Yangzhe River Cruise

What a wonderful week we have had on our cruise!

On Monday, we flew into Chongqing (pronounced Chong King), which is where we were due to pick up our boat.  We flew in a day early, worried that the flight would be delayed (it was - always is for domestic flights from Shanghai!!!) and that we wouldn't make the boat on time. So we had the day in Chongqing, which I didn't like the feel of at all.  The stupid 40+ degrees didn't help.  It's a very hectic city; the 4th biggest in China, and is growing every day.  There were building works everywhere, and we seemed to be the only white people in the 30 million residents.  That meant being stared at. A lot.  And people trying to sneakily take our photo, which for some reason, really annoys me. I don't mind if people ask, but I hate it when they do it without asking.  I usually get my phone out and take a photo of them taking a photo of me!

Anyway, we found something touristy to do in the ridiculous heat - the Guild Hall - an ancient site that has been rebuilt and refurbished, and was full of interesting buildings.  It took us ages to find because there is so much construction going on in the city, that every route our map said to go was blocked by a building site.  To be honest, we couldn't cope with much more than that in the heat, so we went to the hotel and sat in the air con!

We were meant to board our cruise ship, the Century Paragon, at Chongqing pier, but 'due to flooding' (there has been no rain for weeks) we couldn't, so had to get a 2 hour bus downstream to where we were mooring for the night, at Fengdu town.

The town is very interesting because on the opposite bank it has the Ghost City, which we went to, but more on that later.

The cruise liner is really big! It has a swimming pool, cinema, huge bar area, and dining room.  Matt surprised me by upgrading to an executive room, which meant a bigger room, and balcony, and a different dining room, where we got our own table, and didn't have to share with 8 other people. Much nicer.  We also got to use the swimming pool, instead of having to pay a ridiculous amount to use it once.

Dinner wasn't included on the first night, but we chose a drinks package, which was a hundred and 20 pounds for all the beer, non-alcoholic cocktails and soft drinks.  We kept a tally of what we had, and definitely got our moneys worth!  Since I can't really drink on my tablets, there wasn't any point in getting the deal with all of the alcoholic drinks, though i'm sure we'd have got our moneys worth on that too!

After a lovely sunset, and a very cheesy captains welcome drink (think Butlins), we headed off to bed, for a nice cat-free sleep.

In the morning, we had signed up for the optional excursion to the Fengdu Ghost City, which was probably my favourite trip of the whole cruise.  There were only 5 of us on the excursion, and we had our own English speaking guide.  It was worth going 'VIP' (executive room) just for our own guide.  There were only about 30 English speakers on board, so this worked in our favour too, for a smaller group. 

The ghost city is all about the after life.  They built a hotel here but people were so superstitious that they wouldn't come to stay so it just sits there empty!  In various (buddhist and taoist) Chinese religions you have to go through 3 trials to get into the afterlife, and these all take place in hell, before you get to go to heaven.  The first is to cross a bride in an uneven number of steps.  If you do this with your partner, holding hands then you get to be together forever.  The next is standing for 3 seconds on a nobbly piece of stone, on your left foot for men and right foot for women.  the third is the torture chamber.  There were some great photos of that below.  The whole place is fairly creepy, and very cool!

After the trip, which was very very hot - 40 plus degrees - we had a couple of hours before our next trip.  Because we were executive club we got a trip to the bridge to see the second mate (the captain was on a break) driving the ship...

We had a rest on our balcony, and of course a couple of drinks!

The afternoon trip was one that was included for everyone to Shibaozhai pagoda, or the 'red pagoda'.  To get to it we had to cross the wobbliest bridge i've ever been on.  There were huge gaps between the slats that you could see the huge drop to the ground below.  It was horrible!

The pagoda was lovely to see.  It's architecture was amazing.  We climbed the 99 steps to the top, but the heat was so intense it became a bit of a 'lets-get-this-done-asap' situation.  We were absolutely drenched in sweat! Lovely!

Dinner was a buffet, which was delicious and the entertainment in the evening was a dance show done by various members of staff in their free time.  It was pretty good actually, and much less Butlins than the night before!  There were a few games and lots of underage drinking we noticed!

We then headed through 2 of the 3 gorges on our trip - Wu gorge and Qutang gorge.  They were so beautiful.

The top gorge (Wu gorge) is the picture they have on a 10 yuan bank note! Very cool.

Our trip that morning was to the White Emperor City, which is an ancient place on an island (no wobbly bridges this time) where Emperors used to live.  It's 2000 years old, and there is some caligraphy there on the walls the same age.

Above is a picture of a 'hanging coffin' that is a hollowed out tree trunk.  People used to hang their coffins in the highest spots in the gorge, because the higher you were, the closer you were to heaven.

Below is the scene from the 10 yuan note...

In the afternoon heat we had a trip to the Goddess Stream, a small offshoot from the Yangzhe river.  The scenery was very pretty and we were on a cute tiny boat, but we didn't really go anywhere.  We stopped at a small jetty for a 5 minute walk, then all the guides sang us a song, then we headed back. Very bizarre!

Then it was already our last evening on board the ship! So sad!  We went for a swim and had dinner and some drinks and watched the last night's show, which wasn't quite a good as the previous night.  It included some truely terrible singers!

We met a Scottish couple who it turns out work at our Beijing school - such a small world!

On our final morning we had to check out by 7am!  Then we took the boat to the three gorges dam, which is the largest dam in the world.  It's really impressive.  We took the ship lift, which takes 8 minutes and takes you down more than 100 meters.  Very impressive.  The scale is just so big!

I really enjoyed the dam, much more than I was expecting to.  We paid 4 pounds each to go to the VIP deck where there were very few people, so we had an excellent view from the captains bridge of going through the dam.

We then had a scenic walk to view the dam from the hills above it, but in 42 degrees, with no shade and what we were told was a 4km walk, we weren't particularly happy.  It actually wasn't that far, and our guide rushed us along because everyone was so swelteringly hot, so we finished early.  This meant that we had about 7 hours before our flight home!  There was a shopping centre opposite where we got dropped off, so we went in for lunch, then went to the cinema to see The Rock's new film, Skyscraper - so tense!  Then it was time to head off to the airport, which was tiny and didn't have much in it.  Half of the English speakers on the cruise seemed to be on the same flight, so we had plenty of people to chat to.

We got home at 11pm, and the cats were so pleased to see us.  We really missed them!

Matt's parents arrive on Sunday afternoon and then we're all off to Hong Kong on Monday, so lots to look forward to!