Detour

Somewhere along the way, I ended up panicking over National Day and the repeated warnings over how hard travel would be during that week. Concerned that we could end up being stranded in some undesirable location for a week, I decided to skip Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain), Luoyang Caves, and Xi’An, and head straight for Chengdu. We were scheduled to go to Huang Shan next, but since it’s a smaller town, I wasn’t quite sure what we would do if we were stuck there for more than three days. So on a whim, we flew to Chengdu. Internal flights are fairly cheap in China and I paid about $100 for each ticket from Shanghai to Chengdu. I figured we could perhaps come back and pick up what we’d missed later on. And for some reason, I thought there was a lot to do in or near Chengdu.