Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtse (tc)

We left Hefei on an overnight train and 24 hours later, after a 5 hour bus ride at the end of the rail line, we were boarding the Min Shan, a large river boat (some 150 feet long and 4 floors high) on the Yangtse River near Yichang. This photo shows a boat very similar to the Min Shan. We arranged the trip with a local travel agent who listened carefully to our instructions: “we don't want to travel with a bunch of westerners, we want to travel with Chinese since we're in China”. We said this to avoid being immersed in Europeans and Americans in the middle of China. Apparently this request comes at a cost: a 7' X 10' room with 4 bunk beds and a squat toilet, and no air-conditioning. The air-conditioning thing was tough since the temperatures were 95 -100 and the humidity was of equal value (I mean this literally, this is not bravado). Molly and Dylan were great, and only sometimes surprised, like when they asked how to flush the toilet (the best answer was turn the shower on, the water washes over the floor and eventually sends everything down a black squat hole, most likely exiting some 25 meters away in the muddy Yangtse). Showering over the toilet hole in the bathroom floor did, however, actually become a relief after long hot days. One day we found a small watermellon in the market, hot to the touch from being in the sun. We cooled it in the sink and ate it in our room.

I said earlier that there was no air-conditioner. That might be a bit of bravado, because strictly speaking there WAS an air conditioner, there were even hopeful switches on the wall just beneath it where “ON” was clearly marked and next to this was an even better sounding switch that allowed you to adjust from LOW to MED to HIGH. We pressed the ON switch and put our fingers up to the AC – “I think it’s on… Oh, here, it just needs to be on HIGH”…”I think it’s on…” well… in any case there was a weak stream of air that if you were directly in front of the unit you could feel. We even spent some time trying to decide if there was any cooling effect from the unit, or just the weak air flow. In the end it was moot. The bunk beds weren’t directly in front of the unit (how can that be in such a small room?!) and I still marvel (and doubt) that there are any climatic conditions which called for the LOW setting on that machine, except, perhaps, if the inhabitants of the room were all dead, and they might STILL complain!

We motored up the Yangtse that first day sampans were common in the wide river
The looks from the passengers was really comical when they first saw us, but after a short while this turned into requests for photos taken with us. At first it began with requests for pictures of Molly and Dylan but soon devolved into photos of other less photogenic members of our family (no, not Renee). I’m sure that my image will go down in history in photo albums all over China, some future anthropologist will discover my smiling face scattered around China and think that I was some sort of celebrity. Andy Warhol (or someone) was wrong about 15 minutes of fame. This was three days.

After a REALLY hot night on the boat we were roused by one of the tour operators at 6 AM. Since she didn’t speak English, and our Chinese consists of counting and saying “cooked rice” it was difficult to arrive at the complex plan for the day. Especially since no rice was involved. After a bit of charades and carefully constructed line drawings of boats and rivers and clocks and passengers (and rice, for good measure) we were 20% sure of our destiny that day.

We left our large boat and boarded a smaller boat that held about 100 people. This boat traveled for a couple hours up the Shennong Brook through a fantastically narrow and steep gorge (a tributary to the Yangtse, not one of the “Three Gorges” but an astounding gorge of its own right. This truly was akin to taking a boat through Yosemite Valley, the cliffs rose vertically up to 3000 feet and when it wasn’t vertiginous rock it was steep bamboo clad hillsides, impenetrable for the vegetation as much as the steepness of the slopes. Slowly the water grew too shallow for us and we transferred to sampans holding about 20 people. These boats are flat bottomed wooden canoes, about 3 ½ feet wide and 30 feet long rowed by three men standing at the front of the boat, leaning hard and in unison onto long bamboo oars. There was one man standing in front of the boat who was the coxswain (?) I guess. He urged his rowers on and when the stream shallowed even more he began poling the craft with a long bamboo pole tipped with a heavy metal spike. There was a 5th man at the stern of the boat guiding us with a long rudder. As the river shallowed even more the fun began in earnest when the three oarsmen jumped out and ran to the rocky shore pulling on a long bamboo rope and wearing little more than bamboo sandles. The chants of the helmsman and passengers must have been “Pull! Pull! Pull!” though we felt uncomfortable exhorting these guys to go faster in the ungodly heat and humidity as we sat in the shade of the awning of the sampan. The tributary grew even more narrow until we were in a channel about 6 feet wide, littered with large boulders and stones, and the wild water rushing all around us. Turning around at the top of our journey the boatmen refitted the sampan for down river travel, steering with a long rudder from the bow of the boat and poling off from boulders and stones blocking our way.

The days on the Min Shan were like this, surprising and at times startlingly beautiful, and all times just short of miserable. Funny how you come to deal with the certainty of the heat and humidity. Since arriving in China we have been in constant heat and humidity, something Dan (my brother) once described to me akin to “being in a bowl covered with saran wrap and heated in the microwave” very apt.

Throughout this trip the discouraging and upsetting damage to the Yangtse was constant. The smaller Shennong Brook was not so troubled but the poor Yangtse was littered with plastic bottles, ironically they were often empty bottles that at one time held drinking water. There seemed to be very little concern for this third longest river in the world as they are hell bent on progress, each step leading backward, from an ecologist’s point of view.