Our Big Day at the Seaside in Chengdu

After a journey of twenty thousand kilometres, battling a blizzard in Vancouver, suffering the sweltering heat in Sri Lanka and the nightime chills in the mountains of the Tibetan Plateau, we pushed on by boat, bus, plane, train, taxi and tuk-tuk till we reached the province of Sichuan in western China. Our goal – the city of Chengdu to visit the largest building in the world...

This is the New Century Global Centre in Chengdu which measures almost NINETEEN MILLION square feet. This building is so vast that it is virtually impossible to get it all in one photo. But the awe-inspiring size of the building is nothing compared to its interior. It is more capacious than twenty Sydney Opera houses and, for comparison, it is five times bigger than Canada's much vaunted West Edmonton Mall ...

This single building houses 14 Imax 3D cinema screens, two 5 star hotels each with more than a thousand rooms and an Olympic-sized ice rink...

There are hundreds of ritzy shops and restaurants where you can buy almost anything that you would find on the high street in London or Paris and you can even buy a $60 cup of coffee if you can afford it...

But we did not come all this way to skate, shop or drink ridiculously expensive Civet coffee. We came because James wanted to see the world's longest artificial beach with sunbathing space for 6,000 people; to swim in the world's biggest indoor wave pool and to watch the sunrise and sunset on the world's biggest TV – a screen measuring a whopping twenty two thousand square feet that is the backdrop to the world's biggest indoor water park...

And just off the beach is a full scale European seaside village complete with an English fish and chip shop and a massive cathedral...

But wait a minute - there are more than 16 million residents in the Greater Chengdu Area; where are the crowds? We went on a cold drizzly Saturday and expected the place to be packed with families warming themselves under the artificial sun on the beach, swimming in the warm indoor ocean and screaming down the mammoth water slides. But, apart from one little kiddie playing in the sand with a bucket and spade, we had the whole place to ourselves.

Strange, we thought, until we discovered that the pool was empty, the seaside village deserted and the whole place under renovation.

With a sigh of disappointment, James put his swimsuit away and we had a coffee before taking the Metro back to our hotel. Sometimes things just don't turn out the way you planned them!