Thursday 16th July 2009 Chongqing

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Thursday 16th July 2009 Chongqing
The ships PA woke everyone up at about 5.30 am, we had only gone to bed after 1 so didn’t have a great nights sleep. They were stopping for an excursion to some town or temple at 7 so decided to wake everyone up nice and early. We didn’t bother with the trip, they all cost extra and 10 Yuan to see another temple at 7am wasn’t the most appealing of early morning activities. We got up at about 8 though and went up on deck expecting to be sailing off soon to go through the first of the 3 gorges that are the main attraction of the trip. It was a long wait though because it was after 10 when we finally pulled off. We were soon into the first gorge the Qutong. Quite the immense set of cliffs, standing at shear rock faced angles or steep green slopes into the huge river from heights of up to 900m. The Yangzi River is the 3rd longest in the world and was for centuries the main transport route into China; it runs all the way from Tibet to Shanghai. It has recently been dammed by the largest dam in the world which creates as much hydro electric power as 27 nuclear power plants! This is causing the water levels to rise and reduce the impact of the gorges and is to many a huge environmental concern. The river isn’t treated too well by the locals either though, there is all sorts of rubbish floating down it, I must have seen enough flip flops and shoes to fill a shop, added to the plastic bottles, packaging and even basketballs and you have what looks like a floating dump in parts.

The one trip that we did was the next stop, it was called the little 3 gorges trip, so if you didn’t get your fix from the main 3 you had these bonus ones to really get you buzzed up on a river flowing through cliffs! We had to board a smaller boat and for the next 5 hours we sailed up and back down a tributary of the Yangzi. The scenery was beautiful and the river was a lot narrower so the gorges were closer and more imposing, but to appreciate them you had to try and block out the constant commentary that the tour guide was giving in Chinese over a microphone. She only stopped for about 30 minutes over the entire 5 hours, and it was so fecking loud, I was so tired though I actually did manage to fall asleep on the way back for a little while though. Soon after we were back on the mina boat we headed of to the 2nd of the Yangzi gorges, number 5 of the day, it was nice again, kind of like the previous 4 as was the next one too. We would have been well ready to get off the boat then but no we had another night in with our family in the cabin. The night wasn’t too bad actually though, we just sat on the lower bunk and watched a movie on the laptop and made cups of tea for ourselves. Pretty relaxing and the family had konked it by the time we were finished so it was all grand and quiet for a nights sleep.

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