The Chinese Boat Cruise

This past long weekend I went on a boat cruise through the Three
Gorges of the Yangtze River. You have probably heard of the Three
Gorges Dam, currently the largest dam in the world and subject to much
controversey. Well the Three Gorges, the impressive part of the river
leading up to the dam, is a national icon. I gorge-d out on pictures.
And took some dam good ones. The scenery was gorge-ous. God I miss
travelling with English speakers!
The launching pad for the cruise was a city called Chongqing, worth a
blog post in its own right. Once upon a time Chongqing was part of
Sichuan and then it got too big - big as in 30 million people - so in
1997 Chongqing was hacked off Sichuan and became its own
city-province. It's sort of a regional rival to Chengdu as the centre
of the West, but I don't think it will ever really take off in
popularity since it's name is so odd to pronounce.
Compared to Chengdu, Chongqing couldn't be more different. The city
is built on a bunch of hills at the confluence of two rivers, so it's
mesmerizing to arrive at night and see lights and bridges and elevated
highways up and down and all over the place. Where Chengdu looks like
a Western city and has an easy layout with wide, spotless avenues,
Chongqing is a mess of narrow streets and stairs. Though it has a
developed downtown, most of the city doesn't feel modern, it looks
more like Leshan but way bigger.
Of course I loved the place. Compared to any other city I've visited,
this felt like a proper Chinese city and had a lot of character.
Stairways zigzag up the mountains and are peppered with little
neighbourhood shops. Around each turn there is another building
courtyard weathered beyond belief that surely dates back to Mao's
days. We'd be walking and all of a sudden there'd be a truck
container's worth of boxed TVs sitting on the sidewalk waiting for
pickup.
I also saw a humongous centipede in the nice part of town; in the
hostel I saw a wasp that could probably take on a dozen other wasps
and win. And so the bugs get bigger.
Anyway, before long I was on a Chinese cruise boat on the river, the
cheapest way to take it all in. I bought a third-class ticket so I
was down at the bottom of the boat in a little cabin with 5 other
Chinese people. "Are they going to seat the lifeboats according to
class?" No need as I didn't see any lifeboats. Good to know that the
Chinese missed the only real moral of Titanic.
Now some say that since the water levels have risen up to 100m with
the building of the dam, the Three Gorges are not worth the trip. And
I say to them nay! The Three Gorges were really impressive, it's
humbling to be puttering through this narrow gorge with very steep
cliffs rising up on either side. And the side trip to the Lesser
Three Gorges, and of course, the Lesser Lesser Three Gorges, only got
better since in the smaller boats we could navigate even narrower
canyons.
Besides all that, a Chinese cruise is worth it as a cultural
experience unto itself. You never really know what's going on since
all the announcements are in Chinese. You just sort of groggily look
up at 6:30am and think WTF are they playing drums right now? Another
highlight was while reading Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" (very
good) alone in the cabin and I heard a noise and there was an
alarmingly large rat on one of the lower bunks. It scuttled pretty
fast, but embarassingly, I was faster.
Chinese people lineup for things and run to be the first one there.
It must come with living in a country that is so populous, but it sure
is funny to see people push to get onto a plane when there is assigned
seating anyway. Yet at one point I found myself running in this small
town to get to seat on a little golf cart bus. What have I become??
(Subsequently, I was pushed off that little bus by Chinese people when
they noticed my seat was on fire due to a battery explosion. Wow,
this isn't coming off as that enjoyable, but really it was a fun
cruise)
When I bid farewell to my third-class crew on the last day, it was
with a bit of sadness. There was the old guy who chuckled when he
pointed out that I had Bed #4 (the number 4 is bad luck in this
country), the couple from up north who couldn't get tickets in first
class, the room of teachers from Xi'an, the grad students preparing
for a long distance relationship as the girlfriend was accepted at a
prestigious school in....Pittsburgh. I was the only foreigner on
board and usually regarded with curiousity but more often with a lot
of kindness. At every step of the weekend I was taken under the wing
of a group of Chinese people, they invited me to share stories, gave
me beer, bought me noodles, loaned me an umbrella, helped me get a
train ticket home. Sometimes in confusion of flights and tickets and
all those details, I forget that the joy of travel is the people you
meet along the way.
Back at school, after this long break, the students are very
distracted. That's not a good start to 9 days of consecutive teaching
(because in China, a four day holiday means you work weekends before
and after). We're doing storytelling in class, where I show an
interesting picture and ask the students to provide a caption. Then I
draw some stick figures on the board and we try to give the people a
backstory. We ended up having James meet his wife Two-Fat as she was
cleaning toilets in the washroom and then having 100 children. And we
wonder why there aren't more famous movies coming out of China!
I bought groceries for dinner and well they just gave me a free
cabbage that weighed about 5 pounds and even though I don't know what
to do with it I couldn't be happier. Let the week of cabbage begin!