Yangtse Cruise Day 1: Ghost Cities
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2007
1
112
272
Trip End
Oct 08, 2008
Fengdu,
China
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Five minutes later we were down at the docks, without our tour guide and without any sort of ticket. Things were starting off well. But never fear, we were brought aboard one of the more dilapidated vessels and given permission to ignore the woman persistently asking for a ticket. There we waited to be assigned to cabins. We had chosen third class and got assigned to a cabin on the first floor. It was small and had six beds but it wasn't as bad as they had made it out to be
the high water mark
. It even had a window and TV. To make things more confusing, someone apparently didn't believe we were supposed to be in third class because he showed me a second class room and indicated I should take it. When we returned with our stuff the room was locked and they sent us back downstairs again. Oh well.Having found a home we wandered off to explore the ship and meet up with our other friends. This naturally took us to the top deck where we discovered a new way to be charged for things that should not be charged for. Listen carefully folks: on a river cruise where the primary objective is to look at the gorges as you pass by, access to the top deck is not included in your ticket price. You have to pay an extra $8 per person to go up there. This made me really angry. It wouldn't be the last time. In any case, we all paid up and sat down with a couple beers. We were provided with tea and nuts (although this would be the only time).
The boat chugged off after 11 and we watched the city pass by (the amount of neon is amazing) before heading to bed. Because the boat was not nearly full, an offer had been extended to move up to second class for another $12. We decided to stay, which meant we ended up with an entire third class cabin for just the two of us. Not bad, eh? Practically, this meant we each had three blankets and three pillows (it was a little cold). The beds were hard but we were softly lulled to sleep.
We got up rather early the next morning and met a grumpy Steve from 2nd class. He was kept up by his roommates (hawking, spitting, and snoring kind of thing). He was to move down to third class with us for the next two nights
A true ghost city
. We moored at Ghost City for the first of our "tour activities." Ghost City is a collection of ghost-oriented temples, but I found the true ghost city across the river much more interesting. The entire city had been abandoned and the final rise of the water will swamp it. The mist made the collection of highrises look very ghostly that morning. We hoped that we would get the ticket we had already paid for (for some reason they didn't trust the foreigner with any sort of proof they had paid for anything), and sure enough our trusty tour guide popped up to hand them out. Ignoring our group, we wandered into the place alone and ignorant. Our group had now grown to include Andy, Steve, and two German girls, Christin and Marilen. Together we formed the clueless group, being the only people on board who weren't Chinese.
This of course meant we missed the actual complex entirely and wandered off in a different direction. The entire place is pretty tacky - kind of like Disneyland gone wrong. There are souvenir stalls everywhere and poorly maintained displays with various scary-looking creatures. We wandered up through a doorway like a monster's mouth and found ourselves at a dead-end. Turning back, we stumbled on to a little-known highlight of the Ghost City
cool cliff
. A doorway led into the interior of a large wall surrounding the area we were in. We found a series of rooms that attempted to explain the Chinese version of hell. We crossed over a river of blood and into a chamber with ghosties and other not-scary things. English captions in each room gave us the idea of what we were looking at. Only the idea, however, because the English was comically twisted beyond all recognition at times. A couple of the rooms had motion-activated lights and movement. It was fun just because of the absurdity of it all. After a while we became amazed at the sheer number of rooms, all of which seemed to be underground. Where were we? My favorite room was the punishment room, were souls were meted out appropriate punishment. One display had a woman being sawed in half (lengthwise) by two demon creatures. Erin later mentioned that they were all women. After the underworld, we passed through a series of halls with various legends. There was the one were the evil dragon was "arrested and brought to justice," among various others. Suddenly, we came upon a ticket counter and a set of small cars on a track. It was Y5 (60 cents) to ride. Who could resist? We all got in. The woman impatiently waited for us all to sit down and then pulled a switch. I blinked, and we were back at the beginning again. It was perhaps a circular track with a radius of ten meters. We found this strangely hilarious. Money well spent.
More rooms, and when we were beginning to wonder if we were going to miss our boat (we were down there for almost an hour and a half) we emerged through a door that told us our soul was...something in Chinese and found ourselves in the giftshop.
the gate to the gorge
After looking at the huge head they were building on the hill (turns out its a new amusement park), we looked at a couple temples before making our way back to our trusty vessel. It was quite a while before it actually got underway again.
Turned out that bringing our food was a good idea, since breakfast options started at around $11 a person (dinner was worse). That meant our companions subsisted mostly on noodles-in-a-bowl and beer. We fed them sandwiches on a regular basis. We sat up on the deck and drank beer and waited for the temple stop that was supposed to happen at seven that evening. We had also paid for this with our tour. We gave up around 10:30. The girls stayed up and ended up touring the temple at midnight when it finally made it. Just a little behind schedule.
~Travis
