I think there is a river here...

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We left the lovely clear skies of Tibet and flew to Chongqing for the start of our cruise down the Yangtze River. Chongqing's smog is the thickest I've ever seen. We were told by several people that this smog was definitely not pollution (jury is still out on that one) but the extreme humidity from the valley hitting the mountains. Whatever it was it was crazy hot and there was almost no visibility. You could be standing on the river bank and barely see the middle of the river. Lucky for us a lovely guide picked us up at the airport to transfer us to the boat and we ended up just cruising the city with her, the driver, and (this is key) the air conditioned van.

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We saw the pandas in the zoo, the old allied World War II headquarters, and a very informative local museum. We had a very lovely day despite the weather. Every other person we talked to though Chongqing was a hellhole so apparently we lucked out with our guide.

I will say that the Chongqing city (which covers a huge area) has 33 million people. I think the true city area has about 6 or 7 million people. Welcome to Chinese cities. Just crazy!

We boarded the boat and were very impressed by the fancy digs. I was picturing a "budget cruise" that was a bit of a floating hostel but this boat was nice and we upgraded so we had our own balcony. Not too shabby. There were about 125 people on the boat and over half of these were Tawianese so that left the number of folks we could actually communicate with into dwindling numbers. Megan and I knew that whether we met cool people would determine how much fun we had on the trip so we crossed our fingers and went to the opening reception. We spotted some interesting folks but left overall dissapointed and a bit worried about our prospects. Luckily, we were mistaken.....