We woke up the same way we always do on the last day of a cruise, boys didn’t want to get up didn’t want it to end…
We said our goodbyes at breakfast and headed out for the day, our flight wasn’t until 4 o’clock in the afternoon.
Chongqing is a picturesque mountain city located at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. It is the largest city in China at 34 million people! It’s far inland in the Sichuan province, known for their spicy Szechuan food, and it was really good!
Chongqings name was formerly romanized as Chungking and ranks 8th in the world for number of skyscrapers. We saw construction on many, so they are still building.
We decided to go to the zoo since they are famous for the Giant Pandas. I am not a fan of zoos and usually get sad seeing the animals in captivity but due to researchand decades of conservation efforts, the Giant Panda has been recently removed from the endangered species list.
They were heavily poached in the 80’s and that has drastically decreased as their protected habitat has greatly expanded. There are an estimated 1,850 Giant Pandas in the wild bamboo forests and 67 Pandas Reserves in China which are like our National Parks.
So in this case we are there seeing the success of their breeding program instead of looking at an animal in a cage for only our enjoyment. The Pandas are in a specially designed garden habitat that emulates their natural environment with all kinds of bamboo-their favorite food-and trees to climb, pools and other types of play structures. They were very active and playful when we saw them in the morning. They were climbing trees, bridges and the babies were wrestling! They had a set of 1 year old twins there that were so cute and playful. Twins only survive at the zoo because in the wild the mother will only take care of the stronger one so one of them dies.
We spent time on the cruise with Madhu and Sham, a really nice couple from Chicago and they loved the boys.
Time to head to the airport, we have a 3 hour flight to Beijing, then a 12 hour flight back to LAX-not looking forward to it….
Food choices on Air China were the usual airline food but Chinese offerings. It was a meat or seafood with either rice or noodles. The noodles were like over cooked spaghetti but the rice was perfectly cooked sticky white rice, so I stuck with those choices that had rice. Grant had the seafood and noodles and said it wasn’t bad. The side dishes were interesting and I didn’t know what most were, but I ate it anyway. The boys would stock up at the airport lounge on the instant noodles. There were so many varieties, they would have one at the lounge, then bring one for the flight.
We were served breakfast before we landed at 10pm in LAX, it felt like breakfast since I slept 9 of the 12 hours of the flight. This was the only time we were offered a Western meal, they asked Western or Eastern breakfast? We would have opted for the Eastern, it was congee, which we love, but we saw it and it looked terrible-Western please.
Global Entry made it an easy transition back into the beautiful United States of America. Our trip was a trip of a lifetime and we relish every memory and experience we had, but it really makes you appreciate the life, the luxuries and most importantly the freedoms we have in America 🇺🇸
