Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China

Well here we are, in a flash hotel room in Chengdu, China, having just woken up from a pretty good night’s sleep in a lovely comfortable bed. (previous readers of this blog will know I place high value on bed and pillow comfort!)

China doesn’t allow Facebook, so what better excuse to revive the blog. I thought about changing the name of the blog, given it was set up and written for Dave and I to share his journey with Lymphoma in 2016. (Dave said he doesn’t do “journeys” and would prefer I say “Lymphoma adventure”).

I decided however, to leave the title. Our lives are now post-cancer, but that experience is really why we are here in China. We are living life to the fullest, making every decision now with a new perspective. Traveling together and spending time seeing this amazing world is even more of a priority than it has ever been.

So why China?

To get me off social media for 10 day? Haha!

No actually  the main reason we choose China is because we have been promising one of my ex-students (Hang Zhou) we would visit him since he left Australia 6 years ago.  When I spotted an amazing deal for flights, Yangtze cruise and accommodation (for less than a grand!) that flew into Chengdu, where Hang lives, we grabbed the chance.

Our motto for this trip… LOW EXPECTATIONS!

Have you ever set your expectations too high and then ended up being disappointed, when you know if you had set them lower you would probably have been impressed? It happens to me a lot in restaurants. I do lots of research, read reviews, listen to feedback and then when a decision is made I end up having too high an expectation.

When you spend less than a thousand dollars on a trip like this, you pretty much know it’s not going to be luxurious, despite the trip being  described as ‘deluxe’ in the marketing material!

We left Melbourne on Thursday evening. On check-in… “the flight is full so no window seats available”. There was no opportunity to check-in or select seats online, we were flying Sichuan Airlines and their website was a little underwhelming. Remember… low expectations!

I was worried we’d get no sleep on the overnight flight. We did try to upgrade on check-in, but no luck, so once we boarded, I settled in to the seat, took something to help me sleep, ate the surprisingly nice chicken fried rice served for dinner. Interestingly we were also served chicken fried rice for breakfast, this time with added chilli. There were individual screens in the back of the seats, unfortunately the headphones didn’t work, but all in all the experience was pretty good. 6/10.

A couple of large coaches picked up the 120+ people on this trip, from the airport in the POURING rain and took us to the hotel which is 25km from the city. We declined the optional panda tour, got to our room and showered, then connected to wifi, got in contact with Hang, messaged the kids, cleared a few emails then slept for an hour before Hang arrived.

Hang came to get us in his mothers very snazzy Mini Cooper and drove us through torrential rain into the city (about an hour), took us for lunch, to a phone shop for a SIM card, to his flat and then to his mother’s place for the highlight of the day – meeting his gorgeous 18-month-old son Alan!

Food

Breakfast: Buffet at Hotel

Lunch: ‘Western’ restaurant near Hang’s house – Dave had a banana split and a strawberry milkshake 😉

Dinner: Hot pot. Yummy cook-your-own in traditional Sichuan regional style. Hang ordered A LOT of food, but we ate most of it. Hang had a very spicy broth to cook his in, my broth was mildly spicy, Dave’s just plain chicken broth.

We all enjoyed the dinner, but we were exhausted so Hang drove us home past a few sightseeing highlights of the Chengdu city centre, including a giant statue of Mao Tse Tung which looked amazing in the light at dusk.

Last pic then I’d better get ready for breakfast, then our transfer to our flight to Yichang… can you spot the deliberate mistake?