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
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