Tag Yangzi river cruise

Yellow Crane Tower

Again we were awoken at 5:00am as we passed through the final of three gorges. This last gorge was vastly different than the previous two, and we were happy that we had decided to go topside. The cliff sides were covered in lush greenery like a scene from Jurassic Park, and we took out our binoculars to watch for monkeys. After an hour the sun began to rise, and we joined the Swiss in the dining hall for boiled eggs and waterlogged rice. We continued our previous discussion of religion in Switzerland, noting that the Swiss pay taxes to the Church via the government. I pondered how un neutral this was, but decided not to point this out. We talked about neutrality for a long time, and though I had always admired the Swiss for being internally focused, I found neutrality to be a double edged sword. It protected the people, but it also meant they turned their backs on the world when it sometimes needed it. A truly confusion conundrum. After a leisurely meal the Swiss got off the boat to see a monument, we stayed on board and played cribbage overlooking the hillsides. The stop was the final day trip before the end of the cruise, but we had heard roomers that the stop was largely bullshit, another tourist trap selling plastic Olympic goods. The Swiss returned and sat with us in the windy sunshine and laughed at what a joke the last sight had been. It was a fake dragon boat race that lasted less than two minutes, but they had been forced to march at top speeds up a large hillside to see the race from afar. After a few warm beers and more discussion with the Swiss, we packed up our room and got off the boat. It had been an interesting four days, but I don’t think I would ever recommend the ‘cruise’ to anyone. At least not anyone I liked.

We boarded a bus for Yicheng, a nearby city where we would be able to buy train or bus tickets to Wuhan, and then back to Shanghai. We found Yicheng a beautifully modern and clean city that resembled, in many ways, the US mid-west. Our bus passed through a housing district of large brick mansions facing the river, and we watched, mouths agape, as the luxury passed behind us. Apparently black gold had made this village prosperous, that coupled with a constant stream of disembarking tourists had elevated the city. We rumbled towards the bus stop where we bid farewell to the Germans and the Swiss, and boarded another, more crowded bus that smelled of vomit and was full of flies. This bus would take us 5 hours to Wuhan.

Arriving in Wuhan near 21:00 we began walking aimlessly down a large street near where our bus had abandoned us. Curiously, we spotted the German couple down the road and hurried to catch up with them. They had arrived an hour earlier and had checked into a hostel down the street. We followed them to the hostel, checked in and then set about devouring a round of beers with the Germans. We took a cab to look for western food, but ended up in a Chinese buffet hall when we realized it was too late for most restaurants to be open. Returning to the hostel after a tasty meal- our first in five days- we slept soundly and awoke refreshed at 10:00, the latest we had slept since leaving Shanghai.

Yellow Crane Hill

After a nice breakfast at the hostel we went to the Yellow Crane Pagoda where, for 50Rmb one can stroll along the gardens and climb the pagoda where Li Bai had been humbled by former masters and an amazing view of the river. We spent the afternoon talking about American politics and slowly walking through the shade of the bamboo. Resting often, we felt close to the Chinese of old who had had a lifestyle of learning and growing. After the pagoda, which is a beautiful spot in Wuhan I’d highly recommend, we returned to the hostel to spend the afternoon resting in the sunshine. Mike found an abandoned guitar and he strummed songs and sang all afternoon in a cove in the hostel. I read Empire of the Sun, a gift from a Shanghai friend I had recently received for my birthday, and we whiled away the hours sipping beers and relaxing. We ate a nice hostel meal that was the largest array of foods we had seen in ages, and dined until our bellies hurt. At 17:00 the Germans appeared and we decided to share a cab to the train station. Once we arrived the Germans bought another round of beers and we chugged them on the platform and shook hands and exchanged phone numbers and emails. Traveling in china always produced friends of necessity, but this trip had been very good to us, and we adored the Swiss and German couples we had met on the trip. We boarded the night train to Hangzhou, and were amazed at the modernity we were faced with. This was the cleanest and nicest train we had ever been on, and we stayed up playing cards and drinking cheap beer until the lights were turned off and we crawled up into our top bunks and slept.

-posted by Lauren.

