Three Days on the Yangtzi

Buying a ticket is an accomplishment in itself as none of the ticket agents speak English. I try a couple of agents before I find a guy who seems trustworthy. “I want to see the boat before I buy my ticket!” Immediately, he dials the phone a 19-year-old boy in jeans and sneakers appears. “Let’s we go,” he says and it is down the 4000 stairs down to the water to check out the boat. Everything looks OK (I guess) so we go back up to haggle over the price of the 3rd class berth complete with touristy side trips down the Yangzi from Chongqing to Yichang.

It is 10AM. The boat does not leave until 7PM so a day of sightseeing in Chongqing is in order. The ticket agent offers to hold our backpacks. I take out my only valuables – camera, eyeglasses and pack of 1500 Chinese flashcards I have written – and off we go. Chongqing has several million people and it looks like San Francisco with hills going straight up and straight down. Armies of little men in green army pants and sneakers ply the streets with bamboo shoulder poles offering to carry your belongings up or down the hills.

Fast forward to 6PM. My friend and I go to a little hole in the wall restaurant near the docks to get something to eat. The boss loves having us there and keeps calling out to passers by, “Come look, eat here WE HAVE FOREIGNERS! Come look at the foreigners and eat here!” Thank you P.T. Barnum.

After dinner it is time to board the boat so we go to the tour office and are immediately ushered off to another office with a group of Chinese tourists. At the second tour office a women starts trying to tell me something in Chinese. All I get is, “Boat, 11PM, hotel, want, money.” What? Is she trying to tell me that the boat is not leaving until 11PM? Oh no! I am exhausted. I haven’t slept in two days. Do I have to pay for this hotel? What is going on? “I don’t want a hotel tonight, I want to get on the boat!” “OK, OK…blah blah blah, Yichang, boat, 11PM, hotel, boat, money…” I have no idea what she is talking about but there is no way I am giving her money for a hotel if I have to wait until 11PM to board the boat. About 15 minutes more of arguing I finally figure out that the boat will arrive in Yichang 3 days later at 11PM at night and she is trying to offer me a hotel in that city when we disembark. AH! OK – yes I do want a hotel. Book’er up! I can just imagine this poor woman is writing a story to her friends telling them about the annoying foreigner who fought tooth and nail about booking a hotel room.

There are 5 classes on the boat. First and second class each have 4 people to a room. Third class has 8 bunks in a very small room with a private bathroom. Fourth has 8 bunks and no bathroom, and fifth is simply a big room below the water line with no beds and no toilets – just hundreds of people and their belongings.

We walk into our 3rd class room and are met by some grim looking Chinese faces. Our roommates are none too happy to be sharing a room with foreigners and asked for a room transfer. The second group is much better – a family of four and a young couple. In typical Chinese fashion the small television in the room is on about 3 seconds after they walk in, the bags of food are opened, a game of cards begins. Three minutes later we are ankle deep in sunflower seeds and orange peels and the room looks and smells as it will for the next three days.

The boat takes off down the river around 8PM. It is just beginning to get dark because China has only one time zone – Beijing time. I move to the front of the boat and watch the Chinese teenagers pretending to be Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic and survey the river go by before I hit my hard wooden bunk.

RRRRRRIIIIIIIINNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG. A loud bell goes off. My Chinese roomies wake up turn on the lights and start getting dressed. I leap out of my bunk and into my pants, grab my mobile phone (which works even on the river) put on my shoes, and grab my watch. WHAT! It is 2:30 AM. What is going on? Oh! We are just stopping at a port to drop some people off. All of us look at each other, pretending we knew that it was really the middle of the night.

RRRRRRIIIIIIIINNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG. A loud bell goes off. A knock at the door – get up and be prepared to get off the ship. Now it is 5:30AM which apparently is the time when Chinese tours start. I am standing half asleep in the main lobby of the ferry with several hundred Chinese. Everyone is milling about looking carefully at the chests of those around them. We are all wearing plastic badges around our necks that identify which tour group we belong to. I try to find people with the same badges as me but I am in a sea of people. I find an old couple with the same badge and try to stay close but there are so many people pushing and shoving that I keep losing them. The crowd pushes forward and I am swept down the stairs and off the boat. “Oh, all this pushing and shoving is Chinese tradition you know!” a man from Taiwan says in English without a drop of sarcasm.

I get free of the crowd and find myself standing on a dock in the small town of Fengdu for a 3-hour tour. It won’t be light out for another two hours and the town is still asleep except for the vendors on the pathway from the dock. My friend and I try to find our tour group but we are hopelessly lost. It doesn’t really matter because we can understand only about 25% of what the guides are saying anyway. The town has some sort of Buddhist temple amusement park to which we are all ushered – complete with chair lift to the top of a mountain. About 8 boats have docked so there are thousands of people all trying to get on the chair lift. We wait for over an hour in line, a little worried because the tour guides are handing out tickets but our guide has given us nothing. By the time we get to the front of the line we still have no tickets and the very pleasant woman would not let us board until we paid 50 kuai, which was supposed to be included. Forget it – we don’t need to go to this temple anyway.

