May Day holiday weekend at the Three Gorges

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We arrived in Wuhan on Friday morning after catching the early morning train from Guangshui Town - that railway station is so dirty! To board the train you cross two railway lines (this train line is the main line to Beijing) dragging your cases behind you over the tracks - there are no over rail stairs. After the usual push and shove to get onto the train we had no seats to sit on as we are too polite to throw people aside in the rush to board and always get on last! There were no seat allocations so we were quite happy to stand knowing that we would get a seat after the first stop an hour later. However the conductress wasn't happy that we were standing and starting ordering the Chinese people from their seats to give us a seat. It was really embarrassing as we hate to be treated differently from the locals. We tried to refuse to use the seats but she got really upset with us so Renee and I sat down to please her and Jerry and Mel remained standing up.
After the first stop we all got a seat and were entertained by the same conductress cleaning the carriage. Instead of requesting that everybody put their rubbish into a garbage bag she made everybody throw it onto the floor from where she swept it into a big pile, donned a pair of rubber gloves and then proceeded to pick it all up by hand and put it into a garbage bag! That's China for you! After that the train conductor started selling socks (they all have sidelines!) He made one of the passengers hold one end of the sock whilst he pulled the other end to prove how strong they were. After that he spent a happy ten minutes trying to sell us a spinning top for 20 Yuan which was way too expensive. After showing him our residency permits to prove we were 'locals' he dropped the price to 2 Yuan! Anyway it was a lot of fun and helped pass the time.
Once in Wuhan we went to the Holiday Inn - their beds are so soft after our Guangshui rocks - and paid for our tickets for the Three Gorges trip which we had booked through a travel agent at the hotel. After that we went to the bank and changed some of our Yuan to $US dollars. It was very easy as we had the correct paperwork - the tax certificates were worth their 15 Yuan price. Next time we'll get some Aussie dollars but don't plan on changing any more cash until after our holiday in the middle of the year.
We then went to Metro (the western supermarket) and restocked our pesto sauce, raspberry jam and peanut paste supply. It was very hot in Wuhan with incredibly high humidity. I would hate to live there. It is considered one of the hottest cities in China and as it is still only spring I dread to imagine what mid summer will be like there. The city is very badly polluted and I always get sore eyes after spending time there. That evening we enjoyed the air conditioning in the hotel and brie and blue vein cheese on french sticks for dinner. We did wander down to the DVD shops near the hotel for a few more DVDs later in the evening - it was still very hot at 9.30 pm.
At midday next day -- after a big buffet breakfast - we were taken to the bus station for our trip to Yichang. Part way there the bus radiator overheated and we had an unscheduled stop. We were travelling as a group of 3 buses so they all stopped as well. We were able to meet our fellow passengers then. Of the 112 people on the cruise there were 6 non Chinese - us and 2 older Americans teaching in Wuhan though later on board we met a couple from Slovenia who had a been running a business in Yichang for 3 years. Eventually the bus arrived in Yichang which was a clean prosperous city - it had no doubt made a lot of money from it's close proximity to the Three Gorges dam site. The buses pulled up outside a KTV (karaoke and banquet hall) lounge where we were 'herded' in for our evening meal. We shared a table with a fellow passenger and his family - he was editor in chief of a women’s magazine in Beijing and spoke some English so he was able to organise some vegetarian food for us. Jerry as usual tried everything! After a pretty unexciting meal Mel and I wandered across the road to watch the boats cruising down the Yangtze River. There were a lot of them - we had picked one of the busiest weekends of the season for our trip.
After dinner we were back on the bus for a 2 minute drive along the river bank, which was strung with coloured lights and looked very pretty. We had arrived at the pier, and would have enjoyed the walk along the bank to the pier but the Chinese don't walk when they can be driven. We filled up with ice-cream (the ice-cream here has been a great discovery -- delicious and virtually free!) whilst our tour guide organised everybody! We ended up walking back along the bank, down a long set of stairs to the edge of the water and then half way across the very wide river (boat hopping) until we reached the pier where our boat was moored. Thankfully we had already been given our cabin numbers because once on board we were all shown to the nightclub where they started what turned out to be a long safety lecture in Chinese. We got up and left - there was no point in staying - and found our cabins. They were very comfortable, bigger then we expected and had picture windows overlooking the water.
