Adventures on the Yangtze

Finally back in the old Baoding.  We just had our week break or National Week, go communism!  Lee, Emily (a different one) and I decided to go on a cruise on the Yangtze river and see the famous three gorges.  What an adventure!  Lee and I had to take a 32 hour....yes 32 hour train ride to Chong qing.  Lets just say the ride was painful.  Since billions of people travel on the same week you can imagine that it is not too easy to find a sleeper train ticket so we had to sit in regular seats for 32 hours!  Oh my how I did it I will never know.  Finally arriving in Chong qing we get to our hostel and no one is there.  I call up the girl that runs the place and she has lost her key to the hostel.  So after sleeping on a couch for a hour we are taken to a random hotel room to crash.  Then hours later they find a key to the hostel.  We meet up the other Emily and go eat and walk around.  We end up stumbling upon the Chinese version of Pirates of the Caribbean shopping center slash restaurant. It was really random but yielded awesome pictures.  We were all pretty tired from traveling so we went back and watched a movie.  

The next day we set out to see a bamboo forest that someone had suggest we go see, however no one else seemed aware of its existence so we ended up checking out a botanical garden which was pretty.  We did not understand why this garden had a massive golden eagle statue but its China so ok.  We had to get back to the hostel around three to take a bus to Wuhan were the cruise would begin!

After a 32 hour train ride the nice comfy bus seats for 3 hours was no problem at all!  We get to the boat and the rooms are pretty decent.  Western toilet *not a Chinese toilet which is basically a hole in the ground* and bunk beds.  There was this cool Chinese guy that roomed with us that taught us a bunch of Chinese thanks to me always carrying around my Chinese English dictionary.  The boat had a top deck that was open that everyone chilled out at, I met a whole gaggle of foreigners from Sweden, Scotland, Switzerland and New Zealand.  

The next day we got on a smaller boat (after a small ticket fiasco) to see the three little gorges.  It was absolutely beautiful!  We even passed a mountain that had a ton of monkeys roaming around on it!  Since the river was narrowing we all got on really small boats and went along the river which was my favorite part of the cruise.  Each boat had a tour guide that sang a traditional song which is really fun to hear.  I saw a small waterfall too!

After that we went back to out to the main part of the river and they took us to this tourist trap which was lame and then later back on the boat.  That night we stopped and saw a show, and when we got off the boat a big line of horn players and drummers were on the shore playing music.  We listened to this woman sing one song and lip sing another...weird..then these men played the traditional horn music but is we funny because they would pair up and put each others horns to the other persons mouth but still play the notes....it was pretty weird.  Then the ending was this wizard looking guy that I think was telling the story on how he made the mountains split to form the gorges...but my Chinese isn't that great so ya...

The next day we got off the boat and were in Maoping which we then had to take a bus to Yicheng and then another bus back to Wuhan...basically traveling all day.  I made a promise to myself not to broadcast my Chinese skills on the next vacation.  I ended up not only handling our entire vacation planning but then had to help all our new European friends find their bus and hotel and book the hotel and so on....not so relaxing...i guess it is good practice...

Anyways we spent the night in Wuhan at a pretty decent hostel got in around midnight so basically just went to bed.  The weather was horrible so we all just hung around the hostel reading and playing cards.  Our train back to Beijing was not until 11pm.  However, this time I made sure we had sleepers.  Oh how I love sleeper trains!  Yet similar to airplanes no matter where I go there is always a crying baby!  Surprisingly the next morning waking up I heard we were arriving in Beijing, I though we had another 18 hours but I guess we had booked an express train which was really awesome.  We were able to be back in baoding Sunday afternoon instead of Monday morning which was much better!  

Although it was a lot of traveling, I had a great time eating my way through another area of China and seeing the great three gorges...one of the most beautiful areas of China!  

Now it is back to the daily ho hum...