Arrival to Chengdu

1 May

Day 157: Chengdu

We took to flight to Chengdu, picked one of the hostels from Lonely planet, called Loft and arrived there by taxi from the airport (45 Yuan for 30 minutes drive – 4.5 euro). The hostel had available two double rooms with shared bathroom and one bed in a dorm. Since today Tommy was arriving from Singapore, we needed a place for 5 people, so we took it all :-D

Our plan was to leave Chengdu on 2^nd of May by train to Lhasa. The train takes 46 hours and we were supposed to arrive to Lhasa on 4^th, when our trip begins.

Unfortunately, after arriving to Chengdu we found out that there are no trains on 2^nd, just on 1^st or 3^rd of May. Besides that it is impossible to buy the tickets at the train station (we went there together with Luciano and Serafin and confirmed the fact), since there is some kind of mafia in China, who buys all the train tickets and then resells them with a commission of 20-30 euro more per ticket.

First we needed to change the date of the tour from 4^th to 5^th (since we only could leave Chengdu on 3^rd and arrive to Lhasa on 5^th). We called Gisele and asked her to call the tourist agency guy to ask him to start the trip on 5^th of May. He agreed so the first thing was sorted out. Then we went to the railway station, couldn’t buy any tickets and finally reserved tickets in our hostel, paying 200 Yuan more per ticket (20 euro).

Railway station:

There are two kinds of tickets for Chengdu – Lhasa train:

· Hard sleeper cabin – with 6 people, cost of the ticket is maximum 712 Yuan (71 euro) for the lowest bed (the beds have 3 levels)

· Soft sleeper cabin – 4 people inside and the price is around 900 Yuan (90 euro)

Since we are 5, we decided to book 5 hard sleeper seats, to have a cabin for ourselves.

Ok, train tickets were solved, the trip was starting on 5^th of May and now we needed to decide what to do tomorrow. The decision was easy – go see Panda reserve and Big Leshan Buddha, the biggest Buddha statue in the world (68 meters high). Since we are 5 we could arrange private van with driver for this tour. The price for the van was 700 Yuan (70 euro) + entrance for Panda reserve (58 Yuan – 5.8 euro) and entrance for Buddha is 90 Yuan (9 euro). The van had 6 seats and while paying I saw one guy who just arrived to the hostel and offered him to join us to share the price of the van. His name was George, from Germany and he agreed to join us. The whole price of the full day trip finally was 263 Yuan (20 euro per person).

This was the first day when we noticed that tours in China are pretty expensive, any entrance fee, transportation are much more expensive then in South East Asia.

At around 12 pm Tommy, our friend from Singapore, has arrived and we finally went to bed. Tomorrow pick up for Panda/Buddha tour was at 7.30 am from reception.