Speeding to a Halt

Formula 1 is the sport that I follow and Sunday 15th was the day of the Chinese Grand Prix. Although we didn't have many TV channels in the cabin of the Yangtze river cruiser, and all were in Chinese, I had some hopes that the local race would be covered. Vain hopes! There was no wi-fi on the boat and mobile data, though working excellently whenever I tried it, was expensive. Hence I didn't even find out the result (Rosberg's maiden win) until the next day.

The day was supposed to complete with a talent show, but we gave it a miss and lounged in our cabin. Around 10pm I looked out of the window and all I could see was a sheer face of concrete a few feet away. We'd reached the ship locks early.

A flight of five huge ship locks carries shipping from the top of the Three Gorges Dam to the bottom. Normally, the height of the water above the dam is 175m above sea level, but currently it was only 163m to allow space for anticipated spring floodwater. Hence, for the whole cruise, we were looking at a 12m-high pale stripe at the bottom of every cliff, washed clean by the water and contrasting starkly with the dark grey expanses above.

The water below the dam is maintained at 62m above sea level at all times. Hence the ship locks normally bring ships down 113m in five steps of about 22.5m each.

The lock compartments are HUGE. Our cruiser was five stories tall, probably fifty feet wide and a couple of hundred feet long, and each lock could hold SIX ships that size.

Most people saw the ship through the first lock and then went to bed. Color, the river guide, told me that because the water was low above the dam we'd only be using four locks. Since it took about 35-40 minutes for the set of six ships to pass through each lock, I did a quick bit of maths and decided to stay up for the whole process. I don't imagine I'll ever do this trip again, and all I'd miss for my bit of lock-based "geek porn" is a bit of sleep.

I should have done the maths above (with answer 22.5m, which is more than 12m by which the water was low, because that means it would have been pretty unlikely that we could have missed out a lock). I didn't, and consequently was disappointed when the "last" set of huge gates opened and revealed they'd been the last-but-one set and my bed was still three-quarters of an hour away. D'Oh!

At the end (circa 1am) there was the pretty sight of the big suspension road bridge across the Yangtze, all lit up in the night with picturesque reflections. No regrets.

Monday morning saw our visit to the Three Gorges Dam. Huge and impressive, but not great to photograph - near to it's just a lump of concrete and further away it's obscured by the thick, polluted air - foggiest in the mornings and clearing later to varying extent.

The guide provided by the dam repeatedly pronounced "ship locks" as "shplocks", which must attract giggles from every English-speaking group she has - poor girl.

A final hour of cruising brought us to the outskirts of Yichang, where we transferred to a coach and went into town for a great Sichuan lunch, probably the best of the whole trip. We then had a four hour drive to Wuhan, which we only visited in order to get on the high speed train there the next day.

The route took us through the Chinese countryside, giving an opportunity to get an impression of how things are done there and how people live (as far as is possible whilst passing at speed). Most of the houses are similar - two-storey, well-built and modern. There are small buildings by some of the fields where farmers rest during their work, so shouldn't be confused for dwellings. However, there were some with obvious signs of more extensive, full-time habitation, reflecting a fair degree of poverty for at least a small percentage of the population.

Wuhan, even as a waypoint, did hold some interest. We saw old, fairly run-down areas, and I was just about to comment on the contrast from so many new buildings we'd seen elsewhere when I saw that the next area along was being demolished. We proceeded past many flattened areas and then past more where rebuilding was in progress (rows and rows of tower blocks, of course).

It's the same story everywhere - China is exploding!

We rounded off the day with the last included meal of the tour, unfortunately probably the worst - bland and with the gristle and bone that I'd feared we see throughout but thankfully have seen little of. Then on to the worst hotel of the tour, fortunately just one night and close to the station.

The rest of the tour was a whirlwind. On Tuesday we took a three-and-a-half hour bullet train trip to Nanjing. Designed for 350kph, we saw 303kph indicated on the display in the carriage as we enjoyed more countryside views - tiered fields, paddy and otherwise, all with little surrounding earth lips to facilitate irrigation. Sprinkled widely are little clusters of graves and shrines, where people have been buried beside the fields they worked in life.

In Nanjing we treated ourselves to lunch at Pizza Hut, chosen because Clare thought she was having a reaction to eating rice at every meal. Interestingly, the tip we offered was declined, here and at a few other places later. We visited the Confucius temple and a museum commemorating the "Rape of Nanking", when Japanese troops murdered 300,000 people (1/3 of the city's population) in six weeks at the end of 1937, and thousands of rapes were committed.

The Sino-Japanese war started in 1931 and the conflict became part of the Second World War, so they'd date the war as 1931-45, where Europeans would say 1939-45 and Yanks 1941-45.

In the evening we continued our "Western" theme with dinner at McDonalds and a trip round a Carrefour supermarket, of which there seem to be a fair number here.

On Wednesday we had another bullet train ride, this time just 1 hour to Suzhou. Our local guide was a real old-timer called Mr. Tang (all our other guides had been introduced by adopted "English" names - Benny, Jimmy, Sophia, George, Peter). Although it was nearly the end of our trip, Mr. Tang acted as though he was taking charge of the whole trip and one of our Bangkok-based teachers said "I wouldn't treat four-year-olds like this". Mr. Tang started talking about "Shoe" (not even Mr. Shoe) and it took everyone a while to work out he meant national guide Jason.

Suzhou styles itself as "the Venice of the East" and we took a canal boat trip, wondering how true that was, since many of us had been to Venice. There was a smallish narrow section which was reminiscent of Venice, tastefully decrepit, other bits more Amsterdam, but most of the trip could have been on a river anywhere.

Apparently the most picturesque parts are due for renovation because they have few amenities, such as non-public lavatories (emptying chamber pots into the canal being de rigeur), and very few younger people will live there. A bit of a shame, in the sense that it's hard to imagine it'll be done in a way that preserves any of the current charm, and so they'll kill the goose that lays the current tourist egg. Still, I don't suppose the people living there see much tourist gold.

Lunch was great; a big bowl of noodles with pork vegetables for just 90p in a real working-men's lunch-spot. Then we were on to a silk factory where we were amazed by a machine that unwinds silk from eight cocoons and spins that into a single thread, being done tens of times side-by-side.

We finished at the "Humble Administrator's Garden", a beautiful arrangement of oriental walkways, cloisters, low pagodas and pergolas weaving their way across and around a patchwork of small lakes.

This was beautiful, but everyone was exhausted with the pace of the last few days since the Yangtze cruise, and just longing to have free time in one place for a few days.

Dinner was at McDonalds yet again as we waited for Clare's tummy to right itself.

On Thursday 19th our wish was granted. A last 35-minute bullet train ride took us mainly through built-up areas into Shanghai. Reaching our final hotel in China our local guide used all our cameras in turn to take a last photo of the group. We celebrated our freedom by doing nothing for the rest of the day.

Dinner was in the hotel, at a bar table with the Aussies, from the minimal western menu. I ordered sirloin but got something rather more like a thin cross-section through a side of ribs. Someone else ordered ribs and got a respectable lump of meat with no bone. Damn.