Our lecture was still to come though. We were given it in our cabin by J - A - C- K - Y. He was a young Chinese tour guide who spoke good English but insisted on using a megaphone every time he spoke to the 8 westerners and constantly spelt his words out - now we are approaching the peak 'P-E-A-K' which looks over the river 'R-I-V-E-R.' It was quite funny but did get a little annoying by the end of the tour. Anyway by this stage it was late, after 10pm when the boat left. Everybody was on the deck as we cruised into a bypass channel on the river ready to go into a long lock system which would take us through a smaller dam upriver from the Three Gorges dam which was 35 klms west of Yichang. Going through the lock took a long time and there must have been about 15 boats of all types in it before they closed the gates and raised the water level.
We passed through the lock system beside the Three Gorges dam at 3am in the morning - they woke everybody up with an announcement over the speaker system! That particular lock system was very long and comprised of five different locks and took a few hours to pass through! Not that we were up on deck watching! The Three Gorges dam when completed in 2009 will be the largest dam in the world - the dam wall will be 2 klms wide and 185 metres high and the water will back up through the gorge area for 670 klms. At present they are building a hydroelectric plant on the dam which will provide 20% of China's power. One and half million people living along the edge of the river have had to be relocated already and the water level will eventually rise by more than 100 metres. The water has still to rise at least another 40 metres which will make most of the Gorge area very unimpressive. I only hope that they build it much better then they seem to build other things here. There have already been cracks in the dam wall and if it ever breaks will wipe out millions of people. It is also expected to be the largest septic tank in the world as the Chinese do not have a very good environmental record!
We were woken next morning by music at 6.30! The wake up call the second morning was at 6am but I had managed to find the switch to turn the sound off in our cabin before then thankfully. At least the music was relatively gentle and not our usual school military march wakeup! After a very Chinese breakfast of noodles, hot milk, sweet bread, dumplings and vegetables we arrived at Badong where we were transferred to another boat for a trip up the Shennong Stream which is a tributary of the Yangtze River. It was a very enjoyable few hours as the scenery was spectacular. The banks were lined with small villages and the farmers were harvesting their wheat crops by hand. All their original houses were now under water so the villages were full of new cement and white tile houses. The water in the stream had originally been only 1 metre deep and ran over rapids. Now it was 30 metres deep and due to rise higher. All the way along the river were big markers on the side of the gorge marking where the water levels were to rise to. There were two markers - 145 metres and 175 metres.
Eventually the water in the stream became shallow as we went further up into the narrow gorges lining the bank and we were transferred into the small flat bottomed wooden boats to be rowed further upstream. There are 6 men in a rowing crew - 3 at the front and 2 behind plus a captain who directs. The men rowed us for an hour and a half and they were mostly older men who were local farmers earning some extra money. They earn 200 Yuan per trip which is divided by six for very hard physical work.
Once the boat had reached water that was too shallow to row in two men used punts to guide the boat and the others walk, two on either side, along the edge of the water pulling the boats along on a 6o foot rope tied around their bodies. Once they would have been naked though of course now they are all clothed though many wore very baggy underpants and not much else. They wear rope sandals to protect their feet from the rocks. The sandals are handmade, take about 5 hours to make and last only a month.
These boats and small ferries are the only way to reach the settlements along the waters edge. Trackers, as the men rowing and pulling are called, used to pull all boats that passed through the Gorges hundreds of years ago when the water was very shallow and full of very strong rapids. The trackers actually had to pull the boats - loaded with cypress - upwards and against the current in the Shennong Stream. Along the main gorge walls you can still see many trackers 'footpaths' where they walls were cut away to make a walking trail for the men as they pulled the boats along. Where it was not possible to cut footpaths into the walls of the gorges the trackers had plank footpaths built onto and out from the sides of the gorge. On the way back in the small boats our guide sang some local songs of the region and the Chinese passengers joined in some of them. We responded with our version of 'Home amongst the gum trees'. We thoroughly enjoyed the trip through the smaller gorges - the scenery was beautiful and it was very peaceful (we had left j-a-c-k-y behind!) We also enjoyed seeing a hanging coffin high up on the walls of the gorge. These coffins were placed in crevices hundreds of years ago.
