An early flight to Chongqing (pronounced Chong Ching), lunch followed by a city tour. This is a modern, sprawling city, and like all the others we've visited has a huge building programme to house the people who've flocked to the cities to work. It has shipbuilding and heavy industry along the banks of the Yangtze and its tributaries. We were taken to a museum of Sichuan immigration, where we saw a typical building of the Ming dynasty (around 1723).

Our guide explained he had been one of Mao's 'Intellectual Youths', bright youngsters denied higher education, removed from their homes and forced to work on a farm in the countryside at the age of 16 until he managed to move to Chongquing in 1976, where he found work as a welder in the shipyards. He learnt English at evening classes and eventually gained entry to university to do his English degree. He was the only guide we've had who was the same age as me (most have been much younger) and the only one to express a negative opinion of chairman Mao, who is still generally revered, features on banknotes and has statues in every town park and on most taxi dashboards.

By 6pm we were on board our Yangtze cruise ship, having dinner. Ros had warned us the food can be......odd..and we have accidentally chosen chicken legs once, but generally there are enough different dishes that we can find something edible. I now know why Ros is virtually vegetarian. One of our featured dishes was a plate of duck, sliced through the body, including the bones and head. The Chinese like to have crunchy food, and eat the bones, heads, feet, eyes etc with relish. Chicken breast meat is dirt cheap while the queue for freshly cooked pigs' trotters goes round the block. Scorpions, baby birds, squid, toads all get threaded on bamboo sticks and cooked in the street for sale. Deep fried, breadcrumbed pigs' feet on sticks seem very popular and I saw a tray of pigs' snouts. At lunch today dessert was turtle shell jelly, green tea and taro mousse. The jelly didn't taste of much and I'd have eaten more if I hadn't been told what it was.