Our Chinese Tour Group, Yangtze River, China

After a late night of football, we had a painfully early morning taking off to Chongqing - the hop off point for trips on the Yangtze River. The river, cutting right through the heart of China, is the 3rd longest in the world (after the Nile and Amazon) at 6300km long. Out of about 800 people onboard we were two out of 6 Westerners! The rest, for good or bad, were Chinese tourists and we were to be spending our next 3 days with them all! There had been, however, a group of ladies on our original bus from Chengdu, who took a shine to me - making motions of how strong I was to carry my huge pack (it is pretty big now as we are starting to collect a few purchases). Anyway, they were very impressed and took it on themselves to keep an eye on Martin and I. Onboard, as we left the dock that evening we had fun with them trying to communicate in our broken Chinese and their non-existent English while watching the crazy skyscraper lights of Chongqing.

Over the next three days we were to stop at different 'tourist attractions' which were pretty weak: temples, cheap chinese souvenir stalls, a 'Ghost town' with tacky halloween-like plastic skeletons and demons. On land, we were the only westerners in our group and we cringed at the thought of being in a tour group, and a Chinese tour group ( with its loud megaphones, talking, spitting etc etc)at that!! In the end it wasn't so bad and we had to laugh as we got dragged into the obligatory group photo (unfortunately, no group hats for us). Here I am next to my Ladies in the front row. Martin took this pic, but got dragged into the official one a second later. Thankfully, my Chinese ladies kept an eye on us and made it much more interesting showing us how to walk across thresholds of temples and bridges correctly so that it would bring us luck (e.g. three steps starting with right foot for women, three steps with left foot for men). If it hadn't been for them, the whole trip would have been pretty dull. * Mush