We're Still Alive!

It's been a while since we've had access to the internet long enough to do a post but we are alive and well. We've done a ton of stuff since the last update and I will try my best to chronicle our adventures.

April 23 - Yangshuo

All five of us got foot massages in the afternoon before we left for the train - even Dad. He had to be coaxed into going and then the lady who did his massage beat the crap out of him. It was pretty funny. I think his shoulder was sore for a few days and I doubt we'll get him to go again. My massage was lovely :-)

We were pleasantly surprised by the berths on the train. It wasn't exactly luxury but was not bad. There was enough space for our luggage and we each had a bunk that was big enough to stretch out in. And the beds were the softest we've seen. Have I mentioned that the Chinese like really hard beds? It's awful. Anyway, we had a good night on the train and managed to get some sleep.

April 24-27 - Yangtze River Cruise

The train arrived in a city called Wuhan and then we had a five hour bus to Lichang where we had lunch and picked up some snacks for the boat. Eddie told us that the alcohol would be expensive onboard so we picked up a few bottles of wine. Ok, so maybe it was 8 bottles. We had to be prepared for anything and boy were we glad later! The cruise turned out to be everything I expected. For those of you who don't know, I dread cruises. I don't like being crowded with other people, don't like small rooms, don't like buffets and don't like being couped up. This cruise offered all of that and more!!!

We arrived at the dock to a dingy looking ship. When we boarded we were herded through the lobby, which tried hard to be spectacular but really looked old and tired, and into the dining room with it's low ceilings and stained table cloths. Our river guide, Spring, gave us an introduction to the boat and the schedule for the next day and things started to look up. There was an excursion the following day, lots of lectures and even a gym onboard. And, hey, we were there for the scenery anyway so who cares if the boat is a little old? We checked into our room, which was small but ok (we won't be in the rooms much, right?) and had a snack for dinner as no meal was served onboard that night.

The next morning we set sail. It was a pea soup kind of day and a bit drizzly. At 8am we left the boat for the excursion to the Three Gorges Dam. The dam is massive - over a mile long - but they did a good job of not letting us foreigners get too close. We had been hoping for a Hoover Dam kind of tour where you go inside and see the turbines but no dice. So we viewed it from a distance and then were taken to....the gift shop! Good grief. At least they had a nice model of the dam there. Anyway, there are some interesting facts about the dam: when the dam is completed it will be the world's largest hydroelectric dam; when finished, the rising waters above the dam site will displace over 1 million people (our local guides reported that the people were happy to leave their ancestral land and move to the new cities that were being built...do you think the government might have made them say that??); there are five locks to move boats up and down the river and they are building a "ship elevator" that will raise the boats up 113 meters in a speedier (but expensive) alternative to the locks. We hear rumors that international experts say the elevator will never work and we have also heard that the dam is built on a fault line. I can't back-up any of my claims on this as I have just tried to google the Three Gorges Dam and the Chinese goverment seems to have blocked any website with negative comments about the dam. Did you know they employ tens of thousands of people to censor the internet?? Ok, let me get down off my soap box and get back to the cruise.

When we got back to the boat we had our first of many bad buffet lunches. And thus began the downward spiral of the cruise. I don't want to bore you, so let me just say that the food was bad, the entertainment was bad and we were couped up in our room most of the time. The gym had two broken bikes but I was so desperate to burn off energy I used one. In one of the lectures the topic was pearls and we were told if we wore them it would bring us good health and get rid of wrinkles. This was coming from the guy who ran the onboard pearl gift shop...are you kidding me? There was also a talent show which we were forced to do a skit for (we were nearly booed of the stage) and a fashion show where they modeled clothes from the gift shop, including rain coats with the boat company's logo - I nearly giggled myself to death on that one. They had massage and manicures onboard but they were triple the usual price. They wanted $10 an hour for internet when we had been paying around fifty cents everywhere else. Ugh.

The one redeeming quality of the cruise was the scenery. The gorges were very pretty and you could easily spend hours watching the shoreline go by. We had passed the third gorge by the morning of Day 2 and after that it changed to mostly farm land. There are depth markers on the hills to show how high the water will rise and clearly many of these farmers will be out of luck when the dam project is completed.

We were glad when the cruise was over. The three day cruise had been about two days too long. But let's just be glad we made it safely - we had too much in common with the Titanic, our boat on the Yangtze was also an unsinkable double-hulled boat and it had only two lifeboats onboard. Each carried 17 people and there were 250 people onboard.......