Chongqing

Met at Jiangbei and driven in over the viaducts that cross this city at roof height. The afternoon goes straight up: the three tiers of the classic peninsula view, Yalan Mansion's stepped terraces, the open deck at Urban Sky Canvas, and the 29th floor of Pride of Times timed for the moment the towers switch their façade lighting on. Hotpot afterwards, ordered the local way.

The morning is the city at street level, where its logic finally shows: Shibati's eighteen stairs, the monorail running through the sixth floor at Liziba, Hongyadong's stacked stilt façade, and a shopping complex with no honest ground floor. From late afternoon a working photographer takes over for three hours, blue hour into full dark, then a night motorbike run through the tunnels and neon with a second bike filming.

East along the Yangtze to the 816 Underground Nuclear Project: a plutonium reactor hollowed into a mountain by soldiers from 1967, abandoned unfinished in 1984, declassified in 2002, its reactor hall nine storeys tall. Then into karst country for the Three Natural Bridges: Tianlong, Qinglong and Heilong standing in sequence over a collapsed cave floor, reached by a glass lift down through the rock.

Gongtan's river mist lifts off the Wu at about seven and the town is briefly yours. Then the Wulong massif: Fairy Mountain's alpine meadow at 2,000 metres, and the Flying Kiss, two enormous cliff-edge figures that lift visitors out on rotating platforms over a hundred metres of open air, then turn to face each other. A serious drop and an entirely unserious idea. Watching from the terrace is respectable.

Ninety minutes west and a complete change of register. Seventy-five protected sites hold some fifty thousand statues cut into cliff faces between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the last great flowering of Chinese rock sculpture. We take the two that matter: Baodingshan, composed as one continuous narrative over seventy years from 1174, and Beishan, older, quieter, and where the painted colour survives best.

The one day that asks something physical. This is canyoning in the plain sense: you go up the watercourse, not along a path beside it: three hours through clear cold streams, between narrow walls, over boulders and under overhangs, with fixed lines on the harder steps. Water shoes and dry bags provided. Dry clothes, a long late lunch, and the hot springs Beibei is actually famous for on the way home.

A full day underground in the system everyone here calls Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and for once the nickname earns it. You descend through a collapsed doline into chambers that stop conversation, flowstone curtains, a subterranean river, columns forty metres tall, and long stretches lit only by the lamp on your helmet. Boardwalks through the developed sections; the far chambers are dim, damp and properly wild.

A day of the actual place. Stair-streets and cliff-side alleys, morning noodle counters, tea houses where the same eight men have played cards since 1990, and an outdoor lift that is technically public transport. Into the evening, the Guanyinqiao food circuit (xiaomian, maoxuewang, skewers, cold noodles) then an evening with a bar guide through the speakeasies behind laundries and above stairwells that are unfindable without an introduction.

Across the river and up the forested ridge the city looks at from the other side, the old temple road, and the two viewpoints from which the whole peninsula finally reads as a single object. In daylight, so you see the geography your rooftops were sitting inside. The afternoon is deliberately empty and spent in a proper multi-floor bathhouse. Then a last rooftop at dusk, your pick of the six.

A slow morning at the point of the peninsula where the clear green Jialing meets the brown Yangtze and the two run side by side, unmixed, for a good kilometre downstream; the reason the city is here at all. Then the transfer to Jiangbei, timed to your gate rather than the traffic report. A later flight buys you the Liziba platform, shot from the right side.