Sunshine and Mah Jong on the Yangtze

It was all it could have been.

Despite our fears, both imagined and real (in terms of newspaper accounts) we ended up having nothing but sunshine and a slight haze during the first 3 days on the Yangtze where all the sights were. The final day and a half was cloudy/hazy/foggy, or just smog, but that was to be expected given the industrial towns we were passing by, and only one brief, dramatic thundershower in the whole trip.

We left Sunday night by bus for a five-hour trip that took us up above the current dam. It was disappointing to miss the lake area near Wuhan, but not nearly as bad as missing the gorges would have been. The bus ride was our first chance to look at our traveling companions. Some were quite nice, but I was in fact disappointed that they were virtually all Americans. I knew not to expect locals, who go on less splendid boats for one fifth the price, but I was hoping for at least a mix of Europeans, Taiwanese, Japanese, all of whom do go on the Regal boats, but just not on ours. I had an interesting talk with our guide as we drove through the countryside, talking about the history of Wuhan, which was for a brief time the capital during World War II -- before the Japanese came in and sent Chiang Kai Shek on to Congqing (Chung King) which remained the headquarters of the allied effort for the remainder of the war.

We arrived at our boat just before midnight and were escorted down the steps of the embankment by an array of young Chinese crew members wearing pastel colored golf shirts and baseball caps. On the bridge as we boarded the ship was a brass band (all girls!) playing Oh! Susanna. Oh, dear, I thought; I am not going to put up well with this sort of "cruise behavior." The next day we had a brief orientation to the river and then a lecture on acupuncture and acupressure from a doctor on board who was eager to demonstrate his talents on all paying customers. Having already had my adventure with acupuncture in Beijing, I decided to pass.

After lunch we headed back off the boat (which still had not moved) and back onto buses (which presumably had moved) back across the Yangtze bridge to view the mammoth dam site of the now-famous Three Gorges project. Obviously it was our guide's goal to assure us that this was going to be the most glorious accomplishment in Chinese history since the Great Wall, and I am sure most of her generation think that. We were taken past security checkpoints, right into the heart of construction where there is a model of the dam for all to admire and a lookout point which offers amazing views of both the dam itself and the locks, which are separated from the dam by a natural island of granite rock.

If one were just to look at the dam site itself, the project looks do-able and even reasonable. It is only when you ride upstream for three days and realize you are not yet at the end of the area of water to be held back by this dam that you begin to wonder just what kind of force it would take to hold back that kind of water.

Part of the dam project was building the infrastructure (roads, tunnels etc.) that would get the material for the dam to the dam site. We went through 5 tunnels Sunday night, the longest being 3.5 kilometers. In all, 27 tunnels have been constructed in the "infrastructure" stage. One comment several of the guides made was to compare the project to the Chunnel -- a project many thought could not be done, but which now everyone accepts as very natural.

Back on the boat, I dug into reading all about the river in the various books I had brought with me and the brochures I had bought at the dam site. It is a project that has to be seen to be believed.

About 4:00 Monday afternoon we finally launched and headed right into the first gorge. It was a dramatic moment with lots of excitement and everyone on deck all at once snapping pictures -- you can't shoot pictures for 4 1/2 days, so the snapping rate declined noticeably for the second and third gorge -- just like family pictures of the second and third child..

In addition to the myriad Chinese crew members, we had two American tour leaders named Jerem and Jacob, both Mormons from the University of Utah. It was their job to communicate between us and the crew when there were cultural differences, and to make the American tourists feel "at home."

"So Jacob," I asked at the Captain's welcome party on the first evening. When am I going to learn to play mah jong?

" Well," he said, with quite a look of embarrassment, " that's an issue on the boat. You will get a lesson on the last day."

"Well can you teach me then?" I asked.

"No," he said, furthermore although the trip was billed as all-inclusive -- all meals, even the shore excursions, there was an exception, and that was mah jong. You had to rent a room for $12.50 and hour.

"I don't need a room," I replied, "just lend me the game."

" No." he insisted sadly, the games could not come out of the rooms, except for the lessons on the last day.

" You see," he explained, " the boat makes a lot of money when the Taiwanese are on board because they are addicted, but it makes no sense when its all Americans -- they don't play."

So, I focused my attention on the books, conversations with my friends old and new, and the other activities which were offered from time to time, and waited patiently for mah jong.

On Tuesday we were promised our most exciting excursion, getting off our handsome 5-deck riverboat and getting into little wupans for an adventure up a side tributary known as the three "little gorges." This really was a fabulous ride. The mountains were smaller, but the river narrower and the boat just at water level, so the whole scale seemed somehow more real. I would commend the planners of this trip for their remarkable decision to give us a rest and "stretch break" on a sandbar where there were no hawkers, even though there were hawkers on other sandbars both before and after. Why the boatmen were not hooked up with the hawkers remains a mystery to me, but no one on our crew knew enough English to handle that kind of question, and my Chinese was definitely not up to the task.

Wednesday we went ashore again for the afternoon, this time in a grimy industrial town called Wuxian. We were taken to a museum which had just enough Neolithic artifacts to remind us of the archeological losses that would come when the river rises ultimately to 175 meters above sea level. We were then given a brief opportunity to walk through the town's rather depressing shopping district, and then taken to a local "acrobatics show" which was entertaining in its backwater simplicity. The first group -- five teenage boys, intended to jump through a collection of hoops, but the hoops kept falling over before they could even jump, and they spent more time reassembling them than jumping. Later a magician did several obvious tricks, but one that had everyone stumped, even after we studied the video re-play that three of us had taken from different angles.

Yesterday we were on the boat all day, with less dramatic scenery and less cooperative weather -- mostly warm, muggy and misty. I was content to finish my book on the Yangtze and get ready for the highly touted mah jong lesson at 5:00.

So in fact it is easy to learn and fun to play. We spent about twenty minutes learning what the different pieces were and managed to get in several real games before dinner. After dinner four of us decided to play, even at the exorbitant price of $12.50 and hour. I went down to the reception desk to see what I could negotiate, and there was Jacob. While the receptionists tried to resolve an issue about a key for another guest, I took Jacob aside and said I thought it was time to get the mah jong out of the bag. I was willing to pay, but I wanted a flat fee for the evening -- no room required, we would play in the bar. Jacob was skeptical, but said he would ask. And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but another Chinese staff member (whose title I do not know) who said to Jacob's amazement that what I proposed was certainly reasonable, but for not using the room I should only pay half the price. And thus, for a mere $6 and one round of drinks (which we thought we owed to the bartender) we had a delightful, very Chinese, evening of mah jong on the Yangtze.

This morning we were kept on board for reasons that were not clear to me, given lunch, and then invited to disembark. I had made reservations for Elene, Stefan, Katherine and myself at the Holiday Inn, but we were debating, based on some research, whether we should head off right away for the Dazu caves which are 160 kilometers away. We decided to come to the hotel and see what kind of driver we could find, since the public buses did not appeal to us and turn the trip into a 4 hour journey. Weighing time against money we voted to hire a car and driver for a full day tomorrow (split among 4 it is not so bad) and to use a Holiday Inn driver, so we don't have to worry about having the fare raised at the caves when the driver has you stuck -- a scam we had been warned about.

Thus with the afternoon free, we headed out to explore Chongqing. More about that next time.