Yangtze Pics

Cruising down the Yangtze

On Friday morning I left with a few others to go on a Three Gorges Yangtze River cruise. The bus ride to get to the boat was filled with old, loud, Chongqing people. A sign of things to come. The foreigners’ ears were ringing as the others screamed up and down the bus at each other, over the cacophony of a James Bond movie that had audio playing both Chinese and English simultaneously. After Bond, there was a Chinese comedy DVD, which I'm sorry to say, had a strange Jerry Lewis feel to it.

The first stop on the bus was to see a waterfall. Maybe Canada and the U.S. should take a page from China’s book and start charging people to look at Niagara Falls? In China no scenic spot comes without a price tag. For some unknown reason, the bus also stopped at some warehouse/store named Carpenter Tan, where the main products on sale were expensive wooden combs. Can anyone explain how a comb could be worth a few thousand renminbi? Once we finally got onto the boat there were a couple of hours before stopping at another tourist trap. This one was the shrine of Zhang Fei, or something like that. More pictures were taken.

Our cabin on the boat was tiny, but at least there was a western style toilet seat. Too bad hot water was lacking in the shower. We would become quite acquainted with our cabin as the trip grew longer. What was supposed to be a 3 day trip turned into 4.

From Saturday morning to Sunday evening the boat was docked in one place as a thick fog had descended over the Yangtze. By Saturday night there was a mutiny brewing on the ship, as dozens of angry passengers berated the couple of crew members standing behind the main service desk. I have no way of knowing what was being said, but it must have mostly been about the passengers not believing that it was too dangerous to keep going in the fog. After all, we started in fog, ended in fog, and had fog, fog, fog and more fog in between.

We took buses through the hills to get to the 3 Gorges Damn. It seems to me to be quite the prototypical China thing to do to make a huge pile of concrete into a tourist attraction. No mention anywhere of the millions of homes lost because of the building of the damn. And definitely no mention of the actual and potential environmental impact of the project, but there was a lovely little garden for the tourists to walk through as they snapped their pictures.

Sports Day

All the universities in Chongqing have their intramural sports competitions on the same couple of days. I and the other foreign teachers were driven out to catch the opening ceremonies of our school's competition. We arrived late, and all we saw were some Chinese style group calisthenics.

Yangren Jie

Today I visited the wackiest place you can find in Chongqing. Named "Foreigner Street", I thought we were going to a street where there would be a series of foreign shops and restaurants. Little did I know that it would actually be a strange Disney-like theme park, where the main attraction is strange toilets/sinks/bathrooms. Google Chongqing and one of the first things you will find is an image of the lovely shaped sinks.

The park was complete with a parade that included Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and "It's a Small World After All" blaring on the sound system. Unfortunately I was too busy eating some yummy Indian food during the parade to take any pictures of it.

Shopping Sucks (even more than usual)

Can someone explain to me why Chinese people have such small feet? I see men all the time who are as tall or taller than me, but I can't find a decent pair of shoes in my size. Now I don't have large feet, exactly average for shoes sold in North America. So can anyone give me a reasonable explanation as to how Chinese people don't constantly fall over from the sheer tininess of their lower extremities in contact with the ground? I think it must be super duper balance, which would also account for all those gold medals at the Olympics. If you see how they like to squat on curbs and the edges of any other large, inanimate objects, you may agree.

http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/1505340.htm

Chinese New Year

I recently returned to Chongqing after spending the Chinese New Year with a family in Hunan province. I was invited by the woman who works in the foreign affairs department at the university, Juliya, and we stayed most of the time in her family's old apartment in a town named Taoyuan. It wasn't always the most fun, but was packed full of the essential Chinese cultural experiences, and I was definitely in parts of China where no foreigners would ever go.

