Chongqing, where “not spicy” is only a suggestion

A sea of houses

The flight in was easier than we had braced for. A layover in Beijing, no visa needed for either of us, nobody particularly interested in us at the border, and then Chongqing.

What we remember is the taxi from the airport. Not a skyline, nothing like it. Just black night with thousands and thousands of lights in it, all the way in, without a break. Every building looked as if it had been built from the same drawing, and every one of them was dark except for a handful of windows lit from the inside. Not New York, where a whole tower burns at once. Here it was five or six bulbs per block, repeated until the city ran out of horizon, which it never really did.

Our hotel was out in the outskirts, behind what looked like film studios, sleek and elegant in a way that did not match the neighbourhood at all. We got there with Didi, the taxi app, which is so cheap we still have not worked out how anyone makes money from it. Then we asked the guy at reception where to eat, and he sent us down the street to a barbecue.

Forty-six yuan. Six euros, for the two of us, for more food than we could finish. Nobody spoke a word of English and nobody seemed to think that was a problem. It was late on a weekday and the place was full: men playing games, drinking, eating, several of them with their shirts rolled up over their bellies, which turns out to be the standard local response to the heat. Only men, we should say.

Before we left, people had told us the Chinese are a bit like the Spanish: hardworking, and then extremely loud about their free time. Twelve hours in, that was already confirmed.

Breakfast from a stranger

We woke up into something that felt like fifty degrees. Hot, and so humid that the heat arrives before you are properly out of the door.

We went looking for breakfast near the barbecue and found a tiny place doing steamed buns filled with meat. A woman there, very friendly, insisted on paying for our first ones. Her reasoning, as far as we could follow it, was that we had come to her country and she wanted to give us something back. Then she left, because she had to get to work. She did not ask for anything, she did not stay to be thanked, she just paid and went.

The rest of the shop was almost as good. They did not seem used to Western tourists, and by the end they were asking us to post something about the place. Outside, a group of old people were doing their morning exercises in a public park.

A city with no ground floor

Lunch took a while, because Chongqing is genuinely three-dimensional. Restaurants sit on top of other restaurants, and the map cannot tell you which one it means. Everything is in Chinese, so when you translate the names you get things like fish, fatty, sausage, chicken, flooding fish, and then you have to guess.

We found it eventually, ordered what they recommended, and were served roughly three times what two people can eat. The best dish was meat in a very good sauce with a smoking pot next to it. They have these all over the city, in fountains and outside houses, water that appears to be smoking by magic. We still do not know what it is.

Then we tried to reach a famous plaza that is supposed to be very high up. The taxi left us at a hospital. We read online that we needed the 22nd floor, so we walked into the nearest tower without looking up, took the lift, and stepped out into another part of the same hospital: staff, patients, procedures, and two obvious foreigners standing in the corridor while everyone stared. We went back down. The plaza was behind the small building all along, and although it felt like ground level, when we looked over the edge we were enormously high. That was the moment the city clicked.

After that came Jiefangbei, the pedestrian street: coffee, shops, a good mix of very modern towers and older, denser streets full of food. Somewhere in there a fake panda valley lured us underground, complete with smoke, music and a plastic jungle, and deposited us in a store so large it took fifteen minutes to find the exit. We drank some genuinely excellent tea that they then tried to sell us at an unreasonable price.

We had already fallen for our first scam by that point. Two young Chinese students, in theory, sold us a miracle product for removing stains.

Nine o'clock, and the city fills

We walked down to Hongyadong, the caves, past the river and the bridges, through the market, then out to the tip where the two rivers meet. On the way we found a shop selling an unreasonable number of different fish, in what was essentially a parking garage. The skywalk was too expensive, so we watched the sunset from the point instead and came back once it was dark.

That is when the city turns on. Not just lit, but animated: video running across the faces of the skyscrapers, some of the buildings coordinated with each other, boats going up the river covered in lights with parties on board. And at around eight or half past, the streets filled. Not busy, impassable. We could not walk.

People kept stopping us for photos. That is the other thing about here: everything is built around the picture. Photographers work every good corner, and there are always people in traditional dress being shot in front of something, most of them Chinese tourists from other cities who have hired the costume for the afternoon.

The hike that was not a hike

We had found what was described as a walk down a hill. The taxi dropped us on something close to a motorway, well below where we were supposed to start, with a mountain beside us and no visible way up it. Then we found a hole in the wall with a small sign saying it was a passenger lift. It looked like a private garage. It was in fact a lift, and it took us straight to the top.

What waited up there was not a hike but a village sitting on a small mountain in the middle of an enormous city. It used to be self-built wooden housing on the slope, the cheapest place in town, and there is some French history in the area too, enough for a Catholic church. Now it is thoroughly rebuilt for tourism. Still worth it: an old schoolroom left as it was, a library, good views, and a glass skywalk with a mirrored floor at the hotel.

Afterwards we walked to another old town in the middle of the city, drank fresh orange juice, and moved between patches of shade, because by then it was very hot.

The metro through the building

From there we took the metro to Liziba, the station where the line runs straight through a residential block. It is famous because of a trend where people film themselves appearing to eat the train. The views from that line are the real thing though: it is high up and largely above ground, so you get the river laid out beside you the whole way. Nothing like the metro in Barcelona.

Then a short rest, and the hotel pool, which was an infinity pool looking out over the river, the bridges and the towers on the far bank. For what the room cost, it was absurd. The building also has the local speciality of different lifts for different heights, so you take one as far as it goes and then change.

Six teachers and one chopstick

We went back out, took a cable car over the river, and landed in another small lit-up town on the other side, where we had a drink on a terrace above the whole thing. There was a waterfall running through the middle of it, late at night, with all the lights still on. That one felt like something.

And then, because we are relentless, we went for our first hot pot, in a converted bunker. Six different waitresses, all older, took turns helping us: how to hold the chopsticks, what to put in, how long to leave it. Not one word of English between them and it did not matter at all.

We ordered bu la, one of the few things we can say, which means not spicy. We were emphatic about it. It arrived incredibly spicy. We fished out every chilli we could find and it stayed incredibly spicy. Plum tea saved us. We got home at half one in the morning, which is normal here, because the hot pot places run until two or three and they were still filling up as we left.

An airport for trains

Mostly a travel day. Steamed buns again, then two shopping malls, one of them properly local, where Fernando bought most of a wardrobe at Decathlon on the grounds that he had arrived with almost nothing, and we finally found a power bank.

The station, despite being in Chongqing, was an hour away, and it is enormous. Finished only a year or so ago, beautifully built, and far larger than it needs to be. It looks like an airport in Dubai. The only place to buy food in the entire building was a 7-Eleven.

From there, the first high-speed train, and on to Zhangjiajie.