We Prefer Zero Star Boats.

On the morning August 23rd we left Wuhan by a series of vans and buses and ended up in Yichang, another Yangzi riverside city. We had talked to our Wuhan hostel staff and they booked us on the cheapest possible river tour possible with somewhat complicated directions; we'd go from certain cities by bus, then boat, then hydrofoil, then bus, supposedly to meet random people who were hired to help us. I know, it seemed kinda shady to us too, but we had to simply trust that we'd get through it somehow. That afternoon in Yichang a random lady met us as we got off the 3 hour bus ride and said she was to take us to our boat...we were a little wary about trusting her, but once she got us onto the boat we thought it would be ok. And now for the boat...When we first saw it, we all just laughed out loud. By American standards, this thing was a piece of...well, just a piece I guess. It'd appall any normal American traveling abroad. It was a three floors, each floor having about 15 or 20 rooms I suppose. It was pretty dirty and cramped, and if I was an inch taller I would have had to duck throughout the whole boat. Our room was about as wide my wingspan and twice as deep; I don't know how they fit two bunk beds in there. We had a small closet like thing in the corner with a squatty potty and sink, so I guess technically that qualifies it to be called a bathroom. They had cut a hole in the upper call of our room so that they could fit an air-conditioning unit that could blow out air into our room and the room next to ours. Since the boat was full of Chinese tourist families there were cute kids running everywhere; made it quite an exciting little boat. Don't get me wrong, this boat was pretty dingy, but we hadn't paid very much for it either and were totally loving the experience, calling the boat "mei you xing" (zero stars). The boat had a lookout deck in the front so when we left the small city of Yichang around 6 PM we went up front and enjoyed watching the sunset behind the huge hills that were forming on both sides of brown-watered Yangzi River. As night came we entered the locks of the infamous Three Gorges Dam, one of the hugest dams in the world that is surrounded in controversy.
The Chinese government finished building it in 2006 to help meet the country's growing energy needs, but it came at a cost: displacing millions of people and as the water behind the dam rises each year some people fear it will erase the beauty of the gorges along the Chang Jiang (the Yangzi River...means Long River in Chinese). In case you were wondering, a gorge is composed of two huge cliffs that usually are on both sides of a river. There are many along the Yangzi with different names, but the most famous are a series of three gorges called The Little Three Gorges, though I don't know why they call them little because they are no where near little. This is the main attraction of the Yangzi and we were to get there the next day. Oh yeah, so the locks: so we'd go through huge gates on the side of the dam (couldn't really see it from the boat), the gates would lock behind us, they would fill the huge cement cubicle with water, we'd rise with the water (along with tons of other boats, these gates and locks are the biggest in the world), go through the gates in front of us, and do the process all over again. In this way we could go up in elevation to get to the river behind the dam. When we went to bed (smelling like sweat and hoping that there weren't any bugs in the blankets they gave us) it was about 11 pm and we were just coming out of the locks.

We got woken up at 6:15 AM with a pounding at our door saying we had to get off the boat in 5 minutes. Scrambling to stuff all our things into our backpacks we groggily woke up and got off the boat at a small riverside town called Wushan with the hired lady who had got us onto the boat. She said we were to leave our stuff behind the counter of this random shop on the port and get on a smaller tour-seeing boat that would take us up a Yangzi River outlet to the 3 Little Gorges. Keeping our cash and passports with us, we put our big bags behind this lady's counter and got on this two story tour-seeing boat, finding a table on top in the open. The next 2 hours were just a peaceful cruise up this smaller river off the Yangzi; the scenery was just incredible: going on this river with huge cliffs on both of sides that seemed to reach to the sky and I'm having to crane my neck back to see the tops. We got on an even smaller boat at an even smaller outlet to go through the 3 Little Gorges and see their awesomeness. I feel like I'm using the words awesome, incredible, insane, beautiful, etc. a lot in this blog, but that's really the only way I can describe doing all these things. It was just having my mind blown away day after day. I could try to describe the 3 Little Gorges more, but I'll have to let my pictures do the talking. I do wanna mention that as we got back on our medium sized boat from the 3 Little Gorges we witnessed a full on Chinese fist-fight/brawl that involved six people and a man getting thrown down a flight of stairs. Apparently they were fighting over the same table. Lesson learned: never fight a Chinese dude over a table. Anyway, by the time we made it back to Wuhan it was about 12:30 pm and our random tour lady took us to buy hydrofoil (a fast boat) tickets to Wanzhou, a city farther up the river.

We entered the hydrofoil around 3 PM and 2 hours later got off at Wanzhou, just another riverside city covered factories (there's a lot of coal production along the river). Pretty exhausted we got onto another bus that took us through some, again, amazing countryside (this time with cliffside farms and lush green hills) and 4 hours later finally ended up at our final destination: Chongqing. Chongqing is riverside city too it's a huge metropolis with millions of people and skyscrapers. So, after not showering for 2 days and surviving on instant noodles (a traveler's staple food) and peanut butter sandwiches, we showered and feel asleep in real bunk beds, wondering what lay next for us in this city.