I am spending this year teaching English in Chongqing, China. At the beginning of this month, the Chinese had a week’s holiday for National Day – the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (this year is the 55th anniversary). I spent most of my National Day holiday on the Yangtze River. Some fellow British teachers came to Chongqing from around the country and on Sunday evening ten of us boarded a big boat which would take us down the river to the town of Yichang, where we were to arrive early on Wednesday morning. Chongqing is the starting place of all Yangtze River cruises (or of course the end if you go upriver). This is because it’s where the Jialing River meets the Yangtze to increase its size, and it’s also not far from the start of the famous Three Gorges. This seems to be Chongqing’s main (only?) selling point as far as tourism goes, and assures that this otherwise dreary mass of concrete constructions makes its way into most China guides and tours. Another thing about the city is that Greater Chongqing is, with around 33 million inhabitants, the highest-populated city in the whole world. Actually, this probably is of no interest whatsoever to tourists and I only mentioned it as I rather like the idea of it, and like to make known that even though I’m in a place that no-one’s ever heard of, they should have, and it is an important place. I am clutching at straws I know, and in fact when they measure population sizes they do so in so many different ways that the population of the greater area of a city is very rarely used so there’s not really any reason that anyone would have heard of Chongqing. Anyway, I am completely going off at a tangent, and just wanted to let you all know how important my Chinese home is.

As well as the hairdressers, there was a small shop and a restaurant on-board. The woman in the shop tried to charge us ridiculous prices, as we were the only foreigners on the boat and they think all foreigners are rich. We tried to tell her that actually, we are on a Chinese salary, but she wasn’t having any of it. The other Chinese passengers fell about laughing when we told them we’d paid 10 yuan for a bottle of Coke, when they’d got theirs for 3. She wouldn’t barter with us either, so the shop wasn’t much help to us. However, when the boat stopped we could stock up on supplies for more reasonable prices. The restaurant was really good and the prices were fixed, so no-one tried to charge us more. For the first class passengers, there were huge round tables covered in many different exciting-looking dishes. For the rest of us, we had to either get a lucky-dip meal for 5 yuan, or choose a dish from a list and try to fight our way to the front of the crowd to pay a man at a table, who then gave us a receipt, which you then take to find a waitress and give it to them, who will go and get your food for you. After living for a while on pot-noodles, the fishiness meat pieces there were glorious (don’t let the name fool you – they’re really good!)

The 1st stop was at ‘Ghost Town’. We had from 6-9am on Monday to look around this place, and had to meet Betty at 5.30 to walk up to the entrance together. This was a little shocking as we didn’t realise before that throughout this holiday we weren’t going be able to stay in bed any later than 5am. The Ghost Town was really rubbish. After all of us Brits moaned a lot about having to pay extra to get a ski lift up the hill to it, we got there only to have to spend the entire time squishing past massive Chinese guided tour groups. The temples were just temples, and not even very interesting ones as the whole thing was clearly just put on for the tourists. Small stalls sold Scream masks, ghosts that hang from the ceiling, and little finger-monsters. The most interesting thing there was a group of 3 bridges. You walk over the middle one, and if you’re a good person you make it to the other side. If you’re a bad person you fall into the river of blood and are tortured by snakes etc. Thankfully, I made it. We walked back down the hill to the boat where we waited for departure. On the way, we lost two of our group, who had managed to find the better bit of the Ghost Town, where there are less tourists and you can see pictures and life-size mechanical models of Chinese hell – dumping people into hot oil, slicing them in half… Apparently, the bureaucratic Chinese have an administrative office even in their heaven and hell. It’s a pity we missed that bit really. What was actually an awful lot more interesting than the Ghost Town was the city below it which we walked through to get to the cable car. Only there did the reality of the 3-Gorge-Dam project really hit us. There were stalls along the route we followed, where people remained to try to sell souvenirs and snacks to tourists, but apart from those who stayed to manage these, the city was empty. The tens of thousands of inhabitants had all been displaced, and soon it will be an underwater city. It was like some kind of scene from a film, with loads of empty, ruined buildings with no windows, piles of rubble around them, and stray dogs roaming around. Definitely worth getting up at 5am to see.

