Day 42 - November 15th

Wake up to the boat disembarking! I open the curtains and see a wall of rock! Pretty impressive. I’m happy as no one was moved into my room last night, so I am staying in a double room and paying only the single! It’s drizzling outside!

I go for breakfast buffet, and as Leo (my man in Hong Kong), the food is just okay! I get put with the English speaking group… group Lisa, named after our local guide Lisa! We get on the coach with all these tired old people who are acting like teenagers on board! “Let’s sit in the back and cause trouble” “where’s my woman gone?” and then they start singing too! Oh dear!

The coach takes us to the Great Dam, but the rain means that we could see pretty much bugger-all! I manage to haggle for some postcards from Y20 to Y10. I’m happy! Others in the group start to complain about the standard of Lisa’s (ching)lish! Does take a lot of concentration for even me to understand her, but their tour guide rebuts them by telling them that her English is way better then their Chinese! I start chatting to the guide and help her with her English, picking out things she has said wrong! She is very grateful and I could see her using the words I helped her with in her spiel and a big smile on her face when she knows she has got her pronunciation correct!

I talk to an old Australian couple, saying how it’s a shame that it was raining and we could hardly see the dam wall. “Oh well, we can come back and see it again”… whoops, they went silent and give me a strange look… I don’t think they will be up and about for long!

We get taken though all the gift shop areas and I see some how silly some of the mark-up prices are for souvenirs! A chess set which I brought in Yiwu for the business had a price tag of Y3800. I brought it from the manufacturer for around Y20 a unit! Let’s say that the people here brought it off 2 other suppliers, both doubling the price of it for profit, that’s still less than Y100, and let’s say they try and make a profit of 100% too. That’s only around Y200! The funniest bit is that you know for sure that some idiot would buy it (probably American)!

On our way back to the boat, the guide sings a folk song for us! She told us of her story, how she used to live in the city, but then her father, an engineer moved to the 3 Gorges area to work on the dam. She became very very depressed as she was away from all her friends and couldn’t do all the things you could in the city; go shopping, hang out, find a man! But her father always told her that he was doing some thing very very important and that by building the dam, many people in China will have electricity. Harsh.

Before I get back on the cruiser, I buy some beers from a store. I get 7 beers for Y35. Some weird looking can! I get back on board and then go up to the viewing deck to watch us go through the lock system. I start conversation with the tour manager of the UK group, Gillian. She tells me of all the troubles she has had with this group and all about her line of work. Good research on what I may be doing one day! Her work takes her all over the world, she was in Thailand last week, and regularly goes to Europe and Ireland. This was her first time up the Yangtze! The lock opens and we start the slow process up the system (about 4hours).

We then watch the safety presentation (Chinese one had a total of 4 people turn up!) which wasn’t really that assuring! The riverboat guide didn’t seem to be taking it too seriously and I find it a bit funny that the talk is after a whole night on board the boat! Though Gillian says that it is the same in Germany, up the Rhine and we find out that the boat is supposed to be unsinkable and has bullet proof windows as it was once used by the Chinese President at the time.

I get talking to more of the old folk on board. We then watch a talk on pearls, where I meet two girls from Gunagdong. One was alright looking. We get chatting and I show them all my pix from my travels! Captian’s welcoming party in the evening – free champagne! (for half an hour!) Dinner was followed by a talk on acupuncture and foot massage, where Vincent, the river guide, seemed to be making a lot of it up! We then were treated to a fashion show, costumes through the ages, ethnic minorities, and surprise surprise, clothes from the store on board!

I sit on the deck round the back and play guitar for a bit and drink the beer I smuggled on board… turns out to taste like shit! Never get round to finishing the 7!

Miles walked: 283.653m