I left my jaw in Chongqing’s hotpot

Want to know how to be glad you’re in a giant, smoggy behemoth of a Chinese city?

It’s easy: spend three days on a rough and tumble Yangtze River tour boat eating instant noodles and beer and getting grimier and grimier as you watch the verdant landscape drift by.

Despite the beauty of the Yangtze cruise, after bunking with strangers without a hot shower for three days it was actually nice to be in the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing (重庆), pronounced “chong ching”.

If you take the larger Chongqing area into account, its population is over 28,000,000. That’s unimaginably populous. As for Masayo and I, disembarking on Day 64, we stayed in one little sliver of the city, the triangular wedge formed by the junction of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers.

After a Home Inn location claimed they had no empty rooms — it may well have been true, but for some reason I got it in my head that they just didn’t want grungy foreigners staying there — we found a room on the eleventh floor of Chongqing He Ping Bin Guan (重庆和平宾馆), translated on their card as Peace Hotel.

It was a comfy place, and it was nice to be able to rest after the boat trip. We used the internet in the room (and I was supremely annoyed that a last-minute change I’d made to my websites before the Yangtze cruise had rendered them unreachable; they’d been giving 404 errors for three days when I thought they’d be raking in some travel cash) and walked around trying some of the local food in Chongqing.

Galactically spicy hotpot meal

Chongqing is known for its hot, spicy dish called hotpot (a.k.a. steamboat). Masayo and I found a little place in a small second floor room called Wusan (五三火锅). In the spirit of “when in Rome”, we ordered a hotpot.

They brought the pot to the table, and it was separated into two parts, with a yin-yang-shaped wavy divider between them. One side was hot — visibly dark red — and the other was not.

Several dishes of ingredients followed, vegetables and meats, and Masayo and I began dipping them in the boiling water to cook them and eat them. The first were in the regular half, but soon we ventured into the bubbling, evil-looking red half.

HOLY MOLY was it spicy! Unbearably so, except we were here for the Experience™ so we kept at it. I nursed beers continuously, trying to cool my scalding mouth (it barely worked). Even teetotaler Masayo was sipping beer, as we looked at each other with resigned but unbelieving red eyes.

I must say we put more food in the regular part than the hot part, but I also must say we did pretty good, not always shying away from the red one. We couldn’t believe how hot it was. But it did have a certain charm.

Walking back down the hill after dinner, we literally could not feel our mouths and found it difficult to talk. It was a feeling beyond mere “hot” — it was like we’d spent all evening gargling lava. But you know we were proud of ourselves — crazy little experiences like this are what aimless budget travel is all about!

We drooled and giggled and slurred our words all the way back to the hotel.

After four nights we made plans to leave Chongqing on a train bound for Xining, but we had fond memories of this post-river mega-conurbation. Our little neighborhood was actually pretty homey, and the food was good, even when it dissolved the bottom half of our faces off.

What’s the spiciest food you’ve had while traveling?

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