Jingzhou Road Hotel

... loose spinach/pakchoi/other leafy salady things and dumplings! So many dumplings! Way too many dumplings! Seriously! ...so many dumplings! With Victor as translator, we had a lovely conversation with Victor's family (taught them "Slainte" - of course). Two days later before we left, Victor's brother brought us to the local hot pot restaurant. We all tried a hot pot meal which is like fondue in that you cook it for yourself - everyone gets ...

... un Mac do pendant un long moment ! Vraiment si on doit décrire en un mot la province du Hubei ce serait «gris » ! Il faisait froid aujourd'hui et le ciel était menaçant ! Samvit a conduit la première partie du trajet, les routes étaient belles et en bon état comparé à ce que l'on a rencontré précédemment ! Le moteur n'a pas surchauffé et la moto était rapide et puissante aujourd'hui. On a presque fait du 80 à l'heure très ...

... side, China is needs power and this a very clean way of producing it. Also moving goods by ship uses far less fuel than road or rail transport does. The argument will probably go on forever but compared to the 10,000MW and 12,000MW Dam's at Guri and Itipu in Venezuela and Brazil respectively, the area flooded here is very small thus the evaporation losses are very small and the resultant change in the local climate will be very limited. I guess ...

Arrived in Wuhan after a very bumpy and smoky bus journey, got chatting to the locals on the bus, well it was more like sign language with a lot of nodding and smiling, and eventually found our hostel at around 12:30am, thanks to a really nice taxi driver. Checked in and just crashed for the night before our flight to Shanghai

... once the three gprges damn is up and running so ther e was a massive amount of building going on. apartment blocks and sky scrapers and a billion roads and briodges. every way you turned there was the equivalent of spaghetti junction half built! v grey and depressing though. we'd been warned that the boat would be pretty dire but it wa s fine. pretty big. 600 passengers or so. clean cabin for me and c with bathroom.

So we got the bus from Yichang to Wuhan, and it only took 4 hours, but yet again I failed to get any sleep, just dosed a little, 'rested my eyes'. We were dropped off in the middle of the city at 5 in the morning. Nothing was open, it was dark and completely dead. There were a few taxi drivers waiting at the bus stop so we tried to tell one where we wanted to go. This was quite a challenge as our hostel was on a road ...

... golf buggies along the dam itself we were told we could only take 4 things onto it including money, phone, keys and camera. We were unable to find a reason for this with no one giving a straight answer but we did come up with a few of our own conspiracy theories and wondered if the allowing of the camera was a critical flaw in their plans. Unfortunately by this time I was told it was too late to get the last bus to Yichang ...

... level, by which time the scenery will be nowt special. At the moment, it reminded us a lot of scotland, but with a huge river at the bottom. Next was the little 3 gorges, which run along a tributary of the yangzi. They are prettier than their big brothers, but thats because the gorges are much narrower, so you get a better scense of 'overhanging' sheer cliffs. My list of typical chinese traits needs some minor adjustment here. I neglected to add to both lists the very common ...

... construction works taking place where the booking office should have been and in it's place a plethora of touts all plying for tourist's business. We were dragged hither and thither to tour agents offices and always with an entourage of at least five touts. Although it took a number of hours, a lot of walking, sweating (temperatures were well into the 30s) and haggling we eventually struck a deal. We had booked a Three Gorges cruise with a final ...

... to Beijing. Timetables with thousands of times and prices list destinations all ov** China but they are, of course, written in Chinese so all we see is a mess of squiggles with the occasional numb**. The only thing to do is to look at the 2 charact**s for Beijing in the guide book and then try to match these with what we see on the timetables... then we have to find wh**e the ticket office is, which count** sells the ticket we want and then try work out what the ticket lady is ...