China Trip: Yangtze River

Days 13-15: The Yangtze River

Our first "Yangtze day" and very little actual Yangtze. From Emei Shan we caught a large public bus for the transfer to Chongqing, where we were to meet our boat. The roughly six-hour bus ride only grew longer when, with a cracking blast and a cloud of smoke at the back, one of the tires blew out on the highway. Fortunately a mere half hour away (driving at about 20 mph) we stopped at a little tire shop and switched out the old for a new. By 4 pm we had arrived in Chongqing and soon made the trip over to the harbor to catch our boat. Chongqing was a beehive of construction activity; comparatively the projects in Beijing looked like a tiny restoration job. Our local guide Harry said that Chongqing was preparing for a conference of Asian mayors in October, but I suspect that the Chinese just love development. After a quick trip to a fabulous supermarket, we boarded boat 12 and set off along the Yangtze.

Our first real day on the boat was unremarkable and consisted chiefly of an excursion to see the "City of Ghosts" at Fengdu (the town itself turned out to be much the tourist attrac more of a ghost town thantion, as it will be underwater when the Yangtze next rises in 2006) and playing many hours of mah-jong on a travel set Carwyn bought in Xi'an. The Westerners playing mah-jong seemed to be an endless source of fascination for many of the Chinese sharing the lounge with us, and we never played without at least one observer - whether in admiration or, more likely, scorn, I don't know.

The next day was our day through the Three Gorges - more accurately, actually, the nine gorges. After sailing past the first (big) gorge at 5:15 am, we left our big boat at 7 to board a smaller craft that would take us through the Three Little Gorges. At the end of the Little Gorges we again switched over to yet a smaller boat to take us through the Mini Gorges. The minis I could have skipped, but the Little Gorges were stunning, as were their bigger siblings on the Yangtze. We saw the Second Gorge that afternoon and passed through the Third in the evening, just before docking at Yichang. Yichang is the location of the enormous dam the Chinese have been building on the Yangtze for approximately the last decade; the boat continued on through the locks, which I thought would have been great, but instead we disembarked and proceeded to our hotel by bus.