Got up packed due to leave at midday and Penny wanted to visit the restaurant to have her favourite dish of dumplings with Yak butter tea. She was happy with them both but we really like Shangri-La a lot and a bit sad to leave it. Would be a great place for Chinese NY. The hostel arranged for a driver to take us to the airport. We checked our bags in and then went outside as Penny wanted to take some photos a really lovely day sunny and a little breeze. Went through security and waited for our 13:55 flight. The flight before going to Lhasa was cancelled due to the weather there. Our flight was coming from Lhasa, bugger. Then 2 China Eastern Airway flights arrived, one was carrying on to Chengdu, our flight was Tibet Airways. We were told to go back through security and change our flight tickets to China eastern Airways, there was a frantic scramble. Got them changed back through security and boarded the plane and there were still 10 seats available, we were lucky we could get on the flight. So we had a 4 hour wait at the airport becoming too familiar. We had a bit of turbulence leaving Shangri-La as we are surrounded by mountains a couple of Chinese people took their sick bags to the back of the plane. We were not sitting next to the window so no photo’s by Penny. The airline magazine was promoting NZ as a holiday destination a very good spread. As we got closer to Chengdu the mountains disappeared. 90 minutes later we landed it was overcast or may be smog hard to distinguish at times. It was the longest taxiing from when we stopped to our gate and I have flown alot of flights around the world. Then we had a long walk to baggage reclaim, got the bags and another long walk to the taxi rank, showed the driver the address we where staying at and he said okay he knew where he was going. It was a 22km journey eventually he stopped and said our place was up those stairs, I asked him to ring the phone number but he refused. It was not the place, I asked a young guy where it was and he rang the place we were 300 meters away down the road and around the corner. Useless bloody taxi driver and Penny tried to defend him, not good enough taxi driver. The front desk sent a guy down who found us and we followed him and checked in.
We decided to look around for something to eat went into one restaurant and could not see any pictures of food which we would like to eat, we checked out some more and eventually ate at a side road restaurant, we chose a variety of meat, veg and squid on skewers grilled on the hot plate and an aubergine cut in half seasoned like the rest. It was very spicy but tasty and we had a bowl each of cold rice which suited the spicy food. After that we got some fruit and tried to find a decent supermarket but no joy and we have an apartment with kitchen and washing machine, we love our salads which you do not see very often. Got back to the apartment put the food away unpacked our bags and put them out of sight. Completed the dark wash and got it hung up on the clothes horse see how dry it is in the morning. We will have a day get our bearings and check out the area we are staying in. Monday morning around 07:30 we are going out to see the Panda bears they eat early and in the afternoon usually go to sleep, it being winter time they might not be so sleepy.
Maurice's Travel 