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Published: July 15th 2012
There are more (& mostly different), photos on:
http://s251.photobucket.com/albums/gg311/draftwrite/China-3%!G(MISSING)orges-2012/ …..with Bruce & Kerry visiting from Melbourne I need to be a little more organised in my travel plans than I might ordinarily be. I have accommodation names & dates printed out, (English & Chinese of course), plus carefully planned train connections. I shouldn't be so difficult in summer to book tickets. Should it? Maybe their phones don't work here so I hope they arrived in Chengdu & manage to use the translation I typed for them to buy tickets to meet me in Chongqing. Now, off to Yangzhou station to start my trip to that huge, burgeoning city in central China, a special economic area which has its own administrative zone with a total population, including surrounding towns & rural areas, of over 32 million.....
…..leave Yangzhou at 6.15pm with a lower hard sleeper berth, bunks stacked 3 high in tightly packed compartments of 6 bunks. Opposite is a mother with her 20 month old son who is just learning to speak, & practising hard. In the middle bunk is a student of around 20, hoping to be an English teacher but I still
Legoland, Xiang Yang
Another housing estate, Chinese style, from the train windowhave to repeat most of my questions, & answers, in Chinese.....
…..what a good father. Taking the baby out of the carriage for a walk. He holds the baby in one arm, cigarette in the other, the unfortunate child wreathed in smoke. It's sometimes difficult to limit myself to just staring in disgust.....
…..Bruce calls from a hotel in Chengdu. Attempts to get some medicine for Kerry have been hindered by a complete absence of English speakers & some words & terms are completely impervious to mime. I use my trusty electronic dictionary & write it down in Chinese. I'll get in in Chongqing.....
….I know we're getting closer as we pass through innumerable tunnels closer to mountainous central China. The little boy & his mum disembark at An Kang. Cute kid but tiring.....
…..after 30 hours the train arrives in Chongqing an hour late, midnight. There's still a huge queue for taxis, fending off (black, or unofficial), taxi touts & those irritating Chinese queue jumpers who are able to shape-shift into the space in front of you that's actually smaller than any human being. If teleportation is that easy why not just go straight to
your destination?.....
…..Monday, a rainy day in Chongqing. It's humid enough without the downpour but I think it's cleaned up the usually appalling Chongqing air.....
…..a message from my friend Dr. Wei in Yangzhou. Bed rest. No wonder! Her baby's due in September & she looked ready to deliver 2 months ago.....
…..after sloshing round the Ciqikou area near the Perfect Time hostel all day, no lunch & still no contact from Bruce & Kerry I decide to go for some dinner. A restaurant proprietor with blackening front teeth makes theatre performance out of showing the waiguoren, (foreigner), his menu. I play along & order a pot of ji rou, (chicken meat) with vegetables. What's this? It might be chicken, but that purple, rubbery stuff is not meat. I tell him so, in Chinese, “Is Chicken”, he says. “But not chicken MEAT”. They finally get my drift. “Ji chang”, (Chicken intestines). I pay for the beer & go to find another eatery. It takes guts to make me do that.....
…..try again. I finally get a good, appetising chicken dish, on a hot plate. Is this really the smallest?..... It's OK, I'm hungry. Then a call
from the Perfect Time. They've arrived. I tell the bemused staff I'll be back in 5 minutes with 2 Australian friends. In the end, with an additional bowl of rice each & 2 or 3 beers, it's enough for three.....
…..Kerry has a few health issues & apologises about being super-vigilant about hygeine, hands, utensils, teeth. I tell her not to worry. I agree with everything she's doing. It's just that, with no diagnosable condition I'm just called fussy, sometimes with obsessive-compulsive tendencies.....
…..we get the bus details from the helpful staff at the hostel & are ready for an early start to go to the famous rock carvings at Dazu, about 2 hours out of the city. Bruce & Kerry have adjacent seats, my seat is numbered next to a Li Xiao Ju, who is in real estate, (thank you again, my dictionary). She doesn't speak much English at all but wants to learn & I know enough Chinese to get by when we're stuck so we give each other an ear-bashing all the way to Dazu, pausing occasionally to prevent a sleeping Bruce from falling into the aisle.....
