THE YANGZI RIVER

 October 4, 2007

SHENZHEN

We take a ferryboat from Macau over to Shenzhen.  Shenzhen is a new city just across from Hong Kong, one of the first “special economic zones” in China.  The city is being built as they excavate the mountains and use the material to fill in the bay, thus creating more buildable space on both sides of the city.  The ferry delivers us right to the big international airport, which is far from being used to capacity.  The vision is that this will become THE big airport for people coming to China and Hong Kong.  But now it is still a rather sleepy backwater-feeling airport (only at the end of our many hour delay do we discover the newly opened, very comfortable Starbucks Coffee Shop). 

We feel back in “real China”.   Though brand-spanking new, the airport feels “country”, filled as it is with unpretentious Mainland Chinese people making their way home following the end of the national holiday known as Golden Week.  Everyone works on the weekends before and after the 5-day vacation, so things are a little off kilter as the country returns to “normal” following the holiday.

 

CHONGQING

From Shenzhen we fly to Chongqing, a city of five million people located at the confluence of the Yangzi  (Yangzi, Yangtze, many spelling possible for this river’s name) and   Jialing Rivers.  Turns out this area is known as one of the three “furnaces” of China, and here, even in the middle of October, it is hot, hot, hot.   And there is a fog that is present most days here.  And being an industrial city, that fog mixes with the air pollutants, and voila, you have smog.  The first morning I woke up in a Chongqing hotel I had to run to find my eye drops.  But not to complain, the pillows on the bed in the Harbor Plaza Hotel were the best pillows ever!  The Chinese Traditional Massage at the hotel is top notch and very inexpensive.  I just walk down the hall anytime and can have a great massage for an hour and a half for about seventeen dollars.  The wide availability of good massage at a very affordable price will certainly be one of the things about China I will miss on my return home.

Chongqing is so hot that people pretty much live their lives outside.  The plazas are filled with people, the streets are filled with people.  People have moved their living space out of doors.  There are open-air kitchens and tables set out for eating the ever-present noodle.  On quieter side streets couches have been moved out of doors and people sit around playing cards or mahjong or just hanging out and gossiping.  Walking down the street one passes many people just passed out sleeping.

“PING, A DUCK”

We spent three days in Chongqing before boarding our ship for our three-day cruise down the Yangzi River, where we went to look for  Ping A Duck.  We saw many ducks that could have been Ping’s descendents, and many boats where Ping might have lived.  ……no way to really know.  Although, and I hate to tell this to Ping, I have quite taken a fancy to eating duck here in China (nice crispy roasted duck, plum sauce, scallions, cilantro, all rolled up together in a little pancake, yum).

Ping has always been close to our hearts, to Sarah and myself, as it was reading  Ping, A Duck  that Sarah shed her first literary tear.  Poor Ping, he certainly got himself into trouble!  And thank goodness he managed to find his way back to his family boat, there on the Yangzi River.

 

CHINESE HORN BLOWING

There is a city ordinance here against blowing automobile horns, and in honking-horn-mad China this is a relief.  In China everyone honks…the man driving the huge truck loaded with what looks to be far too many bags of cement (or are they apples?), the woman on the motor bike, and the man in the passenger car…they all lean on the horn.  This is partially because in many places the roads have not caught up with autos, and so people make long passes in what we in America would consider to be very unsafe circumstances…so they honk.  Then there is the reason that many different vehicles occupy the road together; wagons being pulled by a horse, a two-cylinder tractor, a bike, motor bike and motorcycle, little cars and big cars, little trucks and big trucks, and the busses  (the busses may be the worse horn offenders)…and they all honk as they overpass, they honk to tell you they are coming straight down the road right at you etc.  Honk honk honk.

