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.

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