We had to get early this morning and pack everything after less than 14 hours in Xi’an. Somehow, we are going to cram in a visit to the terracotta warriors of Emperor Qin’s tomb before we hop onto yet another plane, this time, bound for Chongqing.
Rushing through the terracotta warrior site was so frustrating! This museum is the most amazing display I’ve ever seen and the scale of Qin’s tomb is breathtaking. I’m sure that we saw the main bits of the exhibit, but there were many more buildings that we simply did not have the time to see. (Funny how we always had time to visit the gift shop, however.)
Not having a guide with us really became important when we reached the airport again. The flight was delayed, and after we sat in the waiting room for about an hour, the airline announced a gate change in Chinese. Fortunately, one of the gate agents took pity on us as we all were blithely sitting there and told us in English where the new gate would be.
After finally reaching Chongqing, one of the ugliest cities we had seen to date, we made a visit to General Stillwell’s Museum, which turned out to be closed for refurbishment. (One would think that someone somewhere should have checked on this before wasting our time.) Our local guide talked us into the place for a brief 10 minutes visit. There wasn’t a lot to see anyway, so it probably didn’t matter much that the visit was truncated.
Then, we were taken to the Chongqing Art Institute and Galleries. I’m not quite sure why this was a stop at all. We had to pay to get into the Great Hall, which was just a large, not particularly impressive, auditorium and the “Institute” appeared to be just a venue to sell tourists prints of well known paintings. It was a total waste of time. Doubly so, considering that the Three Gorges Museum was just across People’s Square from the Great Hall, where there were some important pieces of art and artifacts of the people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam. I’m afraid I was barely polite and walked out of the institute immediately to the bus. My frustration level was reaching new heights.
After a very nice dinner, we were driven to the docks to board our boat for the 3 day Yangtze River cruise. It was quite a trek down to the boat since the drought has lowered the river drastically.
Our boat, the Victoria Jenna, was brand-new and our stateroom was lovely. Thank God!
