September 20, 2009

Day 18, 19 & 20 - Three Gorges Tour

Day 18 - The Dam

Checked my results in NPal at 6am and started off with our Three Gorges Tour. Met up early in the morning at 6.20am and had a 5 hours bus journey to our lunch destination. The food was very good! Something that's not too spicy, oily and salty. Then off to our first scenic spot - Three Gorges Dam.

However, the weather is not very good. It is too foggy, so only part of the dam is visible. But I can tell that it is a very big dam. Then we had a tour around the surroundings, then went for dinner elsewhere.

Waited for quite sometime before we boarded the 4-star cruise at a Yichang jetty. "4-star" sounds nice, but it doesn't look as nice. The rooms are very stuffy and a stench. One of the rooms have 3 rats in it!

Day 19 - It's GORGES!

Woke up at 5.30am for breakfast in the cruise. Our ship docked at 白帝城 and we will be going around that island. There's nothing much there except the 200 plus steps of stairs which is longer than the one in our WUST campus of 135 steps only.

Back to the ship to have lunch and had some sightseeing at the top of the cruise. There, the tour guide told us about some amazing stories about the mountains, such as a part of the mountain shows a rat, an area on the mountain that looks like a foot, a rock at the top of the mountain that actually looked like a lady at 神农溪.

Later on, we headed to a smaller ship to cruise around the mountains and we managed to see coffins suspended on wooden planks. It still remains a mystery to how it is placed there. Later, we ended up somewhere where we will be taking small boats like sampans. The sampans are rowed by the local Tujia people, and they are VERY STRONG! They can even pull the boat! Totally amazing.

Night time was the best. Our ship actually went into the water locks! It was very cool, you can see the gates slowly closing and our cruise is lowering down in height to get into the next gantry. Worth the trip.

Day 20 - It ends here

Had breakfast on the cruise and we left. It was raining quite heavy at Yichang. Had a long ride back to campus because of the rain and the route the driver took. Had a late lunch at the wanton shop, and dinner at Mala hotpot. The weather is getting colder now I guess. The wind is really strong and cold and rain is coming too.

Reflections
The standard of a 4-star cruise here and a 4-star cruise back in Singapore IS REALLY DIFFERENT! The facilities here is really bad and once in a while you can smell fuel of the ship. The worst is the weird stench in the rooms and the uncomfortable toilet. What the cruise have is just rooms, a few recreational rooms(eg Mahjong) and a eating room. What's worse is the rats, very unhygienic of the ships. Our tour guide told us that the cruises here is filled with rats. If you can find a rat in Singapore cruises, it will be a big matter.

The dam and the water locks were really MASSIVE! It's so much bigger than the Marina Barrage in Singapore. I just wondered, how they actually build such massive structures. The fascinating thing about the water lock is that, it can actually drain out the water to lower the water level for ships to pass through the gantries.

From my point of view, the people here are quite easily agitated and tend to get into quarrels when they are unhappy with anything. There's one tourist unhappy with her room when we boarded the ship and quarreled. Today, saw another commotion at a store again. I think patience and giving-in is very important in our lives. Sometimes it's just unfair.

Our OIP team!

My group with a gigantic tractor!

An obscene public toilet.

The very very small toilet in our cruise room. You have to get right into the toilet before you can close the door. What's worse is that unluckily my room's toilet door can only lock from the outside.