Cruising the Yangzi

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We took a flight down to Chongqing where we picked up the boat that would journey downriver to Yichang. The boat itself was a little worrying looking as was pretty old and as you walked along the corridors the floors would buckle underneath you, this happened to everyone it wasn't just due to my weight! None of this was helped by the fact that throughout the journey the only CD that seemed to play was the titanic soundtrack. Despite all this the boat trip was amazing. We were sharing a room/ rabbit hutch with an old Chinese couple who were very sweet but I think slightly afraid of us. Out of the 300 or so passengers only 10 of us were foreigners and 6 of us were Scots. I couldn't believe I was on some boat in central China with 5 other Scottish people one of whom lives about 5 minutes from my house -very random! It was a really good group of people and most of our time on the boat was spent getting drunk. The journey took about 2 and 1/2 days but we made some very strange stops along the way. I felt like I didn't really sleep at all on the boat due to the fact that each time we stopped was at about 5am or in the middle of the night and spent most of the other time eating noodles or being pissed. Our first stop (at 5 AM) was the Abode of Ghosts which was basically a really shit haunted house. Apparently there was some other good stuff to see at this stop but we obviously missed that and ended up in a crap kinda fair ground thing -not good! The next stop was the Stone Treasure Stockade which is a twelve storey high wooden pagoda. After that it was back on the boat until the next day. At this point the weather was really bad and we were getting worried that when we eventually got to the gorges we wouldn't be able to see them because of all the fog. But when we were woken the next morning -again at 5 it was a really clear day. The first gorge we went through was Qutang gorge which was incredible and scenery was very dramatic and colourful. Between Qutang and Wu gorge we stopped for about 6 hours and went onto smaller boats for a tour of the little three gorges. This was definitely my favourite part of the journey and the most impressive scenery. We spotted a few monkeys along the gorge and also a few women singing and some guy playing something that sounded a bit like the bagpipes. One thing that was quite sad about the trip was that on all the gorges, every few miles there would be big white maker points indicating where the water would rise to once the dam had been completed. It was sad in that there were a lot of homes and farm land below these markers and the ever efficient Chinese government hasn't quite decided what to do about these people yet.
The final gorge was Xiling Gorge and then the next stop (at 10pm) was the Three Gorge Dam. I wasn't that interested in seeing the dam -just a massive block of concrete to me but felt I should go along and Johan was interested from an engineering point of view!
We got to have our photos taken in front of the dam(again not sure who would want that) and then we were taken to an aquarium where a lot of the fish were dead they made a big feature about Yangzi river dolphins, who will in fact be made extinct due to the dam! After that it got a little bit weirder and we were treated to some horse show battle re-enactment thing, saw another temple with lots of skulls in it and finally were made to pay to sit in freezing cold tents in the middle of the night for a couple of hours until the boat came to pick us up. Apart from the slightly bizarre and tacky man made tourist attractions the trip was amazing. The Three gorges were incredible and one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, again my photos don’t do it justice. WE got into Yichang at about 4 am and then it was a mad rush to get the bus to Wuhan, a flight to Jinan and a bus to Binzhou as I had school the next day.

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