Another good nights sleep. I used the sleep sheet again, didn’t like the look of the bed linen. The alarm was set for 7 a.m., but both Alison and I woke up around 6, so by then we were already at Teddy’s having breakfast. The packs were already packed, so the group was just hanging around the cafe and waiting. The bus picked us up at 8.30. The trip went better than expected. The seats were good with plenty of leg room, air-con and relatively few people so that we all could have a 2-seater to ourselves. The catch was a video at the front of the bus which was on all the time, partly to show Bruce Lee movies, partly to show Chinese music videos. But to our luck we got two toilet breaks, not just one as we feared. The toilets were of that funny kind as we experienced at the Giant Buddha. They were tiled, and of a relatively high standard. But not the usual hole-in-the-floor variety, instead one long groove flowing all the way from the mensroom and through the ladiesroom. You have to stand above this with one leg at each side. They are communal toilets, naturally, but you get your own cubicle. There is no door, but a short wall that is about 1 meter high. It hides you butt, from the outside they can (most of the time) see only you knees and your head. Charming!

The bus is a nice way to get around. We drove through small towns and villages, but fist and foremost the countryside. Then landscape was incredibly green, nothing matches the vibrant green colour of a rice field. Everything seemed well organised, but the farming is pretty primitive. It is a very beautiful picture with the ricefield, and someone riding a bike on a small path through the fields somewhere in the distance. Everywhere you see old people in mao-suits, people carrying heavy burdens, shopkeepers drinking tea or playing cards/mah jong outside their stores. The sun was shining.

It became obvious when we started getting closer to Chongqing. It is a very industrialised city that will be the starting point for our trip on the Yangtze river. It is supposedly on the top five list of the world’s most polluted cities. We saw lots of factories on the way in, and the river is brown. But Chongqing is actually the only city in China where it is forbidden to use the horn – due to noise pollution! – and it is noticeable. Other places Chinese drivers use their horns constantly.

The city seemed pretty dreary driving in. When we arrived at the bus station I saw the closest thing I had seen to slum quarters, side by side with sky scrapers. In general, I am not impressed with modern Chinese architecture. For some reason you see a lot of white-tiled houses, they are pretty ugly and don’t seem to keep well. And the standard modern high-rise buildings that you see absolutely everywhere also look terrible, always grey in colour, with the typical fenced-in verandas and the air-condition boxes hanging on the outside. They seem to age really fast. Almost all the new buildings seem to have been built with no feel for traditional architecture. Someone suggested to me that they are making the same mistakes that we have been doing in the West, only they are in a greater hurry.

We were met by our local guide, who had arranged transportation to the hotel. It turned out to be 3 cars with a drivers seat, a row of seats behind with room for three, and then some sort of storage room at the back, small, dirty and dark, with a rather makeshift door. This is where the guide meant that those of us who didn’t have room up front would ride along with the luggage. Kath refused this, it was too dangerous, so of course a long discussion followed. The end of it all was that Kath along with 5 people from the group took the bus to the hotel, while the rest of us rode in the cars. Another hair-raising trip. As if Chinese traffic isn’t dangerous enough to begin with, the drivers started competing/driving past each other. Adrianne became so mad that she gave out a loud scream (which we could hear in our car) and hit the driver. But we got there eventually (I saw a mad Chinese dwarf screaming in the streets, workers sitting around with their tools hoping someone would give them a job, everything was grey and sad and I was thinking that it looked like a cruel city), and after a while the others arrived as  well. Hotel Chongqing turned out to be an  excellent hotel. Clean, nice, everything works, television with CNN and Channel V (music channel). After checking out our rooms we went supermarket shopping.

There was a change in the boat plans. Some big shots had booked the boat we were supposed to be on. We got another one, but didn’t know up front what the standard was like. We also cut back from two nights to one night on the boat. This was the reason for the shopping, so that we would have something decent to eat. This was a large supermarket close to the hotel where they had everything from shirts to a tank of frogs looking half dead. Then it was back to the hotel to have a wonderful shower before Mr. Tang, the representative of the boating company, took us out for dinner. According to Kath this was partly because we had lost the boat we had originally booked, and partly to save face because the group before us had been very dissatisfied. They were not happy with the hotel they had stayed in, and because the didn’t catch a boat they were supposed to catch because of a delay, they had to find an alternative boat which was very bad, and where they found 20 water buffaloes in the communal toilets!!

The restaurant Mr. Tang brought us to was a place (with Santa Clause posters in the window), where they served hot pots. The tables had woks in them, and you got different ingredients on the table that you cooked yourselves in these. The thing you cooked in looked like some kind of soup, with a black/purple hen lying in it with its claws sticking out. In this soup we cooked strange vegetables, tofu, fish, liver, snake etc. I didn’t eat much, four of the girls left after having had a good look at the food. I wanted to leave too, but it would have been a bit too impolite if even more people left. Thankfully we got some rice eventually, so at least there was something I could eat.

From the restaurant window we could see a cable car crossing the Yangtze river. For fun we took this back and forth after dinner. Chongqing isn’t as bad as I originally thought, at least it looks good at night with enlightened buildings and a bridge etc. But even as I walked to the supermarket earlier in the day I had noticed that this is actually an interesting city that I wouldn't have minded seeing more of. Then we walked back to the hotel for an early night, we would be leaving early the next morning.