2016-10-08T11:11 Chengdu
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| Sim's hostel courtyard, Chengdu, Sichuan province, PRC |
You may not realise it, but now is early October last year. These are details of my last trip to Tibet. It is four months later than the actual event, as I had multiple computer problems, and could not publish anything in the interval. Now everything is working, I am publishing my notes and photos taken during the trip.
I flew out to Chengdu a couple of days before I was due to meet the rest of the party. The flight itself was about as good as long haul flights can be. I had plenty of reading material - a stack of New Scientist, and Amateur Photographer, together with a mass of reading material on my Kindle. During the night though, my Kindle had a catastrophic encounter with the edge of a locker. It came out shaped like a pretzel. I had to junk it completely.
In one way this is not a major problem. I can reproduce what was on the machine when I get back to the U.K. It rather dents my capacities over the next month. Even if I can get a replacement in China, I will not be able to use Facebook, Google or Amazon,all of which will be unavailable behind the Great Chinese Firewall. The one thing that I'm going to have to make some effort to reinstate, is all my Chinese language dictionaries, translator and character recognizer. As I'm on an organized tour, led by people who are English speakers this will not matter for the duration of the trip.
The really aggravating thing is that I was intending to use my Kindle as a half way stage in backing up my photos from my camera to portable hard disk. This is now impossible so I may just have to be careful to ensure that I've always got two copies of every photo on different storage media.
I got to Chengdu, took a taxi to Sim's, the hostel I'm staying at tonight. I then went for a walk to the main Chengdu railway station to pick up the tickets I'd ordered for use later on in the month. Then to the nearest Bank of China, to pick up a bit more money, and back to the hostel to flake out.
I had forgotten that 100% of the motor cycles and scooters, and about 20% of cars in Chengdu are electric. This means that they have, as if they needed it, an additional excuse to use their horns, but it also means they can creep up to within about 3" of you before using them. This makes crossing some of the road junctions very interesting, to put it mildly.