An upgrade to first class please !! Not that our 2nd class, shared with 2 chinese men who whispered 'lao wai'as soon as we walked in, cabin was anywhere near as bad as the 'hammock' situation on the Amazon, but....for a bargain 150 yuan each (list price before leaving port 500 yuan)it seemed worth it! :)
Oh, Gail here by the way. We left port at around 8pm, we werent missing much. Chongqing isnt what you could describe as a 'pretty' place :( The scenery is 'industrial' until the next day when it gets more interesting, with smaller town and terraced fields running up the mountain sides.
Our first full day onboard we didnt do much. The only options were shore excursions to guess what .....? Yip, more temples....so we didnt bother. Morning of day 2 brought the first of the 3 gorges. Impressive, but the water level has already been raised by around 100 feet, so it must have looked better before. The plan is to raise the water level to about 175 meters from original 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 trait of 'pushing in, and queue jumping'. It seems any queue is fair game, nothing at all warrants patience or tollerance. Especially if there is a loa wai in the queue. Obviously not being familiar at first with the social norms means we're fair game to persistant, chronic pushing in :) And yes we mean 'pushing', not just walking past. This is full-on elbows in the rib cage, palms on the back...PUSHING!! The most exteme case of this was when we were transfering from a large river boat to a small 'outboard motor' boat on the little gorges trip. Picture the scene if you can....
500 chinese, and 10 lao wai standing on a small raft pontoon, barriered off from the small boats by strung out chains.Within 5 mins the scene had turned to utter chaos. The chinese, unaccustomed to being 'prevented' from pushing in started to push each other over the chains, or just volutarily jumped over them and started running for the boats...giggling with excitement. The employees on the pontoon tried in vain to stem the flow, but after a few futile minutes just opened the chains, and a 'free for all' ensued.
Ive never seem a group of 40 to 50 year old men giggling with excitement, pushing each other around, hitting each other in 'fun' as they scramble towards a boat, which incidentally didnt leave any earlier as a result of all the pushing! Needles to say, the loa wai got on last! The whole situation remined me of a kindergarden dinner queue! Quaint !
Anyway, the little gorges were great, but it was bloody cold out there! we were grateful to return to our unheated room just to get our temps back up to minus 5 !! :) We headed off down river again and past the second of the 3 gorges, also impressive but...you get the picture. We didnt bother staying up for the 3rd gorge cos it was dark and cold! but rumour had it the least impressive of all 3 so I doubt we missed much. We got to the dam at around 11 pm. Its fairly well illuminated so we got a pretty good idea of how big it is. Having already seem the aswan dam and the hoover dam, its really just another dam to us, being as we are, utterly underwhelmed by 'structural engineering' :) There was the optional tour, obviously! but we didnt bother ! I could see it quite well enough from the boat without shelling out a further 170 yuan. Going through the locks was cool. The doors are truely INORMOUS!!!We got close enough to the sides as we passed through for us to drag our hands along the concrete walls and metal doors :)WE HAVE TOUCHED THE THREE GORGES DAM !!!!
Adam here now,well gail has covered the sightseeing side of things, so that just leaves me really to say we have eaten basically pot noodles for all our food for the last 4 days!!! Fantastic or what, rehydrated dehydrated food for 4 days yummy! The reason? well food on the boat was expensive , pot noodles (they are at least 3 times bigger than in the uk mind) were cheap and you get free hot water on the boats!! So now we are on dry land its good to eat actually cooked food!!
With regard to the pushing incident gail told you about,well we got on the back as they all fought to be at the front,however......when it came for our boat to leave it turned around and it became apparent that they had pushed and fought their way to the back of the boat and we were at the front!! How I laughed!!! How I wished I spoke chinese to tell them all what I was laughing at!! Oh I have also found that if they really dont understand english at all you can say rude words to their face as long as you keep smiling!! Funny thing languages ehh :D
The trip was pretty exhausting too, which sounds abit daft given that we were just sitting on a boat,but the chinese are soooo noisey ,around the clock too,I wonder do they ever sleep? I know we barely did for the 3 nights we were on the boat so now we are on dry land we have some sleep to catch up on, we really are crazy kids :D
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