Journey to Yichang to meet our Yangtse cruise boat

Saturday, August 29, 2009
Yichang, Hubei, China
Friday 28th August. Tour Day 6

Our group caught an 11pm bus last night from Yangshuo to Guilin, from where the overnight train for Wuhan left at about 2am, the late hour meant everyone went straight off to sleep. I had the middle bunk this time, and some decent a/c meant I got a good night’s sleep. I wake up around 10am, and had the rest of the journey (till late afternoon) to keep myself occupied. I had lunch in the dining car, which was ok but all the chicken was on the bone. In fact, it was more bone than chicken - obviously, all the best cuts of meat went to the guards and we had the leftovers. We arrived at Wuhan ~4pm and caught a bus to Yichang an hour later. We had to wait for the bus at a street corner in Wuhan. Wuhan is one of the most industrialised cities in Central China, which meant it was very smoggy and you hardly ever saw the sky. Not being on the tourist trail, it also meant that most people in Wuhan hadn't appeared to have ever seen a foreigner before. Whilst we were waiting on the street corner, virtually everyone was rubber-necking us as they travelled past - everyone on a bus would rush to one side to gawp at us, and motorcyclists would concentrate on us rather than the road, riding into pedestrians crossing the road at the traffic lights! I was surprised the police didn’t turn up and ask us to move along before we caused a serious pile-up.

Anyway, our public bus turned up and we were off to Yichang, getting there about 10pm. There was a Chinese woman on the back seat of the bus who spent the whole journey screaming, shouting, crying, and banging her head. We were all staring at her wondering what the commotion was about (I thought she was a fruitcake) until someone suggested that she had lost someone, so we stopped staring. When she got off, Deng, who had been listening to the locals, remarked that she was indeed a fruitcake. We checked in for an overnight stay at a hotel and managed to get a late meal in the restaurant - starters, main courses, rice, 2 beers for me, all for about £2! The pork and sweetcorn dimsun was absolutely delicious

Saturday 29th August. Tour Day 7

We had another long travelling day today. I woke up at 7am to go with Stephen to see the locals practicing Tai Chi. All too energetic for that time of the morning! Later, we had lunch in a local restaurant and there were some very tasty new dishes – goose in a very spicy sauce, and sweetcorn in a crispy batter coating. At about 4pm, we got another bus to our boat for the Yangtse Cruise. We paid a quick visit to a viewing point for the 3 Gorges Dam en-route, one of the largest engineering projects in the world. Constructed to generate electricity and prevent flooding, it led to the formation of a massive lake and raised the water level upstream by up to 175m. This displaced millions of people from homes in which whole generations had lived and grown up into soulless new cities and towns especially constructed to replace the ones that were flooded.

We stopped off at a basic local restaurant in the middle of nowhere for another meal. Again, the food was very nice although half of every dish seemed to comprise chillies – sweetcorn and chillies, pork and chillies, lotus (tasted like cabbage, but nice) and chillies. We boarded our boat at ~9pm and set off down the Yangtse an hour later.

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