Between the 1st and 2nd gorges, we stopped for a 5-hour trip up one of the Yangtze’s tributaries, the Danling River. We moved to smaller boats for this journey up to what is called the “little three gorges”. For some reason, they can only have 5 foreigners in one boat at a time, so our group was split in half. Whether this rule is self-imposed because they can’t stand to be around too many of us, or they think we might gang up on them, or is something to do with their license, so that if something happens they don’t harm too many foreigners at once and therefore limit the damage to China’s image in the eyes of the world, we were not told. At the start of the little three gorges we moved to even smaller boats to fit through the narrow river. The gorges were quite pretty and the water was green, which was a lovely change from the brown muddy Yangtze. However, the trip was more amusing than astounding, as the boat company had employed people to stand in boats or sit in huts on the cliffs along the way, wearing bright yellow suits and singing songs through megaphones or playing Chinese instruments to provide us with a soundtrack to our excursion. What was more impressive was the journey to and from the little three gorges, as the cliffs were much steeper, the river much narrower and the bends much sharper than on the Yangtze, and it was beautiful. We saw lots of little villages with their fishing boats tied round, and the only thing that spoiled it was the thought that within a few years these lovely small communities would all be destroyed by the flooding. I felt sad for the people, but they seem to be much less sentimental than we are. They are told that the project is necessary for China to become more developed and powerful, and they nod their heads in agreement, pack up their few belongings, and happily move away from the hut their family has lived in since time began to a shining new town and a completely new life. It seems crazy to me but then I guess I’m not Chinese.

On the hydrofoil, the seats were aeroplane-like, and one of my friends and I managed to get stuck with the worst ones on the thing – two seats right below the hatch where you could buy food and drinks, so people had to lean over you to see through it, and there was a big puddle of water on the floor. We were obviously not delighted with this, but accepted our bad luck and thought no more about it for about 3 minutes, until another flustered Chinese stewardess came running over and said “please sit over here”, and took us to prime seats which even had a table in front of them. We did as we were told, and in a few minutes a Chinese couple came in who were obviously meant to sit in these prime seats. They had probably been told as they boarded that they had to sit in the seats at the back, and kicked up a fuss about it, refusing to move. They didn’t even look at us, as they hopefully realised it wasn’t our fault, but the woman sulked and shouted at her husband/boyfriend man that there was no way she was moving. The stewardess explained to her that there were two foreigners there and obviously they wouldn’t dream of putting foreigners in those grimy seats so they’d had to move them to better ones, and this happened to be the seats this couple had been assigned. I wasn’t all that comfortable with this royal treatment, but before I could make up my mind to do the right thing and say that we’d give this couple their seats back as they had more right to them than we did, the couple were found some seats that were empty and told to sit there. The woman’s face turned into the biggest smile I’ve ever seen, and she skipped off to her new seat. Later, when I went to buy a bottle of water from the hatch, I saw that our old seats were occupied by another couple, who must have kicked up less of a fuss when told they had to sit there. I did feel quite guilty, but I’m not sure what I could have done about it anyway, as my Chinese, while slowly improving, is not yet good enough to explain that I’m quite happy to sit in the seats I’ve been given and it’s unfair and unnecessary to move these people from their nice seats, and we should keep the grotty ones. I would have been trying to mime this out which would have been hilarious and everyone would have looked at me like I was mad, and my friend would have told me to sit down and stop making a fool out of myself. So I stayed in the nice seat for the 11-hour dash back up the same river that had just taken us 56 hours to go down. It does seem a little crazy to me that you choose to do a journey and then just turn round and go back, all for the fun of it. I felt all the time on the slow boat that we were trying to get somewhere, but then as soon as we reached our destination we left it again, without even seeing any of it except for the few glances we got as we marched through the town at 5.30am in the dark after only a few hours’ sleep. Anyway, we eventually got back, after having filled the time on the hydrofoil by catching up on sleep, reading, and watching the people around us, such as a toddler whose grandfather kept picking him up over the wastepaper basket beside us so he could wee into it. I saw him do this at least 4 times, and I also saw someone be sick right into the basket. My feelings at this were not so much disgust as bewilderment. Why not take the toddler to the nearby toilet and let him wee over that? And if this was not possible, why not give him some kind of nappy? But nappies don’t seem to be things that Chinese people know about, they just have split-crotch baby grows and trousers, and let their babies wee wherever they may be, and their toddlers wee on the street, or into waste paper baskets that are right beside seats that people have to sit in for 11 hours. It’s not that none of them can afford nappies, as even rich people seem to do this. It’s just the way here. All I can say is, I hope it doesn’t catch on back in the UK.