Just got off of the Yangtse river cruise aka the boat carying young village girls who've adeptly given themselves English names such as Kangaroo and Apple. First order of business was getting our bags stored. We went to the bag storage area but given my overall travel prudence, didn't quite trust the valet. I figured as soon as I left, someone would go rifling through our worldly travel posessions. So, I basically proceeded to insult the poor port lady and offer an incentive program that if our bags were returned as we needed, that I would give her an additional 100 yuan. I was basically waved off- and I was pretty sure that not only proceeded to insult her but also increase the odds that someone would actually go rifling through our stuff, now.
In anycase, we dropped the bags off and proceeded to have a bowl of noodles at the local noodle stand. This really was travelling at its finest. There was no wash station to think of and to clean bowls they basically just rinse them real quick. After our noodles we hailed and cab and had one of the CRAZIEST cab rides in the trips entirety. Chongqing is an insane metropolis. I believe its bigger than the whole of Shanghai and Beijing. And with all those billions of Chinese folks in one place- it was the perfect storm for road rage. Our cabby drove probably 80 mph through city streets and over a hundred on the highways. We were (apparently) in a big hurry to see the pandas.
Alas we arrived at the zoo. I got some nice shots off my 70-200mm f/2.8 canon lense (see above) and Kathleen oggled over the panda bears. Beautiful zoo, well maintained and had a real park-like setting. Very relaxing indeed. Toward the end, the Danish dude we befriended on the cruise came to meet up with us and we saw each other off. Incidently, have you ever met a Danish guy named Rico? Very cool dude tho.
The zoo was basically a 5-hr interlude prior to catching our flight to Xian.
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