Chongqing and Yangtze Cruise

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Wednesday 7
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I had a flight booked for 5:20PM to Chongqiang, and didn’t have much to do in the day. I chatted to 3 Chinese girls and a guy staying in the hostel. They were very friendly. At one point they went and got a whole heap of food and invited me to join them.
The airport is 30km out of town. Flight was an hour late. I arrived in Chongqing 7:30, then had an ‘interesting’ ride into town. Firstly the roads looked positively first world. Big wide motorways, long tunnels, everything clean. But the taxi driver was terrible, blowing his horn, cutting people off etc. He wasn’t sure of the way to the hostel, fortunately I had the number, and he rang them to get directions. In the end I spotted the hostel first. There was only about one other foreigner there and about 20 Chinese, maybe 8 of whom were staff (i.e. surfing the internet and occasionally helping a customer!)
I inquired about Yangtze cruises. The Chinese boats (no English commentary) can be very cheap (e.g 500 RMB) for 3 days. The International boats (mixture of Chinese and waiguoren, with some English commentary and tours) are much dearer (2200RMB upwards- although this is still pretty cheap for a 3 day cruise!). A ‘President’ boat was leaving but not till the night after next. I had heard good reports about them and that was my first choice, but I didn’t want to stick around an extra day. Then they reported that there was an ‘International’ boat leaving the next night for only 2100 RMB, and the photos looked good, so I booked a spot on that.

Thursday 8 Sept
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I wasn’t due to board my boat till 6PM, so did a bit of sightseeing around Chongqing. Chongqing is a massive city. Apparently the entire metropolis contains over 30 million people. There are skyscrapers everywhere, (apparently the majority of the population lives in tall buildings – around 20 storeys or more) and I’ve heard they extend out 45km from the city centre. First I had to extract some money from an ATM. Immediately I found it very hard to navigate around. The area around the hostel was full of very steep streets, and walls. Sometimes I couldn’t get to a place because there was a wall in the way. Eventually I got my cash, and made it down to a scenic spot where a major river (whose name I’ve forgotten) joins the Yangtze – ChaoTianMen. Then I tried to get to a station of the skytrain – that was a real ordeal – had to ask about 50 people, and walk for a good 40 minutes, in the rain. Finally found it, and caught the train out to Chongqing Zoo – to see a real live panda naturally. Luckily a couple of them were still awake. Damn funny looking things. (Zoo was damn cheap – about $3 – compare that with Sydney Zoo – around $35!)
I then caught the skytrain and the subway back the vicinity of the hostel. I was hoping the station was only a few blocks from the hostel, but it turned out to be a nightmare walk of about an hour. Down little alleyways, and then a promising looking road, which was then blocked by a wall. A detour, then another promising looking road, finally I got down to the river side, but it was still a long long walk. I was glad to get back.
A rep from the boat company picked me up at 6 and took me to the boat. He mentioned something I didn’t really want to hear “there are only TWO other foreigners on the boat”!
The boat looked very nice, far better than I expected. I was shown to my twin cabin – my room-mate hadn’t arrived yet.

Later I met the 2 other wai guo ren – a Dutch couple, Rool and Paola. All the others were Chinese. 106 of them.
Later I also met my room-mate – more about him later!

We set sail around 10PM, and had nice views of Chongqing city as we left it.

First night, it was a lovely feeling gently cruising down the might Yangtze river, being able to look outside the cabin window and seeing the various sights float past.

Friday 9 Sep
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By 7 next morning we had stopped along with about 6 other similar ships. It was raining and extremely grey. (But it looked much greyer than Sydney does in the rain!)
We filed into the dining room for the buffet breakfast, and us foreigners realised it was better to stand back and let the Chinese have a go first – they certainly are ‘enthusiastic’ about getting their food. They were also pretty noisy – also nothing unusual about that.
After brekky we went ashore for a tour of the Fengdu ‘Ghost city’ – this involved walking through the lower deck of all the other ships closer to shore than us – about 4 of them! It was raining and pretty dismal. Our guide (lovely girl named Shirley) had to cater for about 30 Chinese as well as us 3 English speaking foreigners. She gave the Chinese a lot more commentary, but still did her best to look after us. I didn’t care that much, as the temples and all the associated traditions seemed pretty tacky and childish to me.
The rest of the day we cruised gently down the river, as the rain gradually let up – although the greyness didn’t.
Most of the Chinese passengers seemed to stay in their rooms playing cards and making noise (and probably smoking as well). On the top deck was a lovely bar, with nice chairs. They sold about 4 beers during the entire 3 night and 2 day voyage. All to me! The staff there consisted of a couple of lovely young Chinese ladies (Candy, Iris and Vicki). They told me they sometimes have 40 foreigners on the boat, and then they do a pretty good (even roaring) trade. But when it is just Chinese they sell almost nothing!
In the evening at 8:30 a dance was scheduled in the bar. I thought this would be very good fun. A chance for all the passengers to break the ice and let their hair down. I went up there about 8:40, and found it deserted. No-one there at all. Apparently Chinese simply don’t like dancing on the Yangtze. Prefer playing cards, watching TV, and smoking. :-)
By that evening my room-mate had started to get a bit annoying. I don’t want to be too critical, but he had a mobile phone which was constantly making beeping noises (everytime someone in China sent an email apparently), and he had to have the TV going all the time. Even when he was having a shower. Even when he wasn’t in the room. Even when I was trying to have a nap! He spoke no English, but was interested in learning about me, so we had some long conversations in Chinese. At one point he asked me “Why don’t you turn the TV on” or something like that. He seemed genuinely surprised that someone could travel half way around the world, go onto a mighty river on a boat, and not want to watch TV in a language they don’t understand!
Sometimes I could communicate but other times I just couldn’t understand him and he would get a bit flustered :-)
Finally late on the 2nd evening I told him forcefully I wanted to him to turn the damn beeping mobile phone off! After than I only heard it beep about 5 times an hour, rather than 40 times.

