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Tibet is a beautiful place and very awe inspiring - but enought already!!! No more monks and no more monasteries were the cries of our hearts as we made our way to the airport today. It was onward to China, land of cheap oily and greasy food that could only make us fatter.

Please don't deport us!

K.thambi
2006-01-05 23:48:18

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Tibet is a beautiful place and very awe inspiring - but enought already!!! No more monks and no more monasteries were the cries of our hearts as we made our way to the airport today. It was onward to China, land of cheap oily and greasy food that could only make us fatter.

Our destination for today was Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province. Sichuan is known for many things, but most importantly for extremely hot spicy food, giant pandas and super green scenery.

We got to experience the beauty of the Sichuanese scenery first hand from 10000ft in the air as we flew over 6000m high mountains. It was amazing how green these mountains were - greener than the greenest green tree we had both ever seen.

We arrived at Chengdu airport and were greeted with an ultra modern little building complete with automatic flushing toilets and automatic taps in the bathrooms. And it was all so clean!! Could this really be China. What happened to the stinky, dirty images that we had built up in our minds?

Anyway, our first chore was to find the Public Security Bureau to get a visa extension. Unfortunately, to enter Tibet, we had to forfeit
the original chinese visa that we had obtained in Australia and exchange it for a dodgy 8-day group visa (where Melenie and I were considered a group of 2). This was because the Chinese government likes to make it difficult for tourists to enter Tibet and thus insists that everybody enters only on an official tour. We were assured in Kathmandu that once we arrived in the 'real' China (eg. Chengdu), it would be a trivial matter to get a 30 day visa extension at the local Public Security Bureau (PSB).

But oh dear!! We couldn't find the PSB. Half an hour of frantic scrambling around the airport asking official looking guys in terrible chinese where the PSB was located was only greeted by assertions that ...