Chongqing

With a metropolitan area of 32 million people, Chongqing is probably the largest city you've never heard of. It sits on the scenic peninsula at the confluence of the Jialing and Yangtze rivers. The city is somewhat gritty, and certainly crowded, but we've been enjoying our time here. At this point we're pretty exhausted from our whirlwind tour of China so we've mostly been taking it easy here, walking around the downtown.

Tonight we are boarding a 24 hour train to Xining, capital of Qinghai province, basically in the physical dead center of China, although psychologically Qinghai is considered to be very deep into the wild west of the country. From there we will travel to south to Nepal, arriving in Kathmandu approximately on the 18th. In this part of the country the government requires foreigners to have a official guide, so we've found another couple to split costs with us on our guided tour. Our email access may or may not be restricted in this part of the country, so you may not hear from us until we reach Nepal.

Chengdu, Chongqing & Xining