Cruising down the river - otherwise known as a three hour bus ride!

Today we were picked up from our lovely hotel and transferred to the airport to fly to Chongqing to board out cruise ship for three nights on the Yangtze. Our plane was a bit late but we arrived in Chongqing and were met by Paul. He took us on a tour of Chongqing  but not before telling us that the river level was too low for the ship we were taking to get up the Chongqing so we would be going on a bus!

 

We have learned not to let these things get to us, I hope I will be saying this in three weeks time.  We opted to go on the earliest possible bus at about 6 as Paul said the trip took three hours.  We visited some of the old town and then went for a hot pot supper.  This is a speciality of the region and was in the past a pot set over a flame. In the pot is a hot chilli spiced stock in which you cook yourself various items of food.  These days the table has an electric hot plate in the middle and the pot is set on that and controlled by knobs on the end of the table.

 

We were served plates and plates full of all sorts of stuff, meat, fish, bean curd, vegetables, mushrooms and noodles.  Far more than we could eat even if had been a meal time. This was 4 in the afternoon!!!

 

AS you know I am quite a capable cook so it was irritating to be helped to cook the stuff and not to be left to do it ourselves.  We did not want to be rude but they kept piling stuff into the stock and we could not eat even half of it.  I think this would be more interesting if there were a lot of you but we have now tried a Chongqing Hot Pot!!

 

Down to the bus station where we paid 10 Yuan about £1.20 for porterage for our two big suitcases!  Given what we found at the other end of the bus ride this was good value! 

On the bus there was one other non Chinese person.  John from South Africa who had run the Marathon on the Great Wall the day before and was meeting up with two friends to do the cruise.

 

We were checked off a list by Leo from Victoria Cruises and once on the bus were issued with bottled water, a banana, not for Tone who hates bananas and a packet of biscuits.  This seemed ominous and did not bode well we thought.

 

Well suffice to say that three hours later, some beautiful scenery, a delicious banana and a biscuit for dinner we arrived at Fengdu which is 170 miles down the river.