The Yangtze's Three Gorges are looking quite full these days

March 13, 2009: I'm pretty sure the toothbrush salesman had exhausted his supply by the time we reached Chongqing. I headed straight to the "wharf" to look at Yangtze River travel options.

I wanted to visit Fuling, home of some nice varieties of pickled vegetables and the "River Town" of Peter Hessler's classic book. I wanted to go there via the river, as Hessler had done before, but i was assured that no passenger boats went to Fuling.

"How do peasants from Fuling go home then?" I asked the taxi driver.

"They sit on a bus. It takes 1 hour. Sitting on the boat takes 5 hours. Why would they sit on a boat?"

The superhighway screws the river then, or rather, the (former) river transport operators - actually it's probably good for the river itself if the peasants are kept away from it... However, the truth is the river's already screwed. a situation educated Chinese blame on a lack of awareness of one's place in the world that they often refer to as part of people's "素质“, or "quality". For the "low quality" people who throw their household rubbish into the river, they say, the river takes the rubbish away from their world - their immediate area - and that's it, full stop. Throwing rubbish into the river is thus a reasonable plan. The really fucked-up irony is that as poor people's material position improves, their non-biodegradable rubbish output probably shoots up much faster than their education level. Given "low-quality" people make up a good 800+ million of this country's population, the logical conclusion is that the whole world is fucked. I wonder what percentage of China's population have even been told the idea of biodegradable and non-biodegradable.

Eventually i gave up on Fuling, so all i wanted now was a plain old ticket that entitled me to go by boat through the Three Gorges. But apparently no-one in China wants that - only packages that include marked-up entry to the various tourist attractions along the way. After all, what's travelling in China without temples and trinkets? I was about to find out. After long negotiations the company admitted there was a plain simple ol' 3rd class ticket - and at 435RMB for the 2-night, 2-day cruise it was a bargain.

Chongqing reminded me a lot of Changchun with the addition of a skyline. It's very confusing and chaotic, a bit greasy on the pavement side of things, and undeniably, potentially endearingly, ugly...well, the parts i saw anyway.


It's built on steep slopes (not in the photo above) above the Yangtze, slopes so steep that in the central city area there are many massive retaining walls - up to 20 storeys or maybe more - so you generally can't just walk from A to B, you have to know where the staircases are and they're not advertised; and huge highways dominate the river banks, adding to the messy effect and pedestrian mayhem. The passenger wharf is so far above the river (the river looked relatively low when i was there) that a special kind of toothed railcar is provided (and whose tracks mean you must take a long detour if you want to walk down) just to get up and down from the boat.


It appears to be a converted city bus, but i've no idea how or why they'd go to the effort of bending a whole bus into the required shape, rather than just making a platform with walls. Maybe it was a face project in the 80s - "Come to Chongqing - where you can sit on a bus right down to the water's edge!". Speaking of water's edge, the rubbish layer is visible even from afar:


Chongqing is also famous for awesome greasy, spicy snacks including chilli potato pieces.

The tourist boat turned out to less shit than i was expecting, given the discount price: a three-storey floating hotel, basically, like this one.


When i first boarded, the staff simply couldn't understand what i was doing coming aboard with a boat-only ticket. Did i understand i wouldn't be able to get into the "attractions" we would be stopping at? They immediately commenced upselling me the tourism products and services i'd just spent more than half an hour eliminating.

Fellow passengers, too, didn't understand why one would go travelling down the Yangtze but not participate in tourism activities. But of course, the next day when they would return to the boat from this or that temple or fun park, i would ask them how it was and the reply would be that it was just like all the others.

A suitably motley crew of characters had emerged by the second morning on that boat: The Shanxi Coal King who was desperate to "treat" me to a Chinese prostitute at the next port;


...the paranoid Taiwan Cryogenics Mogul who, after giving it to me, wouldn't let me look at his business card in public lest the details on it be seen by the Mainland riff-raff;


...the Shaanxi county-level government goons, who oversee welfare in their county (although they had strangely little to say on the subject, about as uncontroversial as subjects get, when asked);




...and the Ningxia book editor with a daughter too fond of Chairman Mao for her liking.

So i kicked back, drank beer, smoked pipes and waited alone on the boat at various Yangtze ports, until we reached the entrance to the Gorges.






Unfortunately the most immediate way they looked to me was "flooded". Although the mountains all around are probably still at least 1,000 metres high, and the portion underwater is only a bit over 150m, they really looked like the peaks of mountains sticking up out of the water. I'm sure a huge part of the Gorges' former glory and impact on travellers was due to their narrowness, which effect is obviously completely gone now. Still insane to think there used to be massive, raging rapids 150+ metres straight down below though.

And the disappointment of a spoiled foreign tourist here or there is, of course, very irrelevant. I'm convinced that the dam has brought benefits to the majority of locals. For a start, the new towns - i didn't see the old towns, of course, but by all accounts they were shitholes by comparison. And river freight transport is so much more efficient than road that these massive drive-on-drive-off ferries for trucks are almost the most common type of vessel. The multi-storey part at the back is presumably a floating inn for the truckies.



The cruise ended at Yichang, or rather, the river port before the dam that they choose to refer to as "Yichang" but is actually an hour's bus ride from that city. Luckily, by blending in with the package tourists (ie. everyone else), i was able to sneak aboard their bus and save myself the cost of a ticket.


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Photos