River boat capitan

At 5:00am I was wide awake listening to an overweight and undereducated Chinese man yell at his wife in the hallway. They screamed as loudly as possible, yet no one asked them to be quiet. I wondered if this happened in America, if someone would ask them to take their fight somewhere more isolated, and decided that they would. Moments after their doors slammed shut, the sirens went off for our wake up call and everyone was moving and yelling in the halls at once. We ate cold rice porridge, boiled eggs with fecal matter caked to the shells and pickled beans with the Swiss couple before getting off the boat and into an overcrowded bus. The bus drove ten minutes up a hill, unloaded its cargo and the driver fell asleep against the wheel. We blinked back sleep and surveyed the area. We were outside the White Emperor City, a small island the Emperor had given to his younger brother to appease him. In a massive group, we walked along listening to the tour guide point out special attractions. Falling to the back, we strayed off course and looked around at the very modern, very new ‘ancient’ city. In a far corner we found a sign saying the city was built in 2005 after archeologists found a brick foundation they thought matched the description in a fictional work of literature about the king’s brother, the White King Emperor (so named because he saw white, dragon-like smoke pouring from a hole in the ground on an island, which he called the dragon’s cave). This may or may not have been that island, and that may or may not have been a factual story about a factual emperor. Dismayed at having been lugged out here for fake ‘history’ we spent the morning checking out the view of the gorges the island’s vantage points provided. We largely ignored the ‘ancient’ buildings and avoided the crowds all together. At the top of the hill stood a lone shack under construction, we went inside and saw a few Chinese gentlemen and their girlfriends from our boat. They were looking into glass display cases and laughing. One youth had his girlfriend take a picture of him making daemon faces in front of the case. We walked over to see that the case contained human remains. A sign nearby said that in ancient times a strange people had buried their dead in hanging coffins, high in the nearby gorges. These few coffins had been removed from their lofty resting places so tourists could pose in front of them. A hold in the glass case was drilled so tourists could fill the coffins with money for luck. We were aghast that the poor dead were being treated in such a way. The worst possible death I could imagine would comprise of being a part of a disrespectful, Chinese tourist trap in a fake city. I spent the day contemplating the way Chinese think of death and dying, a near theme for the trip so far considering the previous day’s outing and now the desecrated remains of an unfortunate man.

Back on the boat we sat on the deck counting the floating shoes we passed in the water. For some reason there was an excess of shoes (possibly because the rubber soles made them float). We wondered if for every floating shoe there was a pair of sunken pants and missing, sunken shirt as well. Mike wondered if we’d pass a body. Before the words were out of his mouth we saw something floating in the water 100 yard away from the boat. As we neared we saw four pale legs sticking out of the mucky river and saw that it was a bloated and green dead pig. Naturally, we stopped counting shoes, worried we would spot something equally or more disturbing than the dead pig. We mentally made a note not to eat anymore river fish.

At eleven we ate a hearty lunch on board with the Swiss couple and talked a great deal about politics, religion and the differences between Switzerland and the US (which are vast). Both of them had been in the US before, and had opinions on things that were very intense and new, and we enjoyed our chat immensely. By noon we had to get off the boat for a long day of touring. This was the highlight of the trip, and was especially touted as one of the last cruises humans would see of these cliff sides before the dam flooded the area. We boarded a smaller boat that held roughly 100 people, and the engine splashed up water as it took off down a mini gorge. We passed through several beautiful gorges before coming to the site of the hanging coffins. Up nearly 100 yards a small wooden coffin sat nestled in a square, man made cave along a steep and sheer cliff side. We wondered how the ancient peoples had put them up there in the first place, let alone how the Chinese tourism industry had gotten several coffins down for the White Emperor City. Further down we saw a monkey playing with a twig over the water, his long furry arms surprised us as we had never seen a monkey in the wild before. He vanished before we knew we had really seen him. After several hours of intense viewing, we halted and boarded even smaller boats of 20 which we took into an even smaller gorge. This tiny gorge was full of thin waterfalls spewing white spit. The water was clearer and our boat guide sang old fishing songs as he paddled us through the gorge. After a time we returned to the larger boat and again took off through larger gorges.

The boat stopped at a complete joke of a town that had at one point been an ‘ancient relic of China town,’ meaning, an old village. Because the water level would rise for the dam they had destroyed the old village and built a new one ‘exactly like the old one’ further up the hill for tourists to see how thoughtful the government could be. We looked around at the cinder blocks and 2x4s and left in disgust. Back in the original ancient village a poor old man was probably sifting through bricks for his possessions. Back on board we sped under several bridges under construction, as older, lower bridges would soon be wiped out, and finally arrived back in town where our ship was docked.

