Slow Boat in China

We were picked up at our hostel at 6:30am and taken to somewhere on the outskirts of Chengdu where we met Dave & Ruth and the four of us were put on a bus full of Chinese businessmen. The roads were quiet for the first half hour as we whizzed along the new highway but this soon petered out and pretty soon it was a road that would rival some of the Bolivian roads that we bumped along as being the worst in the world. At one point the road was blocked by a solitary police car as he waved all the oncoming traffic onto a slip road and into a large holding area. We didn't have a clue what was going on but after about half an hours wait we were allowed back onto the highway to continue our crawl to Chongquing.

The guidebooks describe Chongquing as a poor man's Hong Kong and yes it shares the former British colony's partiality for ugly tower blocks but lacks the colossal glass palaces that give Hong Kong one of the most famous skylines in the world. The grey skies, smog and dirty streets made us glad that we only had a few hours to spend here before we boarded our cruise ship for our three day tour on the Yangzi river. The guy from the tour company had warned us that the on board restaurant was rubbish and told us to buy as much food before boarding. After getting some lunch we picked up some extra provisions before heading to the dock and onto the vehicular cable car that took us down to our floating home.

The boat held over 400 hundred passengers and had three classes of accommodation, we had plumped for the 2nd Class 4 berth dorm which had about enough room to swing a very small cat. One of the main reasons for the four of us deciding to do the trip together was that we had heard quite a few horror stories of western travellers sharing rooms with chain-smoking Chinese men who invited all their friends into the dorm to play cards for the complete trip. So it was lucky for us that we found Dave and Ruth, two chain smoking Londoners (to be honest they never smoked in the room) to share our small cabin with. It wasn't long before the engines were running and we were waving goodbye to the tacky Blackpoolesque skyline of Chongquing's riverfront.


Dave and Ruth are on a years honeymoon which takes them on similar route as ours but in the opposite direction as they head to Japan and then Australia after China. We first met them on the Terracotta warriors trip and bumped into them quite a few times over the following week or two. We also had the bonding experience of exorcising our misfortune at staying at the worst hostel in China, the Yamen in Pingyao.

We had picked up a small slab of beer before boarding and were horrified to discover that once opened it tasted as appealing as the Yangzi which is one of the most polluted rivers in the world. As we were settling into our cabin we had a procession of people pass our door to have a peek at the strange westerners, some even stood for a few minutes and stared, we soon got used to this and just waved and shouted “Nee- Hao” to any of our curious new friends. The rest of the night we drank our horrible beer, slurped our ever so slightly better pot noodles and listened to some music as we had an early rise the next morning.


We were woken at 5:30am for the first stop on our tour at Fengdu, after fighting our way through the crowds and two other boats we eventually made it to land. It was still pitch black when we were handed to a local guide who didn't speak any English, so we decided to head off on and make our own way to the Abode of Ghosts. As daylight broke it was like the pictures of Berlin just after the allied invasion or maybe a bit like Priesthill or Darnley in Glasgow in the early 90's just before the old schemes were demolished to make way for the new toy town ghettos. All the houses on the lower part of Fengdu where being demolished due to the Three Gorges Dam which is due for completion in 2009, people were being relocated further up the hill into new apartment blocks.

Some Facts about the Three Gorges Dam:

1. It has become the World’s Largest Dam (185m High & 2Km wide)
2. When it backs up it will flood an area the size of Singapore
3. Over 2 million people will have their homes washed away & 8000 important
archeologically sites will also disappear
4. Costs over $75 Billion
5. Will produce the equivalent electricity as 18 Nuclear Power Plants

On reaching the abode of the Ghosts (also know as the place of devils) you have to cross a suspension bridge which is strung across a river a few hundred feet below, up until this point the four of us had been slowly wandering up trying to let all the frantic Chinese tourists get ahead of us. Suddenly I noticed Joanne and Dave scuttling across the centre of the bridge as if some invisible spectre was pulling them over. Ruth soon explained, that like Joanne, Dave suffers from vertigo and probably just wanted to be over the other side as soon as possible.

On the other side there were a few temples with some shoddy looking statues and lots of stalls selling cheap rubbish, but we continued on up. We then entered the Hall of Demons which was a cheap Madame Tussauds Dungeon with paper-mâché monsters torturing other paper-mâché creations while silly hooting noises and screams were being played over the sound system. It was like something out of a episode of Scooby-Doo, the one set in a disused fairground where they catch the villain and pull off his mask at the end. There was also a massive concrete/stone head at the side and on the top of the hill but we didn't really find out who and why it was there. Most of the place looked as though was created in the last five years but they had tried and failed miserably to make it look a lot older.



We soon realised that there wasn't much else to see so we headed back down to the boat through all the destruction work. At one point we watched a worker standing precariously on a wall swinging a large jack hammer as he knocked out the bricks from under his feet. This drew a ripple of murmurs and laughs from a crowd of women selling food who thought it was very amusing to see the strange westerner taking photos of the workmen. We all wished we had stayed on the boat and caught a few extra hours sleep but back on the boat we decided to go for a nap until our next stop.


