Yesterday we had a slobbish day... literally I think the only time I left the hostel (without Barnes) was to go to the shop to get a pot noodle, bearing in mind that the shop is not 20m away! This is probably why there are so many pictures uploaded now so I hope you enjoy them. Besides that, we learnt how to play Chinese Poker from an American chap named Jeremy and went about devising a plan for escaping Chongqing, those ideas, did however, not go quite to plan!...

...Today we awoke bright and early (more like midday) to set our action plan into place! After a quick stop at China Post to get a few postcards off to you lovely people.. if you don't get a postcard it's not that we dont love you, we shall blame it on Royal Mail anywho! We then went in search of the China Information and Travel Service (CITS). After a short while of wandering Barnes asked in a local hotel and we were back on track. The woman there spoke no English, so Barnes (with the teacher inside her) played a game of charades, gesturing train wheels turning, the woman said "fly?' so instead she drew a picture of a train. She said "Only flights" and scribled some Chinese letters on a piece of paper and pointed us in some vague direction down the road. Some more wandering later we were lost, so Barnes again took the iniative, this time in KFC, where we were greeted by three chinese teenagers, one of which was willing to point us in the right direction... hooray for Western fastfood restaurants! There was a long queue of people sat outside on cardboard boxes and after 10mins of queueing some lady took us to the front of the line (I guess the people were queueing for cancellations or something!) we asked about trains to Shanghai(Barnes again using her hilarious piece of paper with a train drawn on... the woman chuckled!)... and then Wuhan... it wasn't looking good! We asked about flying... really expensive! So it seems I got my own way... We were going to travel along the Yangtze, the only mode of transport that isn't fully booked!

We then headed for Chaotianmen Docks to inquire about Boats and to see the rivers merge (the Yangtze is yellow and the other, I forget its name, is blue) as well as check out the free Yangtze museum. We walked in the wrong direction however, and after another stop at a China post, this time for directions we arrived. The fog however, was horendous and visibility was about 10-20m. No merging rivers! Furthermore we couldn't find the museum. We did however inquire about boats, they seems to come to about the same as at our hostel so we opted for the assurance, costing us Y800 each. This evening we have been relaxing (in anticipation for the arduous journey ahead!) teaching Lee, one of the Hostel's employees some English card games.

I guess our next blog will come from Yichang/ Wuhan, probably the latter as we only plan to stay in Yichang for 12 hours. Thanks for reading the blog guys. Lots of love.