Happy Halloween! The bus came to pick us up from the Mix Hostel at 6.30am to take us to Chongqing to get on the boat for the Yangtze Cruise. When we got on the small bus everyone else was chinese. We were driven somewhere to get on a larger coach & everyone there was chinese apart from one other western couple. After a very long coach journey we arrived at Chongqing, which seemed to be a high rise shanty town witrh rusting buildings & bars round the windows & clothes hanging everywhere. At the travel agents we sorted out our excursions for the boat trip & were told we could have a "free sightseeing day in Chongqing" whoopdidoo from what we had already seen. We had 6 hours to kill so bought a map off a street seller, soon realised it was all in chinese & so got in a taxi to Downtown Chongqing, we pointed to a large building on the map that was in the centre of downtown. The taxi driver nodded & took us to a Holiday Inn in the middle of nowhere. The butler guy there could speak english & told the taxi driver where we wanted to go. I think we were literally taken for a ride as we got no discount for him going the wrong way & that building was clear as day in the middle of town! We both bought woolly hats as the weather was turning cold & we thought it would get chilly sat on the deck of the boat. After killing a few hours window shopping, eating & drinking coffee we tried to get a taxi back to the travel agents but it must have been rush hour & we were waiting for one for ages, when we eventually got one he had no idea where we wanted to go so we had to ring the travel agents & get them to direct the taxi driver! We finally got taken down to the harbour to get on our boat. There were loads of nice boats with great big decks & neon lights. We got onto our boat & was taken to our "first class cabin". It was two single bed with dirty & ripped sheets, a tiny shower room with a toilet that stank & had not been cleaned. The tap came off in your hands when you tried to turn it on & we found sunflower seed shells in one of the drawers! We laughed about all this until we saw how many spiders were crawling around & then I noticed a great big cockroach scuttling about. We went on deck to chill out & get some free tea & seeds (we had to pay Y55 each to go on the VIP deck for these!). We soon realised that we had walked through all the colourful big boats to get on our little rust bucket at the back! We went to our room & put up our mossy net & both slept under that squished on a single bed!