Sat 10 Sep
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Some people got up early to go on an optional tour, but I slept in till 7:30.
This was supposed to be the day when we got to see some really great gorge scenery. Around 11 we entered the first gorge (Qutang?) Indeed very lovely. The weather had improved a bit – no sign of rain, but it was still as grey as a John Howard speech. After lunch we went on a tour in the “Lesser 3 Gorges’, up a tributary of the Yangtze – starting from the port city of Wushan. This was a great tour and the scenery was excellent – I found it better than the scenery in the Yangtze river. Our guide, Susan, didn’t have to look after any Chinese, so could tell us lots of info. The town where she used to live is now 70 metres under water, due the construction of the famous Three Gorges Dam. The government built the entire city of Wushan (about 100,000 people), in about 10 years. Her family were compensated for the loss of their old house. They put in a bit more money themselves (at a compensated rate) and got a much better house in the new city. 95% of the farmers who lost their homes were resettled in other provinces such as Guangdong, and the other 5% mostly gave up farming and settled in Wushan. Altogether 1.3 million people were resettled. Susan’s view was that the old people were generally (understandably) unhappy about it, but the young people were happy – they generally ended up in much better houses in better cities.
Back on board the main boat, we were supposed to set sail for the Second Gorge at 4PM, but there was a delay and we didn’t get going until 6PM, and only just got to the gorge before sunset. Apparently some passengers were a bit upset about this.
The boat’s main guide (who was bilingual) also told us that there had been a change in our schedule. We were supposed to sail through the locks of the Three Gorges Dam the next morning, but for some reason not comprehensible to us that wasn’t possible, and we would finish the cruise 3 hours early, without being taken through the locks, but be taken on a bus tour of the dam. No big deal as it turned out.
That evening the staff put on a pretty good concert with dancing and singing. About 20 Chinese (being generous there) plus us 3 foreigners turned up for this. There was probably something just as good on TV I guess. After the show I stuck around and talked to the lovely ladies in their deserted bar, asking about their lives on the boat etc. They told me they work for about 8 months of the year, going back and forth, down then up the river, without even a break (or very rarely a break). Sounds pretty awful, but on the other hand these ones don’t have to work very hard most of the time! There were apparently 110 staff on the boat (equal to the number of passengers).

Sun 11 Sep
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We stopped and docked early in the morning and had to have our breakfast, pack up and be ready for disembarkation by 8AM. This was made difficult for me by my damn room mate, who started a shower at 6:20AM and was STILL going at 7AM. Finally at 7:05 I went off for breakfast with an unwashed face and feeling a bit annoyed. When I finished breakfast and got back to the cabin I found my room-mate gone (apparently with some travel notes of mine - more about that later!) After packing, when I got to the reception to disembark, I had a bit of an upset stomach and had to go to a nearby convenience. While I was in there I could hear shouting, getting louder and louder. However I still wasn’t 100% sure whether it was angry shouting or good natured banter! When I came back to the reception it was soon pretty obvious it was the former. About 20 Chinese were just about assaulting the 3 reception staff, shouting furiously at them just a foot from their faces. One particular girl was copping the full force of this blast. She just stood their looking miserable. It must have gone on for 15 minutes. I don’t know what they were so angry about – it might have been that we missed seeing one gorge, or that we were being taken off the ship early, but it did seem a bit over the top.
The dutch guy, Rool, pointed out that someone should have come to collect us 20 minutes ago, and he was a bit worried they had forgotten about us, so we asked a staff member about this, and he took us off the ship and hooked us up with our dam guide, Charles. (So we were left wondering what would have happened if the Rool hadn’t piped up!)
We boarded a bus and set off towards the 3 Gorges dam. At first Charles gave about 20 minutes of commentary in Chinese, until I mentioned to him that we had actually paid for English commentary, he apologised and said he would soon be with us. After that he made a good effort to look after us hapless foreigners. The bus took us on a longish trek, across a suspension bridge. We passed through X-ray security, then reboarded the bus, and were taken up to a good vantage point to see the mighty dam. We also saw the locks system which is pretty impressive – reputedly the largest in the world.
The dam has 18GW of hydro electric capacity (will be expanded to about 26GW later). It is about 2.3Km across and about 175 metres high.
The displays and lookouts were very good, I enjoyed the tour. Very interesting.

So that was the end of our cruise – the bus took us into Yichang city bus station, from where I caught a taxi to the train station, and got a ‘hard seat’ seat to Jishou down in Hunan province. From there I wanted to get to a picturesque river side town called FengHuang.

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Photos

Chongqing high rise
Typical high rise buildings in Chongqing.

The famous Three Gorges Dam
Length is about 2.3 kilometres. Height about 180 metres. Installed hydro-electric capacity 18Gigawatts. Water depth varies between about 150 metres and 175 metres.