Carry on cruising

Still November, getting colder - Chongqing to Yichang on a boat

After our idle time down south, we idled it up a notch by flying to Chongqing to begin our voyage through the Yangtze's famed three gorges (or as I now like to refer to them, the 2 gorges, but more of that later).

The taxi drive from the airport was superb because A) our taxi driver drove like he was in the film Taxi and B) the night time approach to the city over a long bridge looks like something from a manga. However, 'qing was shrink wrapped in low cloud, cold rain and was, as a consequence, crap. No worries; we were only there to get onto the boat.

The boat was a smaller and more primative version of a cross channel ferry; grubby and judging by the food, chef had 'been to Iceland'. The cruise lasts for 3 nights and 2 days and travels down stream through the gorges. The scenery was mostly restricted to the 2nd day, the first being a conveyor belt of low hills heavily scarred by human stupdity.

The gorges, when they came, were good enough; they impose themselves on you through their scale alone, although we saw them from 150m above the original water level of the river prior to Chairman Mo's dam nonesense. We also took a smaller boat cruise up a side gorge, which provided further vertigo inducing cliffs (one of which has some coffins placed in caves several hundred feet up...).

But despite all of the fine scenery, the trip was slightly marred by the Chinese tourism experience. The basics of which are as follows:

1) Wherever you go, get a photo of each of your party obscurring the fine view and pulling the same face.

2) Why walk or queue, when you can run and form a mob. This will save minutes in the long run and you never know when the world will end.

3) Never spend more than 5 minutes at any one site. As above, this will gain you extra minutes back on the bus/boat.

4) Each site of interest should be accompanied by at least one gift shop, if not more. This point is very important.

5) Behave like sheep - get herded, make lots of noise and don't take any notice of your surroundings.

6) Try to observe at least one of the gorges at night, when you are asleep.

The above was demonstrated on a number of occasions, but best when we toured the dam project on the final day. Despite driving along the top of the dam in a golf cart (tick off another one of my ambitions), it was about as much fun as sniffing a builder's 'pit whilst travelling to work on the Northern line.