Gorging ourselves...

Just began typing this and realised the computer was translating my letters in Chinese characters . Excellent! Still, I decided to start again in the interests of making some kind of sense. We came to ground yesterday after a 3 day cruise down the Yangtze river. We had the option of a foreign tourist cruise or a local tourist cruise and opted for the latter - mostly as it was half the price. Before the cruise started we had some time to kill in Chongqin - a fairly uninspiring (not to mention grey and humid) city on the river. Still, we were able to occupy ourselves and stocked up on instant noodles for the trip whilst we were there. We are now becoming instant noodle pros, adding fresh veg, sausages and egg to the pot. Yum!
Our cabin (shared with 4 other people) was small but clean, with bukbeds and the worlds smallest bathroom. My first experience of showering (cold) over a squat toilet. To make matters worse, we had managed to leave our only remaining towel in Chonqing so had to resort to drying ourselves with clothing.
The cruise itself began at 9.00pm, and on the first evening we sat out on deck and met a group of school teachers who had just begun the holidays. I was very jealous as it turned out (as explained by the English teacher) that their trip was subsudised by their school and there were a total of around 30 members of their staff onboard. Little did I know that by the next evening day I'd be singing in front of the lot of them...
The second day (well, first full day) of the cruise was spent on deck enjoying the views and the sunshine. There were some optional tours off the boat (but really, who wants to visit another temple at 6am??) but we opted to enjoy the scenery instead. And of course my singing. I have to say it was less painful than many of the attempts we heard!
The following day however was the real scenery day, as we passed through 2 of the three main Gorges of the river, as well as taking a detour off the main boat onto a smaller one to visit the little Gorges with some spectacular scenery. We even then left he smaller vboat for an EVEN smaller boat to explore some of the narrower stretches. Really beautiful - photos will eventually follow I hope.
The next day turned out to be shorter than we expected, leaving the boat at around midday to take a bus to the 3 Gorges Dam. As this cost quite a bit to go and view we decided that a distant sighting was enough and caught a bus onto our next destination - a short stop in Wuhan (where we currently are) followed by an overnight train to Hangzou. We spend 2 days there (where I'm planning to ride a bike for the first time in about 15 years..) and then head to Shanghai

如 农网, 够哦大半夜