The Shanghai tourist tunnel. An eccentric and somewhat “cheesy” tourist site in Shanghai connects Shanghai with the Pudong side of the bund by going under the HuangPu river. Do you really travel half way around the world to discover the mysteries that lay beneath the HuangPu river in a five minute tram ride when the Oriental Pearl Tower is right in your shadow? We had a couple of hours before we headed out on a an evening dinner cruise which included local shanghainese cuisine and a fireworks display amongst all the neat buildings along the bund.

We paid out our return trip fare and didn’t look back. On to the mini tram with my partner Veronica, step daughter Bailey and a German couple that seemed to be just as surprised on being involved in this journey of sights and sounds. Click, Click and the next thing we knew we were being hurtled into the future through a time travel tunnel and a barrage of strange and weird philosophical banter. We were no longer under the HuangPu river but in a time vortex!! We must have gone through the 4 seasons, life and death, health and sickness and I might have even heard William Shatner speaking some Esperanto.

I don’t know if people remember the original Spiderman cartoon where he ends up going below the earth into the caverns and he meets the cavern people? Outside the tram we started to hear some screeching and then it was as if the power was cut and the tram glided to a halt in the middle of the journey. The Germans logically went for the intercom and it was quite clear that somehow our futuristic tram was working with outdated communications. Where were we? Were we stranded in the time Vortex??

We saw movement outside of our tram but these were oversized creatures of the future that just seemed to be frozen in time or in a different reality. A brief glimmer of hope arrived in the form of time travel refugees from the tram that had been moving in the other direction. We pounded on the tram windows to get their attention but they were desperately running in the other direction with no time to talk to us. Then it was all to clear, that we too, would have to abandon the safety of our tram and run for it!!! I got out of the tram and wrestled with the larger than life creatures of the future and tuned out the philosophical rantings and in classic b movie sci-fi form, ran toward the light at the end of the tunnel.

 In the end, what seemed to be a classic B movie sci-fi thriller extraordinaire was the result of some broken down machinery and a refund that helped to pay for our cab ride back to the Shanghai side of the bund. The Shanghai tourist tunnel is a definite yes on my list of places to see even it if ends up being one of the more weirder things to do in this very exciting city.