was reserved for us 13 and some 8 Chinese engineers.

We had an excellent dinner and afterward enjoyed watching the busy boat and ferry traffic on the wide river with jagged mountains beyond the opposite banks. At 20:00 we were presented with a Kung Fu movie with the heroine taking on a dozen men and climbing up the walls of a narrow street which in my attempted illustration of this feat looks like a Chinese ideogram.