 

TRAFFIC AND PARKING

China is booming and growing and it is hard to imaging the future here, change is so rapid.  Many projects seem to be well thought out and well laid out and well executed.  I can only hold my breath in wonder to see what they will do with the automobile as more and more Chinese people can afford to own cars.  David Walton said that he figured in his city Xichang that the city planners had three years before the city would reach a traffic gridlock.  The traffic in Beijing is the worst traffic I have ever driven in.  It will be interesting to see what will be done.  In Chengdu, beautiful Chengdu, they are just building a subway system, and building it all ten lines at once (you see these mammoth construction projects all over China).  As well as just the deadlock of gridlock, there is the issue of parking…or lack thereof. At this time many people find employment helping people to park on the sidewalks.  Restaurants have their own car parkers who direct the parking of patrons.  And we have seen a few of those elevator erector-set frames that make it possible to stack up to three parked cars.  Only the newest big buildings have underground parking.  So the parking dilemma will be an interesting one to watch.

The Chinese driver made some money and bought a car but knows little about how they work.  Computers were in autos when they came of car-driving age.  The car-owning drivers we spoke with did not own a tire gauge nor would they know what to do with one; they depended upon someone else to service and care for their cars.  As well as being a huge status symbol, having a car makes for freedom from the Chinese travel industry.  Without an automobile, travel can only be done by tour, which, we believe, is a fate worse than death.

 

THE THREE GORGES

We spent three nights and 2 and half days on our beautiful cruise ship.  We opted for the less expensive cruise line, and immediately regretted it, although it did provide for endless laughs.  The tourist industry goes on impressing us as China’s Achilles heels.  Hard to put your best foot forward to foreign visitors when each and every experience a foreigner has with the travel industry leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. 

Anyhow, there we were trapped on our vessel.  There was a large group of Indians and a smaller group of Peruvians and some Chinese and misc. people like ourselves.  Actually, everyone was perfectly nice.  There is just something about “the tour” mindset that neither Joe nor myself can abide.  The herding and the waiting and the buses and the lining up and the instructions screeched over a PA system in usually-impossible-to-understand English.  On and on they go, giving us tourists every possible fact and figure, especially the figures.  The Chinese love the figures.

A few figures, the flooding of The Three Gorges has raised the water level 80 meters, and it will be raised another 30 meters when the project is finished in 2009.  The Chinese Government has built entire new relocation cities.  It is hard to say, or to see, what all was covered up by the rising water level, but I would venture to guess that the flooding of the Three Gorges has been a good thing.  The Yantze, a very big very wide very deep and fast flowing river, has been tamed and will no longer be a cause of terrible flooding.  Power is generated at the hydroelectric plant at the dam.  The relocation process involved in building all the new homes and cities was accompanied by the construction of hundreds and hundreds of new bridges and new highways linking the towns and cities to the outside world.

The Three Gorges are lovely and all, but I doubt that another 30 meters of water will matter one way or another.  By far the most beautiful part of the river was the gorge just below the dam; towering cliffs with many trees and picturesque little houses all cloaked in a thin mist.

We get off the boat to visit the Three Gorges Dam.  The only time we put ourselves into the clutches of the Chinese Travel Industry….where, I ask, is the Cultural Revolution when you need it?  Someone needs to turn this industry upside down and shake it by heels until it agrees to reform and behave itself.  Visitors to China can only get an awful impression of the new and wonderful China if it is the Travel Industry they are forced to interface with, what a shame!

But we go onto the bus, with our little badge around our necks, dutifully following our leader who has his whistle and holds our group’s flag high.  Talk talk talk…will they ever stop talking and allow you to just read the signs and look and experience where you are. 

How quickly these well meaning tour leaders can ruin your trip.  And they do not even know.  They just do not have the training necessary to do a good job.   One can only fault the higher-ups, those who make the bad decisions.  For example, everything on our ship was so overpriced (a coca-cola for $2.50, when you can buy it on the dock for 30 cents) no one shopped on the ship.  On-board they had a masseur, but the prices were two if not three times what you would pay on land, so no one had a massage. Same for the girls selling pearls, embroidery and painted snuff bottles.  These gals were on board selling their crafts, giving lecture-demonstrations etc., but the ship set their prices so high no one bought their wares.  The result was a ship filled with disheartened employees.  It was sad to see.

And, I might add, the carpets in the two bar areas were so filthy and bad smelling you could only quickly walk through the rooms when necessary, to access the open decks.  Smoking was allowed only in these two bar areas, but not on the open deck.  It just did not make sense.

