Tuesday, August 23, 2011

The Three Gorges is Anything But Gorgeous

Who ever said that the Three Gorges on the Yangze River have been an inspiration to artists and poets must have either been on crack or these said artists must have been painting very dark and depressing images.  

From the moment we left Xi'an, it all started going wrong. First, we boarded a 15 hour overnight sleeper train to Chongqing, which really isn't so bad, the beds are actually comfortable and I managed to get about 7 hours of sleep. Nevertheless, it is a long time to travel. Then after our 15 hour train journey, we had a 5 hour coach transfer, followed by a half hour taxi transfer to the dock, where there was no boat. Great! We were told that the boat is a bit delayed due to bad weather, and that it would arrive in 4 hours. That's more than 24 hours in transit, no shower, stranded in the middle of nowhere Chongqing region --how lovely. 
Our arrival in Chongqing got quite a reaction from the locals. Did we really look that bad?
Our boat was supposed to be docked there, but wasn't. The body of water in the distance is the Yangze River.

One of the ways we killed time was having an early group dinner. Our local guide told us that the town we were in was famous for its "hot pot" style food, so that's what we ended up having for dinner. We went to the restaurant on the opposite side of the dock, and the restaurant itself was surprisingly nice and modern yet the prices were in-line with other local places (approx £4 per head without drinks). It looked promising. The table I was sat at ordered a "non-spicy" chicken hot pot that we all shared. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Chinese "hot pot", it's a large pot of spicy (even if it's listed as non-spicy) broth and bits of chicken, beef or fish, vegetables, noodles, and/or tofu mixed in. I like to call it "the pot of surprises", as I was surprised to find an entire chicken head in my soup ladle, and another person found a chicken foot. In China, no part of the chicken goes to waste.

This was the surprise I found in my soup ladle, a chicken head. It's a more exciting surprise than the one you find in a Cracker Jacks box, that's for sure!

Hot Pot with it's "surprises" -deeericious!
I'm quite adventurous when it comes to food, but I do draw the line at chicken heads, feet, and chewing on cartilage. At that dinner, I ended up sticking to the steamed rice and tofu. The traditional hot pot (AKA "pot of surprises") was by far my least favourite dish I've sampled in China.

After a fail dinner, we ended up walking around town and drinking beers until our boat finally arrived at 9:30pm. We were all so ecstatic at the thought of finally being able to shower and sleep on a normal bed. Sadly, the boat did not welcome us with open arms as we were hoping. We found cockroaches in our room and no running water in any of the rooms. Could this part of the trip get any worse? We were told that the boat had to switch off the running water whilst it was docked overnight, so that meant no use of water until 6am the following morning. After being in transit for more than 24 hours in 33C humid weather, this is the last bit of information you want to hear. But somehow we all managed not to lose our cool and we just got on with it. It's all part of the adventure, right?

After a full night's sleep and a lukewarm but very much missed shower, we went to the upper deck to see these famed gorges. As we passed by the first one, my reaction was: "Really? That's it? And what's so beautiful about it again?". Perhaps I'm a bad judge of natural beauty, but I honestly didn't see what the big deal was.

Chinese flag and the gorges




Really? That's what all the fuss is about with these Gorges?
We spent a few hours on the upper deck reading and playing cards --there really wasn't anything else to do on that boat. We waited until the boat docked at a small town called Wushan, where we had a few hours to stretch our legs and beat our boredom. Wushan was built only 10 years ago, as a result of the destructive 1998 Yangze floods which left millions homeless. For a "town" that's only 10 years old, it surprisingly has 600,000 inhabitants and feels like a massive thriving centre on par with a capital city in Europe. But then again the scale of things in China is about 100 times larger than us Westerners can relate to in our home countries. 

The Chinese love their stairs! Look where this set of stairs end.

The small town of Wushan

A view of our boat docked near the Wushan port

This is certainly not the entrance to the Love Boat!
There wasn't really much to see in Wushan, like any other busy town it had a selection of shops, a market, no landmarks as it was a new town-- that's it really. 

The following morning our boat trip finally had come to an end -hallejlujah! We packed our bags and left the boat at 7am, I couldn't be happier. However, the discomforts were not over yet. It was going to be another long journey until our final stop in mainland China, and that train departed in the late evening from a town 6 hours away. So what were we going to do with an entire day of time to kill?  We had no choice but to visit the Three Gorges Dam. Personally, I wasn't interested to pay the rip off entrance fee of £23 to spend 2 hours at a dam. Yes, £23! You can feed the entire Chinese army at the night market with that money. Well, it was either cough up the money and see the dam or sit on the bus, when we had a good 6 hours drive on that very bus to the train station. I chose the former.

To be frank, t
he Three Gorges Dam is quite impressive when you see it in person. And when you see the stats, it really is a feat of engineering marvel. It has the largest power stations in the world, with a maximum power generation capacity of 100 billion kilowatts/hour. The dam is 2,3 km long, 185m above sea level, 124m thick at the bottom and 15m thick at the top. It took China 15 years to build the dam, from 1994 to 2009. It is has been in operation for the past couple years, but work is still progressing on a ship lift, which will move ships from one side of the dam to the other in under 30 minutes. When the ship lift will be complete in 2014, it will hold the world record for the largest and fastest ship lift. The Chinese never cease to impress with their innovations.

An aerial view of the dam

My view of the dam on a typical hot muggy summer's day



After our visit to the Three Gorges Dam, we had an oh-so-pleasant 6 hours coach journey. Again, we entertained ourselves with card games and gambling for beers playing "Liar's Poker". We arrived in Wuhan (not to be confused with Wushan), and we embarked on our 15 hour over-night sleeper train to a modern town called "Guilin". From there, we had a 1.5 hour coach journey to our final mainland China destination, which was one of the most picturesque stops on this trip, Yangshuo. Finally, the nightmare of the Three Gorges started to fade away in the distant past.




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