Protesting

Instead of boarding the boat we were directed to a bus. Apparently a local troupe had a show prepared for us. We ate a quick meal with the Swiss couple before grabbing a row of seats in a tiny stadium. Twenty scantly clad Chinese dancers frolicked on stage while the men, dressed in loin clothes, bounced around in the background holding twigs. Meanwhile, a smoke machine filled the room and flashing neon lights bounced off the walls in what can only be described as the corniest thing I’ve ever seen. In a rare show of defiance, however, one song and dance routine among the pack of otherwise pointless and flashy dances, showed an old man, wife and child with her baby being forced from their tiny home by government officials. The officials pranced around the stage singing as the poor villagers gathered their belongings and cried. It was a silent, smokeless theater when the last note was sung and we all looked at each other in shock. This was the only scent of protest we had ever seen from the Chinese about the dam, and it was not in the least bit subtle. We swelled with pride for the troupe and clapped loudly at their courage for doing a show with so much criticism in it. In the final act the policeman lifted the elderly woman onto his back and forced her off stage while the man was dragged by another young man in uniform. It was chilling. We were very happy to see that there was, at least, someone else who felt the whole project was hurting more than it was helping.

Boarding the boat we fell asleep the instant our heads hit the dirty pillows. We stayed on the dock all night, listening to the water lap at the shore.

-posted by Lauren.

At 4:30 a siren sounded and I was sure the boat was sinking. I mentally ran through all the logical escape routes, noting in my mind where the life vests were stored. There had been no emergency drills, and we noticed that as dirty as the water was, if we fell in we’d probably be poisoned to death in minutes. I had not slept hardly a wink all night as we lulled back and forth in the Yangzi’s current. Not a hearty swimmer, I was worried about the possibility of making it to the closest shore before being snatched by the cold or exhaustion or fear of what I could get tangled in in the dirty water. We did not sink, and another siren went off at 5:00am indicating we should, perhaps, prepare to disembark. We were arriving at the ancient Ghost Town, the only Daoist ghost village in China. For 80Rmb a person you could freely roam the two hillsides full of abandoned buildings full of relics of an abandoned religion. The town was a tribute to death and hell. The idea was that if would could pass through the scary underworld and survive, he had been a good person in this life and thus would survive the torment of hell. We marched past neon pools of drainage and waste into a serene valley of abandoned buildings. At the top of one hill there was an empty doorway shaped like a giant dragon’s open mouth. We walked inside alone and down dark stairs where a motion sensor triggered an insane and surreal giant puppet show of flashing lights and life-sized displays of torture and hell. We quickly walked through the haunted house of Daoist hell, but after twenty minutes of giant puppets sawing each other in half, we had not found an exit. Another ten minutes of crazy lights and giant horrors and we finally passed into another hall of Chinese history stories acted out in moving statues. We were too shocked at what we had just walked through to really express any thoughts other then blank stares. Walking out into the bright sunlight we wondered if we had really just marched through hell. After walking around the town a bit more, we headed back to the boat early and beat the crowd. I took a cold shower (no hot water on the boat) and by the time I came out of the disgusting bathroom I felt dirtier than when I went in. Our room mates sat on their bunk, nearly nude, chain smoking and avoiding eye contact. I went topside where I read in the fumes of exhaust and wrote in my journal, all the while snapping pictures of the gorges and hillsides as we passed slowly by. We spent the rest of the day on board playing cards, drinking warm beer, chatting with the Swiss couple, and watching the scenery.

walking through hell

At 21:00 we stopped at a Buddhist temple for a quick trip, but decided to walk around the outside of the temple rather than go inside. This was a depressing revelation. All along the temple there were knocked down homes and piles of rubble with people sifting through debris looking for belongings or scavenging. Little children pestered us to buy rocks and oranges from them while the elderly simply sat and looked at the piles of bricks. The whole town was in piles around the temple, and the people stayed only to try to sell what little they could produce to the tourists who would overpay and then board their boat. The three gorges dam has aroused controversy across China and the world for its massive displacement of people. Reading about the project one could see the large numbers of people who would be moved, but watching them poke at piles of bricks that used to be their homes was heart wrenching. We bought oranges, and then left them on the shore for the children to find and resell, and then we boarded the boat in a sober and depressed mood. Back on board, however, we met a German couple, we thought there was only us and the Swiss on board for foreigners, but the Germans had been hiding in their room until this evening. We chatted lightly and he bought us a round of beers while he talked about his pipe factory in Canton. We ate boiled cabbage and rice with the Germans in the canteen before bed. Returning to the room we found the nearly nudes mid argument. They abruptly silenced themselves and huffed into their beds. We all slept heavily that night as we rolled further away from the depressing shores of devastation.

-posted by Lauren.