…..she'd like an English name. Let me
see.....Li Xiao Ju.....how about swapping the family name & last half of the given name.....Ju Li....Julie. “Yes, I very like”. She helps us to find a taxi in Dazu to the Baoding area.....
…..the carvings cover, apparently, a huge area & the ones at Baoding are reputed to be the best so we concentrate on those. Like things tend to be in China they are on a scale & in numbers & variety that are hard to absorb in one trip.....
…..back in Chongqing we decide on a dry run through this bewildering city to Chaotianmen pier, where we'll be catching our boat tomorrow for a 3 day trip through the 3 Gorges. We find a small, plain but rather overpriced restaurant near the pier & I introduce my Australian guests to “Kao Yu”, barbecued fish, one of my favourite dishes. Chongqing is the starting point for the trip down the Chang Jiang, or Yangzi, river, the world's 3
rd longest. The 650km stretch from Chongqing to Sandouping forms a very long but narrow lake behind the world's largest dam.....
…..the Perfect Time hostel is OK. Just-a-so-so, as they say here when they're trying to speak English. You
Kerry and Bruce, Chongqing
Each crossing starts with a single step have to ask for towels, the windows don't fit well, there are a few mosquitoes, the bar & pool room close around 11pm, even in summer. We go across the great metropolis again, leave our bags at the pier & visit the 3 Gorges museum & the People's Great Hall. Some impressive exhibits in the museum, itself an impressive building. Also some monumental hyperbole in some of the English text, particularly the bit about the million migrants willingly leaving their homes to make way for the Dam, “with deep affection & longing for the future”, the “patriotism of the folks of the 3 Gorges area...blazing new trail with pioneering spirit”, etc.....
…..after that another bewildering taxi ride, this time to Haochi Jie, (Good Food street), in the centre, if indeed there is a centre in Chongqing. It's not the quaint, old fashioned restaurant street we expect but a lot of modern mall-style food halls. Just-a-so-so. Cold beer though.....
…..Bruce & Kerry are coping really well with China though they're still reluctant to step out in front of cars to cross the road, (no one will stop or drive round you if you don't, crossing or no).....
…..boarding
Dazu, Chongqing
Rock Carvings, the boat around 8pm it turns out to be a pretty good deal, especially as Bruce & Kerry don't speak any Chinese. A lot of the staff speak English &, even if not very well, are keen to try. Compared to the ¥1,600 we paid for a similar trip in 2009, 4 bunk cabins & buying our own food on board, this one at ¥2,200 each, 3 meals provided & spacious 2 bed cabins. For an extra ¥200, (about Au$35), you can have unlimited drinks with meals for the 3 day trip. LUXURY! My room mate is a young Chinese guy from Xiamen in Fujian who doesn't speak any English but we get by pretty well. He has 2 mates in a neighbouring cabin so I don't see much of him....
…..Fengdu, the Ghost city, temples dedicated to the afterlife & photos taken of the demon statues which I lost in 2009 during the changing of a memory card. Long, hot, sticky walk up, yes, quite a number of steps, as usual. A lot of work has been done on the temple complex & we even get an English speaking guide.....
…..we have table places assigned in the
restaurant so Bruce is able to practice his Spanish with the Mexican family also at the table. Actually they all speak good English & 2 of them live in Vancouver. Rudolfo, (Polo), the younger is also a keen musician & singer. There's a talent show tonight. One of the girls on the staff knows someone who might lend us a guitar. The scene is inexorably set for a night of music that might not end with the Talent Show. Bruce, Kerry & I have already introduced ourselves as, the “Three Gorgeous”, though that's probably stretching credibility for 2 of us.....
…..the show is good, some of the staff have impressive costumes, dance moves or both. There is a German contingent on board, with their own interpreters. One we name “Blitzkrieg”, mainly on account of his, let's say vigorous, guitar style. We find a spot on a rear deck around 10pm as the boat is about to enter the huge 5 lock system that may take 4 hours or more to reach the lower side of the dam. The locks are 280m long, capable of taking 2 of the larger cruise boats or barges at a time. The amount of
excavation & concrete is just staggering. They are building a boat elevator for smaller boats which will lower them in just 40 minutes. “Smaller boats” in this case refers to craft under 3,000 tonnes!.....
