[2022] Chongqing: What to do, with travel tips and itinerary

Tips 👏

The local food is very spicy, actually the most spicy of China!
It’s the biggest city in the world with 30 millions people.

🏠 Accommodation

We again slept in a central airbnb very cheap, was ok.

🚲 Getting there

Bullet train from Chengdu, 1h30.

⏱ Duration

We stayed three nights, including one chill day, and that was enough.

❌ Miss

Ronghui Hot Spring Centre: by what we read, it seems one of the best spa in China, with tons of pools and massage options. We couldn’t make it because of sickness but looks awesome!

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Three Bridges (Wulong Karst Unesco) ⛰

Must do while you’re in China, very big and spectacular. As the name state, it’s three natural bridges of more than 100m high and wide. It’s the biggest of their kind in the world.

To get there, we’ve hired a private driver for the day for 600RMB. The site is very very far from Chongqing (3h30 drive one way) so it was quite a good deal. We bought our tickets on the way at the Wulong Tourist Centre (weird building looking like a pyramid in the middle of the mountain) for 125RMB/person.

Once we bought the tickets, our driver brought us to the beginning of the hike, starting by an elevator bringing us at the bottom of the first bridge, which is the most impressive one. After taking picture, we made our way to the bottom. There was a temple on the way, famous for having some movies shot around like Transformers. We then walked down to second and third bridge. At the end, we opted-in for gold car option to bring us up which worth it 100%. In total, we spent 3 hours walk. Make sure to bring good shoes.

After our visit, we headed back to town with our lovely 4h drive. To be honest, it was a long day which is spend mostly in the car. It’s a shame because Wulong also have other site which we couldn’t visit due to time restrictions. We recommend you to actually stay in Wulong Town and not in Chongqing for two nights, where you’ll be able to explore the surrounding with calm instead of adding hours of driving every day.

City Tourism 🚶

As mentionned, Chongqing is the biggest city in the world, so definitely worth a stop. We were staying in an AirBnB in the centre, so we went out by walk/tube/taxi to visit the centre. It’s a working city so there’s actually not that much to see expect a forest of giant building, including a replica of the Singapore’s Marina Bay. A good idea is to go by night where all the building have led animation on.

We went at the Street Market in the city center, to find some decent and cheap food option. However, it was not the best we had in China. We also took the Cable Car from the city to the other side of the river for 30RMB round trip. We had to queue for a while and get our elbows ready to have a decent spot in the cable car. The view from it was nice but in our opinion didn’t worth neither the wait or the fight. Getting a cab and going around is much better.