We were woken at 6:45AM by the ships PA system, thoughtfully piped into our cabins, announcing breakfastbreakfast (it was IvyIvy again), and so we (but not Madeleine... are you serious?) dressed and went to the restaurant. We had been assigned to a table, so we got our food and took stock of our table companions (who it turned out we were to sit with for the rest of the cruise). A motley bunch, but, it turned out, quite compatible -- the social interactions were perhaps the best part of the trip.
From youngest to oldest: a German student nearing the end of a two month summer internship teaching English in a Chinese Kindergarten in Chongquing, two tall and very blonde Norwegian nurses in the midst of a three month world tour (they had reached China on the Transsiberian railway), an Australian couple (the quietest of the group... I didn't learn much about them), and a retired American couple from Phoenix, he knowledgeable and charming, she funny, loud, very opionated (but not abrasively so), and very, very social (as she told us, you can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but you can't take Brooklyn out of the girl!). We laughed a lot and also hung out together when away from the table.
About half the passengers were foreigners, and half Chinese, which was good, because although we didn't mingle, it didn't feel like a "made for foreign tourists" experience.
At 8:30AM we left the ship to see the Ghost City, which was mostly a disappointment -- despite being a real Buddhist temple, it felt a little Disneyfied (an impression which was heightened by our useless local guide, whom we abandoned shortly after getting into the site), and then the rest of the day we spent relaxing for almost the first time since getting to China. Madi and Lidia got pedicures or facials or massages or some such beauty treatments, I caught up on blogging (I had fallen behind due to the hectic pace of the previous days and to the fact that I had battled a cold for a couple of days, which left me with less energy for creative work... yes, this is both creative and work!), and from time to time we sat on our deck and admired the views.
The Yangtze is a huge river, and even when it isn't going through gorges, it has cut itself an impressive valley. On top of that, there were many towns along the banks, with stunning bridges from time to time across the Yangtze... almost all of which (towns and bridges) were new, because the construction of the Three Gorges dam (about which more later when we see it) raised the water level all the way back to Chongqing... some 450km upriver... flooding many old towns and roads, requiring them to be rebuilt higher up the valley sides. Officially some 1.3 million people were relocated... but I wouldn't be surprised if the figure was much higher. Although the valley is not as densely populated as other places we have seen in China (the terrain is often very rugged), there were a lot of good-sized towns along the way.
All in all, I found it very impressive... and again I found myself reaching for fantasy and science fiction for comparable images -- I can't think of anywhere else that I have seen in the real world that is quite like it. The books that came to mind was Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series, set on a world with an immense, world-girdling river, along which the main character makes his picaresque way. If you have read them, it felt a little like that. If not, forget this paragraph ;-).
In the evening before dinner there was the captain's welcome cocktail party. I've never been on a cruise before, so this sort of organized social event was new to me, but I suspect that even if I had been on cruises, I wouldn't have seen something quite like this. The captain after being introduced by IvyIvy, stepped forward and barked at us for a few minutes -- more Japanese than Chinese it seemed to me -- before signalling the end of his speech by applauding himself in the best communist style (or at least, so I am informed by Lidia, who saw many such events while growing up in Romania). Then some of the other crew members were introduced, and duly applauded. Then the individual cabins and groups were called up to have their pictures taken with the captain, with a beautifully dressed hostess kneeling on either side in front and holding up a gaudy banner with the name of the cruise ship. It was all quite surreal....
One last thing: unfortunately there is no Internet on the boat, so this, and the previous blog posts I have caught up on, won't be sent until we get to Shanghai. Sorry for the delay....