The next stop was much better but that isn't really saying much, we pulled up at the Stone Treasure Stockade a 56m high wooden temple built on a huge rock. Before you get to the 12 storey pagoda you have to run the gauntlet of women selling snacks & drinks. We slowly climbed the 12 floors as everyone on the boat seemed to do it at the same time, I'm not sure how safe it was having 400+ people climbing an ancient wooden structure hanging precariously on the side of a rock but we made it to the top without incident. Once at the top there was no view to speak of as the sky was so low and overcast that we could hardly see the boat below us. On the way back to the boat we haggled quite unsuccessfully to get some beers for 2 Yuan a bottle, but had to make to do at 3 Yuan but there were a millions times better than the dishwater we had the night before. We also picked up some small potatoes on a stick to tide us over for a while.


We then had a lazy afternoon watching a movie called “Raise the Red Lantern” which was filmed in Pingyao and was set in the early part of the 20th Century. The film was about 4 concubines/wives (we're not really sure if there was a difference in this movie) each vying for the time of their husband. It was quite funny watching a movie in a place we had all been in the last two weeks and they had used Pingyao's old houses to great effect.

We stopped at nine o'clock where you could visit a temple but it was quite expensive and we decided to try and get some dinner at one of the local shops. We had a look round some of the market stalls before heading back to a place that Dave and I noticed that was showing live Premiership football. All the food was laid out on a table on the outside of the restaurant and you just picked what you wanted and they would throw it into the wok. The food was ok but we weren't sure about the sausage, we thought it looked a bit like chorizo but as for the type of meat that was in it, it could have been Beef, Pork, Rabbit, Donkey, Dog or something worse.


The game was Villa vs. Liverpool and wasn't much to write home about, Dave is a big Charlton fan and the first day we met he was quite proud as his team was sitting 2nd in the league at the time. Joanne soon put him in his place and asked what league they were in, since that first day they have slowly slipped down the table and even worse now their manager has been linked the poisioned chalice that is the managers job at Rangers. When we asked for the bill we were quite surprised to see it and thought they had made a mistake but I think they must have charged us for their full years subscription to the Premiership, so we paid up and wowed in the future to ask how much before tucking into the food. We were all still feeling a bit peckish as we headed back to the boat and decided to get some small spicy potatoes, this time the food was brilliant and the women selling them wasn't wearing a mask.

Next morning was another early rise as we transferred onto a smaller boat for a trip up the Lesser Three Gorges. These gorges are much more narrower and loom high above us as the smaller boat edged up through the mist, we spent most of the trip standing on the deck waving at people on the other boats. We even managed to see some monkeys jumping about the rocks and trees on the side of the gorge, I'm not sure exactly what type of monkeys they are but I'm certain some of my anthropoid loving friends will soon let me know. As to how the rising water will affect the monkeys we don't really know but other endangered species along the Yangzi like the Chinese Sturgeon and Yangzi river dolphin are feared to be lost forever once the river turns into a 480Km long septic tank with the untreated waste from the 40 towns and 400 factories along it's banks backs up against the dam wall.


We stopped for lunch on a steep set of stairs where crowds of local woman sold loads of interesting looking food. The first thing that stood out was the deep fried birds on a stick, complete with head, beaks and feet. None of us were brave enough to try them but we seen many Chinese getting stuck into them like we would eat an ice cream, we stuck to the safer potato on a stick option.




At the next stop we transferred on to an even smaller boat, more like a glorified rowing boat with a motor attached. We then passed some people who were standing on platforms at the side of the gorge singing into a loud haler, but nobody could tell us if they were protesting or just singing for the good of their health. After about 40 minutes sailing up some amazing scenery it was back on the middle size boat returning to main Yangzi river.


Out of the 400 people on the boat there were only around 20 westerners and an elderly Australian woman had organised a meal for all 20 of us in the ships restaurant. We were a bit unsure about the food after the reps warnings back at Chongquing but to our surprise we had a really nice meal and got speaking to some people from Canada and Switzerland. After dinner there was the chance to leave the boat for 5 hours and visit the Three Gorges Dam or stay onboard while the boat descends through the 5 locks of the Gezhou Dam.

After our experiences in Igazu in Brazil we were in no rush to go to another dam and at night time I wasn't certain as to how much of the concrete wall you would see. There have been lots of fears about the dam project and not just about it's environmental & social aspects but about the quality of the build. In 1999 over 100 cracks were discovered running the full height of the up-stream face of the dam, but the raising of the water level has continued. Chinese engineers have said that such problems are common in large dams and that the cracks have been repaired, but the former Premier Zhu Rhongji has been quoted as saying the concrete has the strength of `mashed tofu'. The Chinese also have some unfortunate history of disasters with dams, in 1975 two dams in the Henan province collapsed killing 230,000 people. This information was kept secret up until very recently and is just one of many stories we have heard about China's poor human rights record. Click this link to read an article that appeared in the Herald on the 9th Novemeber.


So we remained on board and watched from the deck as we went into the first lock and slowly descended, after about half hour the four of us head back to our room and watched the new Charlie & The Chocolate Factory movie starring Johnny Depp. Up at 5:30am for our 6 o'clock bus to Wuhan which was supposed to be 3 and half hours but it actually took us more than 6 to get to our the train station in another massive city that didn't have much to hold us there. Dave & Joanne managed to get us tickets on the next train to Shanghai which was due to leave in two hours. So after a quick bit of lunch it was onto the train for a 21 hour overnight journey, which didn't turn out too bad because of the late nights and early starts we were all tired and managed to get a few hours sleep.