Chongqing & Yangtze River

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Chongqing & Yangtze river cruise Dec 07

Huge isn't the word to describe Chongqing, I hadn't heard of it before coming to China but 30 million people live there. The city centre split by two big rivers doesn't feel that big, the rivers both have cable car rides across them for views of the city and the pollution above it. After we had been on that we found ourselves 10 pin bowling which says alot about the place and it's sights. It is a massive industrial city and travellers just use it as a gateway to the Yangtze River. We booked our river cruise at the harbour front which was hard work with the usual number of touts sniffing around. The options were 1st, 2nd & 3rd class cabins, this really meant 2,4 or 6 beds per cabin. We opted for first class as we thought two days with potentially some chain smoking, karaoke singing chinese would be hard work. It was called 1st class but it was along way from the QE2. We were early to check in for a change and had two hours to kill before we departed. We had spotted a cheap DVD player in the supermarket and decided to go and get it, the weather wasn't great so it looked like quite a few hours would be spent in our cabin. They sell fake DVD's even in the supermarket, for a pound you can own every Tom Cruise film ever made, although I'm not sure if that's a good thing ! We headed off stocked up with DVD's, food and plenty of that well known wine 'Great wall'. We left around 11pm and arrived at our first sight at 10am which was a 'ghost town' there were a couple of other stops that day but Casino Royale and Ocean's 11 were much more interesting ! On the second day the scenery was much better as we saw the first of the three gorges, it was unbelieveable to see to see just how high the river will rise on the completion of the three gorges dam. We saw many homes and farms below that level so they will all have to leave their homes, many peoples homes are already underwater!

We swapped to a smaller boat for a 2 hour cruise to the lesser three gorges this was definitely the best part of the trip it was very pretty with the narrow river and the enormous cliffs either side. The big downside to the trip was the awful weather, at some points the river is very wide and due to fog we couldn't see the gorges , that and the fact that we were woken early every morning by terrible music blasting into our cabin by some stupid speakers that you could not turn off unless prepared to smash them up.
We reached the dam on the third day, annoyingly it was really foggy and you couldn't see from one side to the other, but it was huge. We had changed from our boat to a tour bus to take us to the dam, there was myself, Gill and 40 other chinese tourists on the bus. The tour guide seemed to be doing a good job of "on my left is... and on my right you will see........etc" unfortunately for us it was all in Mandarin. At one point she must have asked everyone to be back at a certain time (I'm sure you can guess the next bit). We arrived back at the bus half an hour late with 40 angry chinese people shouting and pointing at us. Some were stood outside the bus pointing furiously at thier watches to make their point even clearer, stupid foreigners ! We tried to explain that we didn't know but it was no use, it was annoying because the guide spoke a bit of English and could have told us but didn't bother. The 2 hour journey back was a touch ackward with people occassionally turning around to scowl at us just in case we forgot they were annoyed. It was quite funny but a bit intimidating too.

The cruise had been a bit of a let down really, if the weather was better I'm sure the trip would have been too. On the plus side though it was good to see Casino Royale again !

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Comments

[Lianne]

30 million?!
I can't believe there are 30 million people living in that city! The entire population of Canada is only 34 million!!!

[michelle]

God Dolan how did you keep your hair clean with all that pollution i bet you were freaking out!! michelle xx