Cruising the Yangtze River

Despite all the magnificent stories we had heard about Yunnan county in South-West China, we decided to head to River Yangtze. We paid a handsome sum to the hostel for arranging a luxurious cruise in first class and I started to dream about a nice massage on the boat. I was all ready to be treated like a queen.

The morning started with a 5-hour bus-journey with smoking, spitting, farting and burping chinese men. During the break I went to pee in a hole in the ground. In our destination in Chongquing we waited for our turn at the ticket office and the woman in front of us exercised for a while, did some interesting stretching movements and then started to fart very loudly. After we got our tickets we came out in the street and a bunch of rats were running around in the street. This was the moment I started to realise that this cruise will probably not be what we thought it would be...

Ok, so no male servants feeding me grapes. Our cabin was a cold storage room underneath the Chinese karaoke-bar (wow these ladies can sing high!) and it was raining pretty much the whole time. But the biggest problem was the language barrier since nobody in the staff spoke English, unlike what was promised when the trip was booked. So we missed announcements such as "we are now passing the 3rd gorge, might be a good idea to come outside and take a look" and "this stop is NOT the famous temple, please don't leave the boat".

Luckily the scenery during our 4 day cruise was amazing, luckily we found other westerners to share a beer and a laugh about the whole ordeal, luckily we had packed long underwear with us!