Dark side of the moon…

The obligatory Indiana Jones selfie…

Well, not really…but it sure feels like it could be.   It took us over 30 hours of traveling to get here…a 6-hour flight from LAX to Honolulu, a 2-hour layover, almost 13 hours from Honolulu to Beijing, a 2-hour layover in Beijing, and then another 3 hours to Chongqing.   It was a good set of flights, though.   I read Bill O’Reilly’s latest blockbuster Killing Patton (it was excellent; you should read it), and when I finished that, I started re-reading (for about the 5th time) Peter Egan’s Leanings (it’s one of those books every rider should read).   The flights went by quickly, even though we practically needed a calendar (rather than a watch) to measure the length of this journey.   With the help of the international date line, we arrived in Chongqing two days after we left LA!

Our Zongshen point of contact, Bella, was waiting for us at the airport, and then it was another hour to the hotel.   Whew!

Susie and I were on our second wind by the time we arrived in Chongquing.   We didn’t feel tired at all, perhaps because we managed to nap a bit on the flight from Hawaii to Beijing.   But it was that kind of fitful napping when you wake up every 20 minutes trying to find a comfortable position in which to sleep.   And folks, that just doesn’t exist in an airline seat designed for the mythical 98-lb weaklings featured in the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension ads of yesteryear.    You geezers out there know what I’m talking about.

Susie Q and Bella posing in Chongqing

Chongqing is exactly as I remembered it.   Immense.   Skyscrapers shrouded in mist, peeking up through the green mountains.   Hills.   Valleys.   The Chiang Jiang bisecting the city (Chiang Jiang, in Chinese, means the long river…it runs from western China all the way across the country to Shanghai on the east coast).    We know the Chiang Jiang as the Yangtze.   Like I told Susie…Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.  Susie and I are going to get out to grab a few photos later today and I’ll see if I can capture the mystical nature of this place.

We had a great lunch at a traditional Chinese Sichuan restaurant with Bella.   Chongqing is known for its spicy food.   Good stuff and good food….

Hot, spicy, and (trust me on this) very tasty…

You know, Christmas in China has become a tradition for Susie and me.   I think this is the third or fourth time we’ve been in China over the holiday season.   China officially has no religion, although they celebrate Christmas as much as we do.   There’s Christmas music everywhere, all in English, and all with American artists.   The same goes for Christmas decorations….

A scene in downtown Chongqing, with Frank Sinatra singing a Christmas carol over the PA system…

Say what you will, but I’ve spent a lot of time here and I can tell you the Chinese are not a lot different from us.   They admire the US and I’ve never detected even a hint of animosity.   As is our habit when we are here, we read the China Daily (their English language daily newspaper) over a dynamite breakfast in the hotel a little while ago.   It’s like USA Today, but better written and with more substance.   There’s a political lean to it, but I have to tell you, it’s more pro-American than either the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times (two other papers I like to read with breakfast when I am in the US).    Maybe it’s because of their exposure to us in so many different ways.  Bella told us over lunch that they enjoy most of our TV shows (The Big Bang Theory is a favorite, as I also found it to be in Turkey and in Scotland earlier this year).   And, of course, some of their favorite food spots are distinctly American…

The Colonel, the coffee, the Big Mac, and the DQ….all the comforts and calories of home…

Anyway, the breakfast was awesome.   Like all of the fancy hotels we’ve stayed in while in China, this one has a breakfast buffet to beat the band.   Susie wanted an omelet with egg whites only…try translating that!  One of the guys standing around helped us by explaining this to the chef, and I actually watched that omelet artist extract the yolks, unbroken, from the pan with chopsticks!  Kids, don’t try that at home!

China is a land of many contrasts, and Chongqing’s street scenes fully show that with the contrast of bright colors and gray architecture…

I was going to ask the balloon lady to make a motorcycle, but Susie wouldn’t let me…

More color in Chongqing, and we’ll have more to show you later…

That’s it for now.   We’re going to go down to the hotel gym in a bit where I’ll do my world-famous impersonation of a California gray whale on an exercise bike  (no photos of that, folks…so you’ll have to ride with us to Baja if you want to see it in person).   The work starts tomorrow when I’ll be in the Zongshen plant.

More to follow, so stay tuned…