Day 46 - An adlibed bus to nowhere, and a delayed bus to Chongqing ...

Today started like any other adlibing day: we woke up, packed up, and left our bags in storage while headed (we thought) to the Panda Breeding Centre. Climbing onto the No. 1 bus as told, clambering our way through hundreds of other passengers - we literally had to push our way through to insure we didn't get caught in the door - we waited patiently until the last stop to make our bus transfer to No. 532.This is where we discovered our mistake: there was no bus 532 because we had taken the bus 45 minutes South, instead of heading North.

Eventually we boarded the No. 1 bus again and headed right back to where we began, arriving 2 hours after we started. This all meant we ran out of time to make it to the Centre, the only upside was getting a view of the sprawling concrete city and getting a photo we wanted of a huge cruise ship building we saw a couple of days ago (but didn't know how to get back to).
Feeling a little despondent, we headed straight for vege dumplings to cheer ourselves up. Sometimes travelling feels like just going through the motions, doing what you're 'meant' to be doing, however, we know by now that the adlibing way doesn't always mean getting our way.

Fueled up we embarked on another bus (thankfully the right one in the right direction) to the long-distance bus station for our bus to Chongqing. Chongqing is one big city nestled between the Yangzi and Jialing Rivers, that was made into a 'special municiplity' in 1997, separating it from Sichuan Province. While we had hoped to catch a 12.30pm bus, when we got there we realised the next bus was not until 5pm, meaning we had a five hour wait ahead of us ...
To fill the time we spent the next few hours at an internet cafe and went on a snack hunt, where we found some more delicious local bread stands that are scattered all over the city.

Finally on the bus, we enjoyed the trip through the countryside to Chongqing and looked forward to arriving in the "City with an ordinance against horns". We arrived late at night and found ourselves sleeping in a somewhat questionable hotel with rooms "by the o'clock" and lovely ladies strolling the stairways. Adam played the ignorant tourist in relation to paying a deposit, as we weren't certain we'd be getting it back!

Adlibing the buses.