We spend the next couple of hours wandering through the back alleys of the town and find lots of neat things. The buildings are tightly crammed together and many of the sewers run open in the street. It is little wonder why many of the residents are not upset that they are being moved to brand new modern villages when the river is flooded in the coming years and their current homes swept away.

We stop at two more small towns during the day before setting sail for the evening. Our roommates are watching TV, playing cards, and eating – somewhat out of character for them (read: that is all they did). I have an exquisite meal of bland cabbage, pork fat and overcooked rice washed down with a warm beer.

1:30 AM – Oh god – what is that rumbling – I think the pork fat and my intestinal system are fighting with each other. Out of the bunk. Hit the head.

2:15 AM – Round two – my stomach is losing. Vitamin I (Immodium) time!

3:30 AM – Footsteps running across the roof – Loud whistles – BOOOOM!!!!! I am nearly knocked out of my bunk. What was that? The boat definitely hit something. Everyone else in the room wakes up for a second and then falls back asleep.

3:34 AM – Something is definitely going on. There are more footsteps, loud voices and banging. Nothing on the PA system yet – I can still see the shore of the river so we are not underwater. I am going back to sleep.

3:45 AM – Vitamin I not working. Voices getting louder (outside - not in my head). I gotta check this out. I get down from my bunk and head out into the hall. There are peasants everywhere. Where did they come from? I walk out to the main lobby of the boat and look out the doors. We are tied up along side another boat in the middle of the river and there are literally hundreds of people standing in the lobby of the other boat waiting to board our boat. The two boats are so close together people are just leaping across. All of the stewards on our boat are awake and handing out keys to some of the people boarding. Is this normal?

4:15 AM – I walk down to the 5th class area and peer in. There are so many people crammed into the room that they have spilled out into the walkways. Their belongings include bags of fresh fruit, fish and rainbow-colored canvas sacks bursting with all sorts of things. They are sleeping on the deck and in the halls and in the lobby on pieces of cardboard and newspapers. Whole families, babies and small squatting men in dark blue suits smoking cigarettes are scattered on every floor of our boat.

4:20 AM – Hit the bathroom. Go back to bed. I still don’t understand anything.

6:00 AM – The ship’s bell rings to signal that we will pass through the first of the Three Big Gorges. It is still dark but you can see the massive cliffs rising hundreds of feet on either side of the river. An hour later we exit the gorge and dock. We are ushered off the boat in the usual pushing and shoving fashion to go see the Three Little Gorges. The river is very low in the winter so the locals have been kind enough to dig stairs into the side of a sandy hill. After the first 10 or 20 people climb them, the stairs disintegrated and people are slipping and sliding all over the place – everyone except for the women who have thoughtfully worn their “hiking heels.” I am attired in rugged clothes and shoes, while most of the Chinese tourists seem to be wearing their Sunday best. Many of the women have the most inappropriate footwear, such as 3-inch spike heels.

We meet our tour guide, a small attractive woman of about 40. She ushers us to our bus for the 30-minute drive to the small boats that will take us up the Little Gorges. As soon as the door closes, she reaches back, clears her throat and spits right on the floor. When I first moved to China this habit annoyed me but I have become mostly immune to it. However, this woman must have had some sort of throat problem because she spat every 5 minutes for the next 6 hours – on the bus, on the boat, in the river, near my feet, EVERYWHERE!

The Little Gorges are “Gorge-a-riffic” and you can see some of them in the pictures on my web site (www.elgrandeblanco.com). The tour is long, almost 6 hours on a very slow boat in very shallow water on a raw misty day. By the end, I am all gorged out.

Back on the big boat I am in quite a way. This is directly from my journal: “Punchy since have not slept in 5 days. On the boat again. Oh the lies, the lies – arrival times changing, number of dams we will see, gorges. Why are we going through last two big Gorges at night? This sucks. Pork fat dinner from last night kicking in again. 11:55PM – dam in the mist – raining hard, cold, peasants and tourists all crammed on front of boat, stomach not well, that is one big dam. Damn.”

At last I see the dam. The project is enormous and something that must be seen to be believed. We finally get to Yichang at 2AM and for once I am glad I did the touristy thing and pre-booked a hotel. The hotel has the most comfortable bed ever! I am asleep 30 seconds after my head hits only to be awakened 3 hours later to begin what turned out to be the most exciting adventure of all – getting back to Nanjing…