After a wonderful but all too brief couple of days in Chengdu, I caught a train to Chonqing. I departed from Chengdu's shiny new train station, Chengdu East, which was a stark contrast to the somewhat run-down station I had seen in Beijing. The train too was fairly swanky, and a fast train that runs up to 200km per hour, meaning you can get to Chonqing in just 2 hours. I was exhausted, and slept for a little on the train, but when I awoke about an hour in I tried to force my eyes to stay open and witness my first real view of rural China, with the ramshackle houses and terraced farms. The extremely hilly, lush landscape was really pretty.
Arriving into Chonqing was also a much more pleasant experience than Xi'an had been. It was busy, but tolerably so (have I just been in China too long?), and it felt more ordered and clean. I also wasn't immediately hassled by beggars, and this time, my transfer was waiting for me. We drove to the docks on the Yangtze river in about 20 minutes, and my guide helped me to check in to my luxury 5* cruise ship (which had been upgraded when the one I booked was cancelled!). As I suspected, my new roommate would be Julie, a lovely Canadian girl I had met in Chengdu. They'd told me they would try and pair me with another single female traveller, so when we'd realised the previous day that we were on the same ship, it seemed likely we'd be paired together, and we were. (Although I later discovered that they'd tried to pair Julie with an elderly Chinese lady, but she had specifically requested that we share a room instead). 