The Sewer at the Center of the World

The Yangzi is dirty, really dirty. That's what I noticed when I took a cruise on it with 3 of the other teachers. A boat trip through the Three Gorges area is a standard Chinese vacation. If you're like us and like to ride cheap, you get on a small, rusty ferry-like vessel and spend 3 nights sweating profusely in a four-person cabin with a Chinese toilet that produces wonderful smells. The river is completely brown and profuse with garbage. Paradise on earth.

That toilet started a ruckus the moment we saw it. You see, a western toilet had been a selling point for the entire trip, and once realized the lack thereof, the arguments started and our booking agent, "Jimmy" Yin bolted. It turned out we had gotten some bad information from certain parties and Jimmy wasn't really at fault, which I told him when I caught up to get the room key. However, Jimmy did manage to put us at the immediate fore section of the ship, so the 4 biggest people on the boat were occupying the smallest room.

It was nice to wake up that first morning, drenched with sweat because they turned the AC off at 11 and ponder the misery that we had shelled out 5oo Yuan for. That first day, walking up this silly historical-theme-park tourist-trap "ghost mountain" thing, I felt like a human faucet. Gradually I began to adapt to the discomfort. I stole some deck chairs from the "entertainment" deck and we passed the time reading on the foredeck, where there was a breeze...when the ship was moving. Aside from a Korean couple, and a Chinese-American family from San Francisco, we were the only foreigners on the voyage. The Chinese passengers busied themselves doing laundry, playing cards, drinking beer, and eventually stripping to their waist.

This explains a lot.

The cruise took us through some empty, dingy towns and some pretty "meh" tourist attractions. On the third day we reached the gorges. The first was quite astounding, but short, and the second two equally majestic, but more of the same. The real treats were the "Lesser" Gorges, which we reached by taking a smaller boat up another river. The water turned green and blue and the cliffs came closer as the river narrowed. When we stopped at the beginning of the 3rd "Lesser," Sean and I decided to blow 10 Yuan on "smart water" from a "wise spring" up on the cliff face. We later boarded a smaller skiff which took us further up the narrowest part of the gorge while the boatswain sang unintelligible river songs and the tourists took action shots wearing traditional fisherman's garb at the front of the boat.

We reached the dam--the massive monstrosity which supposedly made the Gorges less beautiful--on the last day for a tour which disappointingly did not take us inside the behemoth. It was smaller than I expected.

Leb Wohl.