Thursday 5th April 2007
Woken at 7.15 by Eric, we were up and off the train by 7.45 in Wuhan. First impressions were that it was dirtier and smellier than the other places we’d visited. We walked for a few minutes across town to the bus station and clambered aboard our transport for the next few hours.
An interesting system where bus timetables are concerned: basically you have a nominal departure time which becomes adjusted to the time when the bus fills up.
Anyway, we’re finally getting some sun, the telly’s on in the bus and we’re being serenaded by the sounds of locals hawking all around us – yum.
Today also seems to commemorate some sort of festival and we’re told it’s when the Chinese burn incense and fake money for the dead. After a long, uncomfortable journey accompanied by the unmistakeable sounds of Chinese karaoke classics at head-splitting volume and even more hawking, we arrive in Yichang. It appears quite a pretty city with some nice parks but also a load of derelict buildings. It was also the first place we’d seen any churches. The one we entered was Catholic but very different from those found in Europe, very plain with no gold whatsoever, just some paintings of saints, of course with ‘dewesternised’ faces. Back near the river Yangtse and we watched the kites being flown expertly at great heights.
Later we took the bus to the departure point for our boat tour of the Yangtse and the Three Gorges Dam. The bus driver was great and took us really close. We saw an enormous amount of this immense structure. It’s hard to comprehend the scale of it. At one point we were stuck in a traffic jam but couldn’t figure out why we’d stopped until Eric told us we had to wait while some detonation of explosives took place. When it did happen we were right up close to the action!
We boarded the ferry about 6.15, and settled into our plush accommodation with smelly, but Western, toilets, and after a bite to eat settled down for the night ahead of an early start for the visit to the Little Three Gorges in the morning.
An interesting system where bus timetables are concerned: basically you have a nominal departure time which becomes adjusted to the time when the bus fills up.
Anyway, we’re finally getting some sun, the telly’s on in the bus and we’re being serenaded by the sounds of locals hawking all around us – yum.
Today also seems to commemorate some sort of festival and we’re told it’s when the Chinese burn incense and fake money for the dead. After a long, uncomfortable journey accompanied by the unmistakeable sounds of Chinese karaoke classics at head-splitting volume and even more hawking, we arrive in Yichang. It appears quite a pretty city with some nice parks but also a load of derelict buildings. It was also the first place we’d seen any churches. The one we entered was Catholic but very different from those found in Europe, very plain with no gold whatsoever, just some paintings of saints, of course with ‘dewesternised’ faces. Back near the river Yangtse and we watched the kites being flown expertly at great heights.
Later we took the bus to the departure point for our boat tour of the Yangtse and the Three Gorges Dam. The bus driver was great and took us really close. We saw an enormous amount of this immense structure. It’s hard to comprehend the scale of it. At one point we were stuck in a traffic jam but couldn’t figure out why we’d stopped until Eric told us we had to wait while some detonation of explosives took place. When it did happen we were right up close to the action!
We boarded the ferry about 6.15, and settled into our plush accommodation with smelly, but Western, toilets, and after a bite to eat settled down for the night ahead of an early start for the visit to the Little Three Gorges in the morning.
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