Our wake up call this morning was at 6am and the boat played some nice relaxing music to wake up to and it became louder as it went on. It was actually quite pleasant. However I was awake much before the wake up call as we docked at our location around 5:30am and there was yelling all around. I didn’t sleep very well on the boat, though mom did, because we would pass barges that were loud and our ship is a bit loud as well and our beds are basically wood boards so not the most comfortable of conditions to sleep in. The breakfast on the boat was definitely skipped by mom and I, though dad did venture downstairs to see what it was like and came back up and said it was a good thing we didn’t go. We decided to have a bar for breakfast instead. At exactly 7am, we met our group in the “lobby” of the boat and left by crossing three other cruise ships that had already disembarked.
We walked through many disgusting fish and meat stands and other chatchka stands that seemed very chintzy.
There was a bus area that was a mad house and nothing was organized. People were rushing to whatever bus arrived and our tour guide was not a typical Chinese guide and he had us wait until we were able to be the first onto a bus to go to our destination.
10 minutes later we arrived at the White King City. It’s located at the mouth of the Qutang Gorge (one of the three gorges) and it’s now an island after they flooded this area to build the gorge. It used to be a large peninsula with much history and artifacts from poets, but all of that is now underwater and there is a large bridge that you have to walk over to get to the island. We then climbed over 200 steps up to get to the tiny city, which is really just a few buildings with poems and the hanging coffin, which was the major attraction, but it was closed for renovation. This whole city was built in 1980, so there is not much history and had some nice scenery but that’s about it.
We then walked back to get the bus back to the boat and it took a long time to get on the right bus with people running and rushing and so we were one of the last groups to leave the site to get back. The boat was supposed to leave at 9:30am and we got onto the bus at 9:25am. So we had to rush, though the rest of the people in our group didn’t seem to realize that. The entrance back to the boat was again filled with shops selling food, knick knacks, wood products, fruit, etc and it took us at least 10 minutes to get through all of those things.
We had to walk down all of the many stairs to get down to the docks and then we rushed onto the boat. We were definitely the last group on and immediately after we got on, they blew the horn on the ship and we were off. There was no time to spare. I don’t know if they were waiting for us or if they even knew we weren’t on-board, but I’m glad we made it. Even though its kind of gross in our room, it still felt nice to be back on the ship.
We had 4 hours on the ship to take some photos of the gorges and the huge mountains as were quickly went by. Lunch was around 11:30am and we did go to lunch not expecting much, but we had some rice and a little bit of tofu and that was about it. Apparently our guide had asked them to prepare our food without MSG, but after lunch, mom and I had splitting headaches and didn’t feel well, so we are assuming they still put some in. We tried to rest for a bit and lied in bed while looking at the nice scenery before we had to get off of the boat again at 2:30pm.
Around 2:30pm, we again met our group in the lobby and then boarded a ferry that had come alongside out boat in the middle of the river. It was an old fashioned looking ferry but very colorful. We took the ferry for about 40 minutes up a tributary of the Yangtze and saw a hanging coffin, some monkeys! and some nice scenery (or as they translate scenery here as beauty). After the ferry ride up the river, we arrived at another boat that we disembarked on and then we got onto a tiny 17 passenger wooden boat that was rowed by 4 men. It was the best thing we’ve done so far. For an hour we rowed up the river, saw some nice scenery and learned the story of the men rowing the boats. Our hearts ache for them, but they are happy workers. They work in teams of 5 (one man is the captain, the other four row).
They live about 3 hours away from this boat site and they commute everyday by their individual wooden boats to come and work. They have made their boats and their oars and they are such hard workers. They are also farmers so when they return home from working, they have to work on their farm to get some food for themselves. At the half way point of the boat ride, two of the men jumped out on the side of the river, ran up a hill and started pulling us up the river from the side. It was very cool. Then they hopped back into the boat and we went back to the ferry boat. The ferry boat then took another 40 minutes to drop us back off at our real boat.
When we got back to our ship, we boarded, quickly dropped off our gear in the room and went down to dinner, which was more rice, some corn kernels and a bit of tofu and pumpkin. We also brought dad’s birthday cake from yesterday with us so we could celebrate for dessert. Everyone sang happy birthday and dad made a wish and blew out his candles. A man from a nearby table saw that it was dad’s birthday and came over to our table and offered him a little shot of the alcohol he was drinking and wished him happy birthday in Chinese. We are now traveling somewhere on the river, but we are not really sure as we got off the boat onto the ferry this afternoon where we boarded the boat yesterday. So we feel we may be moving but maybe going around in circles until we reach our final destination, which we don’t know what that is yet!
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