Back on board the big boat we had lunch - much later than scheduled - and settled down to an afternoon of commentary from j-a-c-k-y as we cruised through the main gorge area. They were worth seeing and must have been spectacular before the waters rose. We passed one very large town which had been submerged and rebuilt since on higher ground but was virtually empty as the locals decided that if they had to move they would take their resettlement money and move to a larger city away from the Yangtze. We also passed under some massive bridges crossing the river - all coloured blue with lots of suspension cables.
By now it was late afternoon and we were well past the time we were supposed to be visiting White King Town which 2000 years ago was the founding place of the Ba Kingdom. Since then many famous poets have lived there to gain inspiration from it's beauty. We cruised straight past it into Fengjie city and joined the queue of boats tying up for the night. From our boat we could see this enormous flight of stairs leading up the bank and I was already dreading having to climb them. However it was not to be as we were eventually transferred from our boat onto another boat and cruised back down the river to White King Town. From here we were eventually 'allowed' ashore - it was around 8 pm by this stage and there were literally hundreds of people fighting for space.
We rebelled, along with a couple of Chinese people on the tour with us, and refused to wait to join the march up the hill, serenaded as we went with the megaphone. We went off on our own with warnings to be back in an hour to reboard to sail back up the river to our original boat for dinner. Naturally we were back in time but the rest of the group weren't! We enjoyed seeing the museum display which showed some of life along the river many years ago and particularly the coffins full of bones. The coffins were so tiny that the skeleton had to be broken up to fit into them. We were all made to go from one 'holding' area to another to get back onto the boat but eventually we ended up back on our boat at 10pm in the evening. It had been a long day! Dinner was served at 10pm and it was to be followed by a party. Jerry and I gave the party a miss but Mel and Renee were made of tougher (younger) stuff and stayed to be entertained with a fashion parade and a game of musical chairs amongst other delights..
During the night we went back down the river again but did not go through the big lock system at the Three Gorge dam. Instead we docked at Sandouping close to the dam. After our early morning wake up call and breakfast we boarded our bus for a quick trip past the dam - it is large! - and headed off back to Wuhan again. We had a lot of fun and am very glad we made the effort to do the cruise. Our bus dropped us off on a street corner in Wuhan five blocks from where they promised to drop us off (we had asked and they had agreed to drop us at the Ramada Hotel) which meant we had no toilets and no plush comfortable surroundings to wait for our train departure time a couple of hours later. We ended up waiting in the train station forecourt which was nowhere as comfortable and made us targets for all the beggars and food sellers.
Next day Jerry and I started work again though the girls, as they work in a junior (as apposed to our senior) school had the remainder of the week off. Only another six weeks of teaching before the end of term and our 2 months holiday. Mel goes back to Australia in one month and Renee follows a couple of weeks later. We will really miss their company - hopefully their school will find another couple of Aussie teachers as much fun as they are before September. We went for another long walk through the fields again last weekend and feel that we are really starting to get to know the countryside around our town very well now. Tonight we are going to a 'ball' at the school in the canteen. The teachers have invited all the nurses from the No 1 hospital to be guests. Hospitals, like schools are rated here - No 1 being the best. Tomorrow evening we've been invited to have dinner with all the Grade 1 teachers and on Sunday have been invited to a wedding. The best part of my week has been finishing my last lesson plan as it required that I sang 'My Heart Will Go on' twice a lesson! The students sang as well but were very quick to get upset if they couldn't hear me singing along. I have sung it 52 times now and the students have requested a song by the Carpenters next! I've tried playing more modern music to them and they're just not interested!

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