The entire boat rose once again at 6, this time for a trip round ‘White King Town’. The town was built when an old Emperor saw ‘white smoke’ rising from a pond and declared it a good omen for his reign. He immediately built a small palace on the site. Within the historical building there were also some interesting burial stones, excavated before the rising waters could consume them, and a selection of ‘hanging coffins’ within which the local people we...

After being worried that our personal wake-up call would disturb the Swedes (they weren’t doing the morning trip, apparently they were ‘templed out’) we discovered that in fact the entire boat was awoken by announcements over the loudspeaker at 6am. This was tourism Chinese style, collective and controlled! We headed off the creaky, cramped vessel and were paraded past two luxury cruises on our way to the jetty as if to confirm our social status on the riv...

We arose early for a 7am bus to Chongqing to board our 3 Gorge boat trip. The early start was rather annoying as the boat didn't leave Chongqing, a five hour bus away, until 9 at night but we were told the early start was in case of the bus breaking down on the way. That explanation rather lost it's credibility when we were told that we could pay a fee to get a bus later in the day instead. That bus obviously never breaks down then! 5 hours later we arrived in C...

Once again slaves to the sun we rose at 6 and headed to the peak to hopefully watch the spectacular sunrise. We were well prepared this time, as veterans of another peak sunrise, and dressed in pretty much everything we'd got, including managing to tuck our sleeping bags around our middles and inside our jumpers. Sadly, we'd not accounted for being so far West but in the same time zone and so had a long and lonely wait for an hour before others joined us and the ...

Unfortunately during the night there was a storm with high winds that caused loose doors to slam all over the temple so our sleep was less than satisfactory during the night. We revived ourselves in the shower and prepared for a big day ahead. We had a couple of cookies and resolved to hit the trail hard for a couple of hours before stopping for a proper breakfast. the trail immediately after the temple was steep and tough and we'd definitely made the right decis...