Slow boat through China
Thrilling gorges soar above you on this swish Yangtze cruise
THERE are not nine million bicycles in Beijing, as Katie Melua sings. There can’t be because there isn’t room for them among the nine million cars clogging the roads.
‘It takes four hours to drive north to south,’ says my guide, Jade, as we join yet another snarl-up.
I am in Beijing for a couple of nights’ sightseeing on my way to cruise the Yangtze River with Sanctuary Retreats, but it takes just a couple of hours to learn that in China, size really does matter.
There’s one of the biggest squares in the world (Tiananmen), the largest complex of palaces (the Forbidden City, where the Ming and Qing emperors once lived) and Chairman Mao’s massive mausoleum.
The city is buzzing — but after a few days I’m ready to escape to the peace of the river.
Sanctuary’s Yangzi Explorer is the smallest cruise vessel on the river (just 124 passengers vs 300 or more on others). The crew are excellent, as is the food, with plenty of Chinese dishes — happily none featuring the pig snouts or tails I spot when we visit a market in Fengdu city.
Some of the boat’s decor is old-fashioned, but my cabin is beautifully decked out. I even have a day bed by my balcony. But there’s no time for dozing.
This four-night cruise, from Yichang to Chongqing, is packed with everything from lessons in making dumplings to lectures on Chinese medicine, and a trip to the Three Gorges Dam — the largest hydroelectric power station in the world.
As we sail through the famous Three Gorges — Xiling, Wu and Qutang — our guide, Max, is on deck pointing out the highlights of the third-longest river in the world. Before engines came along, naked men formed human tractors to pull the boats upriver. They do a brief demonstration along a tributary of the Yangtze, but the men keep their clothes on.
Max also tells us about the mysterious 12 peaks in Wu Gorge that, legend has it, were wicked dragons slain by a goddess. Sadly, the mist is so thick we can’t even see the peaks.
My fellow passengers are predominantly Americans with some British and Chinese.
The scenery along the river bank is dramatic, forested, dotted with houses, and with perilous-looking roads clinging to steep cliffs. But often we sail past unsightly high-rise cities built to rehouse the 1.3million people whose homes were flooded by the dam, which raised water levels by 113 metres.
After their ugly grey, it is a relief to sail into the neon nirvana of Chongqing. It’s the end of the cruise, but I stay on in the city to visit the Dazu rock carvings — 10,000 of them up to seven metres in height. They were chiselled out some 800 years ago and depict the life and death of Buddha and the horrors of hell.
It’s like reading a book, says my guide, but this being China, it is — of course — an epic.