I survived the Yangtze river

I am once again writing from one of the nicest internet cafes in the world. And it's only 25 cents an hour, well, plus the $1.25 weird assed "apple juice" that ended up being some sort of warm milky green apple thingy. Not so bad, really.

Since I last wrote I have recovered from whatever food-borne sickness I contracted, hopped a bus from Yangshou to Guilin, then a flight from Guilin to Chongqing. As soon as we arrive in the airport, we were hit up by a woman trying to book us on a boat down the river, which is what we were in Chongqing to do, so convenient! The boats have first class (two beds, private bath), second class (4 beds private bath), and third class (6-8 beds private bath). This isn't as bad as some of the boats in Vicky's book that go as low as 5th class where you're sharing a toilet with 50 other people and have to fight for phlegm-free space on the floor for you and your bamboo mat. She told us that second class was full (which we later found to be a mistruth - she was trying to get us to book first class, which was about $200), so we surprised her by booking third class (for $80 including three entrance fees). We pay our deposit, she puts us in a van with one of the SCARIEST drivers in this part of the world, and we whiz off to drop the other passengers at their hotels. Since we didn't have enough money for the whole ticket, he took us to a Bank of China, but since it was an active construction site, we didn't want to get out of the van. So our comes his cell phone for the first of three calls to the woman to deal with the silly foreign girls who don't speak Chinese. We manage our way to the travel office, pay the balance on the boat, book a train and one flight for me, but I still had one more flight to book (and no money left to pay cash because NO ONE here takes frickin VISA!!)

So we went downtown to load up on enough snacks to feed an army, get cash, and gorge ourselves on McDonalds. I know, I know. I ordinarily wouldn't touch the stuff. But you know how good Chinese food is at home - well it's not like that in China. I'm losing some serious weight here, but will soon be back in Thailand to bulk it back up again ;) Anyway, so we finish our shopping and go to get a taxi, except that by this time, half of the 2 billion people in China are in the downtown area, and they're all literally throwing themselves in front of cabs. So after 20 frustrating minutes, I decide to do the same and successfully get the attention of one of the many female cabbies in Chine, only to be cut off by some dude. So I'm right behind him whinning "please please please, I don't speak chinese, and you could easily get another taxi, please please please." I don't think he understood a word of that, but he turned around and gave me the "okay crazy lady" look, and we got our cab!

We get back to the travel office, and the woman doesn't want to book my flight yet - instead we're supposed to rest. So over an hour later and 3 more attempts to get her to book my flight (from Xian to Xiamen to catch my already booked flight from Xiamen to Bangkok), a guy in the office is trying to usher us to the bus that will take us to the boat. So I flipped out, she finally realized that for the last hour I wasn't nagging her to get on the boat, but I needed my frickin flight, so she took my passport, and booked my flight by cell phone en route to some other travel office. Sweet!

We get to the docks with hundreds of Chinese tourist folk, and we're walking down this creepy dark stairway to the water, then across a totally rickety scary walkway that's just a bunch of metal planks spanning from floating platform to floating platform, and the river is RUSHING all around us. We both tweaked out when we saw what we thought was the ship, but fortunately it was just the docking platform. The lobby of the ship was pretty nice, so we thought, whew, we got lucky...until we got to our room. It's a 6 berth, me Vicky, three Chinese men, one chinese woman, and a two year old boy. Six bunks only four inches wider than my shoulder width with an inch thick mattress, a desk with a TV, and a TEENSY bathroom that was just big enough for a squatter and a sink. And it smelled. And it got worse over the next two days.

So we nearly cried, panicked for a bit, thought about trying to upgrade but didn't have the money between us, then decided to just tough it out and see how bad it was. Pretty bad. One of the men was smoking in the room, and gave me a snarky look when I asked him not to - the old woman looked absolutely astonished that I as a woman would have the balls to ask a man not to smoke. The lot of them ate every meal in the cabin, and as far as we could tell only left twice in the entire two days, so it ended up FULL of rubbish and SMELLY. To add to that, the woman was dumping the remaining contents of cup o noodles down the squatter (fortunately it never overflowed), and washing the cups to reuse. And since we could NEVER get the room to ourselves, changing was not an option, and I wore and slept in the same clothes for three days. My hair is nice and healthy though after the grease buildup. It made me really happy that I'd grown it out long enough to pull into a ponytail cause otherwise I would've gone mad. And, with the help of our Australian friends, we discovered an unmarked door in the hallway that was a broom closet with a squatter. MUCH cleaner and nicer than the one in our room, which is saying a lot since the sink was full of brown water. And the light was out, so I had to wear my headlamp while doing my business in a broom closet that was bigger than the bathroom in my designated cabin. Go figure. At least it gave the Chinese folk a better reason to stare at me when I came climbing out of the broom closet ;)

Speaking of which - this seems to be the national sport - tourist watching. Four of us were up on deck on day when three old men came up and TURNED THEIR CHAIRS to face us. Away from the beautiful scenery rolling past and directly at us. It was entertaining - so we just stared back for an hour or so :) The scenery really was fantastic. And the whole trip was so worth everything that we had to go through to get here. The Chinese tourists are a sight all to their own - watching the men all dressed in suits and people posing for very serious portrait-type photos with no smiles in front of whatever thing we're at. It did bother me, though, how they still hack and spit and smoke even at the temples, and there was even one place we saw where people had used the incense tray to put out their cigarettes. It's like these religious sites are really just tourist attractions to them as well.

So the three gorges dam project is the most amazing engineering feat ever. I'm glad that we came to see this, because there are parts of China that may never be seen again - that is unless the dam fails and all that water comes rushing out again. I'm not even sure how wide or tall the dam is, but it will eventually raise the water level by 115 meters when it is finished in 2009. The was has already risen about 40 meters, so there are things that we've already missed seeing. The first stop was at this down that is being entirely demolished and moved up onto this hillside above the eventual high water mark. 840,000 people who lived along this river have or are being relocated, sometimes across the country to entirely different provinces, and the Chinese government is apparently only minimally compensating them. There has been massive corruption with subcontracting, and the project has already cost tons more than it was intended to because of poor materials, and they've had to patch cracks. It's just crazy to see it all and think about how much more there is to go. We got to the dam and passed through the locks late last night which was incredible. Imagine the seattle locks times about 100,000. Because of the huge depth difference, there is a system of 5 locks that you have to pass through to get to the river below. The fifth one isn't even being used yet, so you cruise on through to the next one, and it takes about 3 hours to pass through the whole think. It's really intimidating too to look back and see a gate holding back 30 meters of water from crashing down on you. Eeesh.

We pulled in to Yichang this morning and offloaded to find the nearest cheapest hotel where we could just take showers and change clothes for the first time in DAYS, so we feel like real humans again. We've just been spending the day wandering around the city, which seems more poor than the other places that we've been but still nice and interesting. We were crossing a big park and stopped to watch a bunch of folks ballroom dancing. This seems to be a big thing in China - ballroom dance and karaoke, and they often come together. We apparently stood around a little too long because some old guy came over and asked us to dance. Of course Vicky goaded me on, so I danced with this very nice guy to the longest song EVER, which she chuckled her ass off and took photos and video. We've got our train our of here (soft sleeper, baby!) at about 5 pm, so we're killing time in this cafe which is why this is the longest blog posting in the world, but if you were going to complain, then why did you finish it ;)