Waypoint Journeys Presents
The Vertical City
10 Days
Six locked rooftops, a blue-hour photo production, a Cold War reactor inside a mountain, and the karst country the city was carved from.
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Chongqing is the only city on earth where a building can have a ground floor on the first storey and another on the twenty-second. Thirty-two million people live stacked on a peninsula between two rivers, on ground so steep that escalators do the work of streets, a monorail threads through an apartment block, and the address on your door tells a taxi driver almost nothing.
The result photographs like science fiction and works like a small town. Its famous skyline is best seen from roofs that are not open to the public, service lifts, locked doors, a building manager who has to be asked. That is the half of this expedition that cannot be improvised, and it is the half we do for you.
The other half leaves the city entirely. A plutonium reactor hollowed into a mountain and abandoned unfinished. Three limestone arches standing over a collapsed cave floor. Fifty thousand figures carved into cliffs eight hundred years ago. A canyon you walk up rather than along, and the cave system they call Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Chongqing without them is a light show; with them it is a place.
"You do not get above this city by accident. Someone has to open the door for you."
Three Secret Rooftops, Yalan Mansion, Urban Sky Canvas and the 29th floor of Pride of Times, working buildings with locked roof doors, each arranged with the management before you arrive.
Three hours with a working photographer, timed from blue hour into full dark across four to six locations. Ten finished, colour-graded frames plus every original file: not a walk with a camera.
A plutonium reactor hollowed into a mountain by soldiers from 1967, abandoned unfinished, declassified only in 2002. A hundred thousand square metres of hand-cut chamber, and almost unknown outside China.
Tianlong, Qinglong and Heilong: three limestone natural bridges standing in sequence over a collapsed cave floor, with a Tang-dynasty post-station on the sinkhole floor for scale.
Fifty thousand figures cut into cliff faces between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Baodingshan's seventy-year narrative programme and Beishan's quieter gallery, read by a guide who knows them.
Three hours upstream through the cold water of Jindao Canyon, and a full day in the Tianyan chambers below a collapsed doline. Both with a costed alternative if the weather or the legs say no.
Two days on the roofs, five in the country the city was carved from, and three back inside it, at street level, underground, and in the water.
Chongqing and the Karst
Ten days based in Chongqing: two nights at Wulong by way of Fuling and Gongtan, then day trips to the Dazu grottoes, Jindao Canyon and Tianyan Cave from the city.
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.
per person, twin share
Nine nights in the named rooms, one guide and one vehicle for the whole journey, all six rooftop accesses, the photo production and its deliverables, the motorbike night, 816, Wulong, the Flying Kiss terrace, Gongtan, both Dazu sites, Jindao, Tianyan, the food and bar evenings, the bathhouse, every ticket named above, both airport transfers and your eSIM.
International flights, visa where required and travel insurance are extra. Departures run April–May and late September–October, when the air is clear enough for the long views and cool enough for the canyon. Private departures for your own party are quoted separately.
Plan This ExpeditionChongqing is a very safe city to walk at any hour, and nothing on this itinerary is dangerous by accident. The parts that carry real risk are the parts we control: every rooftop is entered with the building’s permission and a guide who has been on it before, never through a propped door; Jindao runs with a local canyon guide, fixed lines and equipment we supply, and closes on heavy rain, which we do not argue with; Tianyan is walked on boardwalks with helmet and lamp. Both active days have a full alternative already paid for, so stepping back costs you nothing. We strongly recommend travel insurance that covers both.
