October was approaching, and with it the October holidays, China's celebration of the Republic’a birth 61 years ago. That meant close to 1 billion people having vacation at the same time, and therefore every site within China full of people, every train filled to capacity (and more).
Philip like everybody else would have 4 days off, and we started looking into traveling to other Asian site as did all the other expats., Therefore flights and hotel rooms were at a premium. At this point Philip had a brilliant idea, why not take a 3 day cruise on the Yangtze River, as a ship can only fill to capacity. With three cabins left when we inquired, we immediately booked a space.
We flew to Chongqing, China's largest City at 30 million inhabitants. However, it is also a very large in landmass, the city center only has about 9 million, so compared to Beijing it looked like a village in many ways. Here we boarded our ship, the Century Star in the evening, starting the 3 nights-3 days trek downriver to Yichang.
Impressions from the trip:
Our most relaxing vacation in China as the sights came to us. No running around to catch every tourist destination.
Good food, good service and a realization that China has more to offer than big cities.
A river that often reminded us of fjords in Norway as the river turned and twisted.
new sights revealed themselves
We took an interesting small vessel side trip with rowers from the ethnic minority of the TuJia people. This ethnic minority lived along the Yangtze River, and all of their lands were flooded when the dams were built. About one million people were either resettled on top of the mountains, or moved to totally new areas with the government’s help. As we were rowed into the narrow river, our guide and one of the rowers sang hauntingly beautiful songs in their ethnic language (Which is only passed down orally, it does not have a written form). The riverbanks were lined with bamboo forest inhabited by small monkeys.
Two of the three gorges came before the dam, exhibiting beautiful shore-lines, seemingly sparsely populated.
The river was very wide at the point of the dam which is the biggest in the world (It took 30.000 workers 10 years to complete), producing more electricity than any other hydro-electric dam. We reached the dam around 1 AM, and now had to pass through the world's 5 biggest lochs. Huddling amid pajama-clad guests, we watched the ship steam toward the first lock." No way our ship was going to fit," we thought. Much to our surprise, not only did our ship fit, but also 4 other cruise-ships along with a great big coal barge. The gates closed behind us, and within fifteen minutes the water-level went down about 20 meters. it was amazing and scary to watch how rapidly the ship went "down". What if the gates gave in??? We decided to not worry about this, and rather go to sleep. And next morning we woke up, sailing in a river not manipulated by man . Our ship was at rest, giving us a chance to go back to look at the dam and the locks in day-light.
The morning was spent traveling down the third gorge, perhaps the most beautiful, still in it's natural state. By noon we arrived at our destination Yichang after a relaxing and beautiful trip. The cruise-ships dock somewhat outside town, we had therefore ordered a taxi to take us to the airport. He showed up promptly, and after driving the long route in order to show us some of Yichang, we arrived at the terminal in plenty of time. This is the first airport we have seen in China that is not new and gigantic. It mainly seemed to serve as a transit-port back to Beijing or Shanghai for cruise passengers.
Two hours later we arrived back in Beijing, having experienced a relaxing Chinese vacation. And we thought that was an oxymoron!