But I will say that the food was quite good.  And they had learned to give the wooden floors a high polish waxing.  Corners however, well, better not to look there.  Again, it is, all in all, the training, or lack thereof.

Knowing they have you in their clutches, the tour operators squeeze every cent out of you they can, adding a large “service charge” to the cost of your train fare on the next leg of your journey.  They happily advertise they will handle these logistics for you, and only later do they stick-it-to-you.

And they pollute the people they do business with.  The porters at the dock suddenly are demanding 5 times the amount of money they would normally be receiving for carrying your bags, and make a big fuss if you refuse to be one more Gringo who is fleeced like a sheep.  I don’t know anything about how the Travel Industry is organized from the top, but unless someone comes to its rescue, people visiting China will leave with a bad taste in their mouths and likely have no desire to return.

Par of the issue lies in the fact that in China there is no “tipping”.  Most people will refuse a tip, and for someone who has been very good to you and you insist on paying some thank you money to, you may have to just jam it into his pocket.  But the people who work around the international travelers, well, they have learned to smell blood, and they not only expect a tip, they expect and demand a large tip.  This can lead to embarrassing scenes; avarice comes to China.

As for the poor traveling Chinese, herded along as they are, they seem to think this is how travel is and they are thrilled to be traveling at all.  But this unknowing can’t last for long.  The Industry needs an overhaul, and fast.

 

THE TRAIN TO SHANGAHI

We got off of the ship in Yinchang and went right to the train station where we had the good fortune to meet up with the most wonderful porter of our trip.  He directed us through the train station maze, waited with us in the “soft seat” area of the station, and then he took us and put us and our luggage into our train car.  He was a porter who was happy “being of service”.  What a pleasure!, we all enjoyed our time together.

 

CHINESE PORTERS

Speaking of “porters”…all along the Yantze the banks are very steep and there are hundreds of stairs leading from the street level down to the level of the docks.  All goods going up to the town, or down to the boat/ship docking level, must be carried, and much of this work is done by porters.  Many docks also have a cable car rail for transport, although we did not see any in action.  The towns along the river are built on hills, and in Chongqing, for example, we saw porters carrying peoples grocery shopping bags. The men walk around with their shoulder sticks over their shoulders, waiting for work, the ropes dangling from the sticks.  In areas with out hills, much of the carrying g can be done by cart or bicycle.

People carry incredible loads suspended on ropes tied to the two ends of a strong stick.  The ropes can be ties to buckets, flat baskets or whatever is most appropriate for the situation.  Some porters favor a flat stick, others a round stick.  There are several ways of arranging the stick over one’s shoulders.  Sometimes two men will each carry one end of the stick, and move along with at a chanted gate.

On the train we find our ship’s fine travel service has booked us into a train car with stacks of open bunks, no compartments, no closing doors.  We have 24 hours to go to Shanghi, so we will take it train stop by train stop and see how it goes.  So far no one has claimed the other bunks above ours.

The fog still continues to cast a pall over the landscape.  We were told that the fog is ever present along the river, and that, my, what a clear day we were having, you could actually see the cliffs.  But now we are hours and hours away from the river, and the fog is still making for that flat dullness that gets me down at home.  We haven’t run into much fog until this past week. 

As the night moves on we stop at many train stations and people get on and off.  The bunks above us fill up with people, but with people who are quiet as mice.  Joe suffers from the extreme heat and stuffiness of the train car.  When we all wake up several Chinese men come along wanting to speak English, but not willing to say words in English, so we spend a long time writing long notes in a lined notebook.  Chinese people know a lot of English that they have learned in School, but because they never use it, they are embarrassed to speak.  Ten-year-old Monica from the next group of bunk beds speaks very well and is not afraid.  We give her cookies, she brings us yogurt.  Her father takes a photograph of us together.

We pass an uneventful night and arrive at the station in Shanghai where Haixiang meets us and we head home to his family apartment to drop off our bags (and wash our face and hands) before going out for a lunch of roast duck (in the famous duck restaurant in Beijing you actually get a card with the identification number of the duck you are eating).

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