…..even with the water level in the dam being low in summer, (witness the bare area on the banks in the photos up to the normal level of the dam), it's well over 100 metres to go down. It becomes an almost surreal experience, another ship behind us turns on a spotlight & the revellers are picked out as shadows on a white bulkhead, the eerie & disturbing squealing of the 800 tonne gates closing after we enter the locks are an aural backdrop to an eclectic selection of music, passionate Spanish ballads, Aussie & UK songs &, thanks to Bruce of course, almost certainly the first rendition of, “I like onions” to be performed in the lock system of the world's largest construction of its kind. It has to be the best Dam Jam in the world.....
…..of course it's not enough to show Australian guests only the best of what China has to offer. Yichang is a city of about 6 million
on the lower side of the 3 Gorges Dam but we have had problems with transport connections there before. At the station I ask for 3 tickets to Zhangjiajie in Hunan province. It's a 5 hour trip & the train I have earmarked leaves Yichang around 1.30pm. “No seats”. Ok, we don't really need a sleeper bunk in the afternoon but, hard sleeper? “No”. Soft sleeper? “No”. OK, what time CAN we leave? “Train at midnight”. OK, let's get a hard sleeper. We go through the previous conversation again & find that the only tickets for the midnight to 5am trip are not even allocated seats.....
…..the buses don't even go to Zhangjiajie so it's back to the station for the standing room only tickets. A late lunch, a beer, some shopping & a tedious wait for the train at midnight.....
…..the Chinese have developed a new philosophical concept, or at least refined an old one. Not the train TO Hell, or even FROM Hell, but the idea of the train itself being Hell. It's crowded when we get on but 2 people, assuming the foreigners wouldn't get on a train without seats, vacate a couple for Bruce
& Kerry. They squeeze in, careful not to step on the woman sleeping on the floor under the small table between the facing rows of seats. I stand. At each station a few disembark but many more appear to get on. Dante's inferno on wheels. By the time an old man makes his way through with a huge pile of boxes & 2 or 3 kids, Bruce is at least prevented from falling into the aisle by the sheer number of people. They are friendly enough & I do my best to read my tablet, which also sparks some interest. A couple of guards make a half hearted effort to remove the woman from under the seat, (she appears to be without a ticket), but it's impossible in the crush so she misses her chance to be cast out of Hell. We also stay & wonder why the depictions of Hell at Fengdu do not include a tableau of a night train in China at holiday time. Probably best to stick to less disturbing images, like disembowelment & impalation.....
…..5am, Zhangjiajie. When we arrive at the Home Inn the taxi driver tells me it's ¥50, about Au$8. I tell
him we'll just get our bags into the foyer first. I then ask the receptionist if ¥20 wouldn't be a more appropriate fare, (I know it is!). She agrees & the driver reluctantly agrees to accept the latter amount. It's exchanges like this that lead Bruce & Kerry to think that my Chinese is adequate. However I assure them it's not. It's easy to impress someone if they don't know ANY of the language. I was certainly impressed with Bruce's Spanish.....
…..the conflicting images of people sitting in shops, at street stalls or sleeping in the trays of trikes waiting for customers, or spread out all over station waiting rooms, compared to the kilometres of concrete pylons awaiting the high speed train line to be installed, the masses of 30 & more storey apartment blocks mushrooming in every city, the chaotic traffic has led them to see China as a country of frenetic activity, carried out at a leisurely pace. After that train journey we opt for a leisurely pace for today, what day is it?... I think it's Sunday, July 1
st. More of that in the next instalment.....
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Kerry Finlay
non-member comment
You're exhausting me!
Hi Dave I'm not sure whether your blog inspires me or terrifies me at the prospect of travel in China! It's certainly convinced me NOT to travel to China without a Chinese speaking (or Chinglish speaking!) guide. Maybe one day....