Yangtze River Cruise and Other Assorted Wanderings

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Where to start this time?
We've been so busy over the past few days! We left our hotel in Yichang at 7 in the morning and took a tourist bus to visit the Three Gorges Dam. This mighty re-enforced concrete barrier curtails the world's third largest river, the Yangtze forming a massive reservoir causing a hundred metre difference in the water levels on each side of it. A massive lock system is in place to allow ships to pass through and the dam's purpose as a hydroelectric power station makes it the world's largest electricity generation system.

On the bus we shared with a Chinese tourgroup we we're treated to an hours worth of some daft bint hollering down a microphone in Chinese so loudly that we all wanted to kill her pretty quikly and according to Louis she wasnt even saying anything worthwhile anyway!

The point is that the dam was incredibly impressive, if somewhat ugly and the weather was stiflingly hot even in the early morning. I love living in a country where its perfectly acceptable to wander round tourist attractions fanning myself under an incredibly pretty parasol! =D

Following a group lunch of a variety of dishes picked out by Louis on a gargantuan lazy susan we took first a public bus, then a private coach to board our cruise ship. The ship was reasonably large and very much like the sort of old fashioned pleasure boats that turn up in the Mississippi or Florida Everglades. The food was really good and we had a great time flopping about on the top deck in the dark drinking unidentified oriental spirits admiring the starry sky and spectacular landscapes revealed by the ship's massive searchlight.

We spent the following day lazing about on the deck under our parasols or sunbathing and for the most part enjoying the complete lack of ogling Chinese cruisers who seemed to think we were as much a tourist attraction as the scenery. However when we passed into the first of the scenic three gorges, half the passengers flooded onto the deck gathering round to watch us, quite a few of them blatantly filming us! The staff went as far as to tell Lucy and Amy that they couldn't sit out in their bikinis as it might scare young boys!

During the afternoon we visited a small riverside town with a market where I was able to pick up some souvenirs, as well as a massive water melon which I had great fun lugging back to the ship. In the evening we went back out onto the deck and sat gossiping in the dark with our weird spirits and I finished off my day by hurling the remains of the water melon overboard into the manky Yangtze >=D

We left the ship at 7 this morning and spent 5 hours on a private coach getting to board our overnight train from Wuhan to Guilin. However, just as we pulled up outside the station Louis got a phone call from the local travel agent to say that they had been unable to book us beds on the sleeper train and that we'd be stuck in a hotel in Wuhan until tomorrow! Unsurprisingly this did not go down well. Both Gap Tours and the local travel agents agreed to make it up to us by booking us into a soft sleeper train during the day tomorrow and paying for both lunch and dinner while we stayed in Wuhan. Both meals we're lovely (although dinner was Sichuan style and just about blew our heads off!) but it all means that we have a day less in Gulin than we we're supposed to, which given that we already had a day less in Xi'an than we were supposed to due to trains not being booked is incredibly annoying!

We leave the hotel at 5.30am tomorrow morning (in about 5 hours) to board our 12 hour day train to Guilin which I'm really looking forward too. The town is surrounded by spectacular scenery and we should have the opportunity to ride bikes through the countryside, take cookery lessons and watch traditional cormorant fishing on the beautiful Li river, so watch this space, I reckon my next set of photos are going to be spectacular!

Cat xxx

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