Golden Lion Hotel Yichang

... seeing people in parks practising their tai chi or whatever, but this was in a different league! There were separate groups of people all the way along, engaged in ballroom dancing, line dancing, aerobics and wafty-armed Chinese dancing... it was a sight to behold, and the good spirits emanating from the area put me in great form for my walk back to the station.

The entertainment continued in the waiting ...

Alison: We stayed in our first hotel of the trip in Yichang and though it was a pretty basic room, we loved it! Such a nice change from the hostels we had become used to. The best part was the bathroom which we were pleased to see had a western toilet. The previous accomodation only had the traditional Chinese toilet aka a fancy hole in the floor that you have to crouch over....we like to call them crouchers :-) These toilets ...

... flick. They got to the line up extra early (9:15 am) and were filmed for the nightly news as one of the many waiting to see the latest Harry Potter movie. All had been going to plan until they realized that the movie was only going to be in Chinese. Either their Chinese was not good enough or Harry was not as exciting in a language you didn't fully understand - at any rate, the kids got their money back after the first 30 minutes.

Yichang
Yichang, Hubei, China maaske

... clientele on board, we had fried eggs and bacon available, which was too good an opportunity to miss, even though we had seen on the tv that a huge batch of eggs from the Chinese mainland, had been destroyed in Hong Kong as seriously over contaminated with melamine. Eggs? It seems that the farmers had been feeding the melamine (presumably a job lot left over from the dairy farmers, who weren't using it any more) to the chickens. Ok, so maybe not too many eggs then ...

... around 30 minutes for a bus, and then boarded the bus for a 4 hour bus ride to Wanzhou where we boarded the boat around 7 pm, stopping at a scenic spot along the way to see a waterfall. The boat was certainly nothing like any cruise ship I've seen around the world, if I didn't get up close I wouldn't have thought it was even a passenger boat. Not surprisingly, I was the only westerner on the boat of 200-some odd people. Seeing that the 4-bed ...

... in Beijing and speaks Mandarin (pretty damned fluently from what we could guess!) and Melissa also speaks Mandarin as they both studied it at school. Their experience of the world and language skills at such young ages put us to shame. David loves to talk and, to give him his due, he's very good at it! He was a great laugh and he had an endless supply of genuinely interesting stories on all aspects of life and travel and they all gave us some great tips on our ...

... too inviting, so we cleared people off it and set about a new dance routine. It started off with us doing Tai Chi moves to the techno music, but when we forgot what the next move's were, we just blended it into a drunken version of the Macarena! Now, if we were in the UK, they would have put a straight jacket on us and whisked us away to a padded cell, but not here. Instead, the barman came over to us, dropped half a bottle of JD on ...

... a bath. Plus also they didn't have the banana 'ship' ice cream I wanted for dessert as they didn't have any bananas! Great. I then walked through a large square with people dancing samba and ballroom dancing all at 10pm at night. I carried on walking and tried to find an internet place as indicated in my Lonely Planet and eventually found it after going around in circles for over half-an-hour, on the first floor of a building and of course there were no signs to it English.

... In the morning we woke up early to get onto a smaller boat for a trip up a smaller river to see some smaller gorges. They were really pretty but partially obscured by hazy air. We arrived at a smaller town along the river bank where some local 'trackers' met us. Now this was embarassing! These guy rowed us up the river and then when the water got to shallow they got out of the boat, wrapped a rope around their shoulders and ...

... 8 hr train journey tomorrow........ 28/8 We are up bright and early to board the train. The waiting room is chocca and we sit on our backpacks. Then the train is announced and everyone dashes for the platform. It is a mad rush and we somehow end up at the back of the queue, maybe its becuase were english and too polite! Getting onto the train is a joke, everyone is crammed in with most people standing. It is soooo hot and there is no ...