The morning of New Years day sounded like a war zone, firecrackers going off non-stop. We woke up just before 6:00am, b/c in that area of China it is the tradition to have a big family meal before sunrise. We were then off to the rural village where Juliya's husband grew up, to visit the tomb of his parents. It became very obvious why Juliya's husband loves reading and is a professor - it allowed him to get away from that kind of desolate, rural life.

I also witnessed drunk, middle-aged Chinese men singing Karaoke, and understand how they get so drunk. They drink baijiu, more than 50% alcohol, out of teacups, and at dinner parties there are endless toasts. Each person goes around the table and forces everyone individually to drink. At the dinner party I attended there was a special toast for me - something about improving Chinese-Canadian relations, as well as a mention about Dr. Bethune.

Stone Forest - Shilin

Just as it sounds. There was the main area where all the Chinese tourist groups went around, with people selling the usual tourist stuff, and then there were more secluded areas. Sticking around till dusk was a good decision, as the place became much more surreal.

Wild Elephant Valley and Nature Reserve

There were no elephants to be seen, but you could have a picture taken and photo-shopped to make it look like you were standing in front of one. Best part of the place was the cable car ride.

Xiding

From Jinghong we got in a little Chinese style mini-van and left for a small town named Xiding. Starting out early in the morning it was difficult to see outside the windows, and there was little to see besides flat, desolate farmland. Then once we got passed another town, where most tourists stop for the day, the landscape and scenery improved (though the road got noticeably bumpier). All of the sudden we were seeing mountains pop up through the clouds of fog.

Up one mountain we rode, our final destination being where the town holds its weekly market (plus a nice, white pagoda). There was nothing spectacular about the market itself, but there were some Hani women in their finest head gear. Our driver took us to the restaurant in the area, where he seemed to be friends with everyone, even helping prepare the fish for lunch. We had what I consider to be just about the tastiest meal since living in China, accompanied by travel companions from the UK and Austria.

On the way back from Xiding we stopped off at a small Buddhist monastery/pagoda, and then a tiny village on the side of the road. It felt a little strange walking into this village for no good reason, and then being accosted by a few women wishing to sell the white folk all their tourist nicknacks.

Xishuangbanna

Our next stop after Kunming and the Western Mountains was Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture. It is the southern most part of Yunnan, bordering with Burma and Laos. Quite different from other areas of China, the Han Chinese are not the majority in the area, the largest ethnic group being the Dai, and it feels like you have entered a new country that is half Chinese, half Thai. The name of Xishuangbanna was established in 1570 during the Ming Dynasty, at which time the area was divided into 12 sub-districts, or "Xishuang" (meaning 12 in the Dai language), for the purpose of collecting taxes. In the Dai language, a "Banna" is one thousand Mu, a unit of measurement in Chinese similar to an acre.

From Kunming we took a 10 hour ride on a sleeper bus (I didn't fit in my bunk) to Jinghong, the capital city of Xishuangbanna, which by Chinese standards feels like a little town. There is nothing much going on in the city itself, but it is a hub for travellers looking to explore the surrounding countryside. We simply sat around in a foreigner friendly cafe and met other people who were looking to share the cost of hiring a driver for the day.

Kunming

Over the Christmas/New Year holidays I had a visit from the beautiful Miss Tanya Erassova. We spent a week traveling through Yunnan province. Our various modes of transportation were complete with trains, planes, and automobiles.

Our first stop was in the provincial capital of Kunming, aka Spring City - it never gets too hot in the summer, and never too cold in the winter. Kunming itself isn't all that interesting, just another big Chinese city, but it was nice to be able to differentiate the sky from the clouds for a change.

We spent one day just outside the city in an area called Xishan (Western Mountains). Getting there was interesting, and provided the first instance in which I realized that my guide book was not to be trusted. Once there we climbed high up the mountain in search of something called the Mini Stone Forest, only to discover that there were just a few small rocks next to the path.

The first 3 pics are from Xishan. The last is from the centre of the city, and needed to be taken quickly, because of all the people begging the foreigners for money, intent on ruining our pictures.