20250919 Friday, September 19, 2025 Farewell Zhao Shang Viking Yi Dun, Hello Chengdu

20250919 Friday, September 19, 2025 Farewell Zhao Shang Viking Yi Dun, Hello Chengdu

Tianjin Port

Farewell Viking YiDun

Just as we were beginning to relax on the ship, it was time to go and we’re back to living out of our suitcases for a while.  We grabbed a quick last breakfast on ship in the buffet and then rendezvoused with our extension group “Jimmy’s Family, Group 19” in the Star Theater.  We promptly disembarked the ship at 7:30am and went ashore to claim our luggage.  Unfortunately, our bags, along with one other couple’s bags, were missing in action.  It took some calling on walkie talkies and about 15 minutes before the missing bags were located and we were then able to head to the transfer bus.  

Our larger checked bags will be segregated from our smaller roller bags for most of this part of the journey.  They will have purple luggage tags and will be handled by ground crews, while we will be responsible for our carry on bags and back packs every day. In general, that means getting them onto and back off the bus every day.  

Tianjin countryside with new high speed rail construction.

Tianjin Airport

The bus ride from the port of Tianjin to its airport was less than an hour.  There is a lot of infrastructure building evident with what appears to be a high speed rail link under construction.  The main highways into and out of Tianjin are 8 lane super highways with no pot holes or rough expansion joints.  The infrastructure in China is making the US look obsolete.  While the US has had its interstate highway system much longer, the lack of investment for maintenance and improvements is woefully evident.  Our current administration’s philosophy of stripping out every last cent of federal spending so it can grant massive tax cuts to billionaires who fly around in helicopters and private jets is failing the US population, and our crumbling infrastructure will hamper productivity and growth.  Our tax revenues should be used to maintain and improve infrastructure, and billionaire oligarchs should pay their fair share instead of riding for free.

When we got to the Tianjin airport, we had two dedicated Viking check in counter lines, but for some reason, all the seat assignments were completely randomized so that virtually none of the couples were seated together.  To make matters worse, this was not a chartered flight, so we were mixed in with a hundred other non-Viking passengers, so we couldn’t just swap seats.  This was handled very poorly by Viking. We were able to get adjacent seating for all couples on the Spirit of Mongolia flights, and there was really no reason other than a lack of organization or effort to be able to achieve the same for this flight. 

Ben got stuck in the very last row of the plane in a seat that didn’t recline, but fortunately, the passenger seated in front of him didn’t recline her seat during the flight.  Janet managed to have an empty seat next to her.  

Our tour group of 24 passengers happens to have one morbidly obese gentleman. For a while it looked like the flight crews were having troubles seating him in the plane as he stood in the aisle for a long time after everyone else was seated and buckled in while the flight crews worked to accommodate him.  They must have been able to find two adjacent empty seats or moved passengers to achieve that and used a seat belt extension to secure him.  There was a first class section on the plane but it only had 12 seats and they were full.  Viking doesn’t allow booking first class for domestic flight segments during these land tour parts.  This was a 3 hour flight from Tianjin to Chengdu. 

For much of the flight, the plane seemed to be at relatively low altitudes.  While this made for more interesting terrain viewing, it also encountered a bit more turbulence.

It is amazing how lush and green much of China appeared below, and how even rural areas were pretty well developed with farms and housing complexes linked by highways and rail lines.  Throughout much of what we flew over, rivers had carved the land into innumerable serpentine hills and valleys extending as far as the eye could see. 

Chengdu is a massive metropolitan city with a population of over 20million.  It is an important hub between eastern and western China, and is also an important military and industrial center.  It is in Sichuan province and is recognized by UNESCO as a city of gastronomy.  It is most famous for its hot pot, and its spicy hot pot is renowned for both pungency and the numbing effect of the Sichuan peppercorns.

 
Chengdu is also renowned for its close association with the Giant Panda.  Due to its geography, there are areas in Sichuan Province that remain isolated from human contact that are natural habitat for the Giant Panda.  We are going to visit Panda Base tomorrow, which supposedly has over 240 Pandas.  There are Pandas literally everywhere in the city’s decor.

Chengdu is also an intellectual hub with the greatest number of universities in Western China, and ranks in the top 25 for scientific research output. 

 
We arrived in the mid afternoon and just rested up.  The Chengdu Ritz Carlton is a very nice business class hotel, just about matching the Andaz Hotel for amenities and room size.  It even has fancy Japanese bidet toilets that automatically raise the cover when you approach. 

In the evening, we headed down to the hotel restaurant which has the most amazing buffet with just about everything.  You could slurp 3 different varieties of oysters, pick a cut of meat to be grilled to your specifications, have a chef create your very own custom noodle dish or yakitori, and of course, they had hot pot as well.  

Tuna doesn’t come any fresher

Where else but in Chengdu can you find a Panda in your cappuccino?

We started off with the hot pot, but before we got too far into our meal, our guide Jimmy came up to us and asked if we weren’t coming to the Sichuan Opera program.

We had entirely forgotten we had signed up for this months ago.  Viking has done a terrible job of providing us with information on what excursions and tours we had signed up for and paid for in advance.  This information would normally be mailed to us, but we never received a packet, and the MyVikingJourney web site where we had a calendar we could look at, was taken down from the web the day before we boarded the ship.

  
So we had to abandon our dinner and head straight to the Sichuan Opera Theater. There were only 4 couples that had signed up for this excursion and they were all couples we had done other optional excursions with, either Mongolia or Treasures of Fujian.  

The show and theater were nothing like what we had expected.  In 2006, we had attended a showing of the Peking Opera, and we were expecting something like that, but this was actually more of a cabaret with multiple different kinds of acts.  There were two classical opera acts with singing and formal dancing, but there was also a comedic sketch involving limbo dancing with a lit torch on someone’s head, some martial arts and musical instrumental performances, shadow puppetry and doll puppetry.  They closed the show with something called the mystery of the many faces in which players on stage could change their faces in a blink of an eye.  It was hard to imagine how they did that- pretty good magic trick.  The masters of the art could change their faces a half dozen times in a minute.  

There were some other gimmicks included with the performance including massages and ear cleaning.  At first these were billed as free and we were supposedly arriving early enough that we could get one of these treats, or a souvenir of some sort.  But there was a long line for these services, and as the show started, people started to try to steal our seats, so we abandoned the extras and just focused on the show, opting for a souvenir instead of a treatment.  It turned out the souvenir was a canvas tote bag with the Sichuan Opera logo on it, so that was decent.  They also served tea and sunflower seeds for munching on during the show, and sold popcorn in the lobby.

It was a very entertaining show, and we’re glad our guide hunted us down so we didn’t end up missing it unintentionally.  After we got back to the hotel, the restaurant stayed open late so we could resume our dinners. 

 
Tomorrow we have to have our checked bags placed outside our rooms at 6:30am and breakfast starts at 6:30am.  We will head to the Panda base at 8am, and then in the afternoon, we will fly to Lhasa, Tibet.  We have started taking our high altitude sickness prevention medications, so hopefully we will not be adversely affected by the altitude when we arrive tomorrow evening.