China : Chongqing and Three Gorges Dam Cruise
After running away from Shangri-La we made our way back to our comfortable no-name place in the inner courtyard of that 5 star hotel in Lijiang. Our bags were returned to us and we got our comfy room back ahhhhhhhh……these small pleasures keep us going!
The next day we started making plans for moving out of Yunnan. We really shouldn’t leave, we love this province so much! It is absolutely the place in China we will come back to again. There is just so much to see here and travelling is so great!
We considered several options for moving on…..do we go to Chengdu Province and catch a train to Chongqing, do we bus and train it to Kunming then to Chongqing? Do we fly? We ended up flying once again since the bus from Lijiang to Kunming was 10 hours and $20 each and then the train from Kunming to Chongqing would have been 20 hours and $50 each – making the whole trip $70 each. In the end we spent $100/each and the entire travel time took about 2.5 hours instead of the >30 hours we would have had with the other options. Another big selling point on the flying was that we have a certain amount of time before we HAD to leave the country to ‘activate’ the other portion of our visa so we needed to save time whereever it was feasible.
At the Chongqing airport we were surrounded by people trying to sell us boat tickets for The Three Gorges Tour. No one had any photos of their so called “beautiful boat” AND no photos, means no go, simple as that. Plus we’re not buying anything right at the airport anyhow! We sat down and had a coffee at the airport, tried to make some phone calls to hotels, but some had no availablity – at least in my limited knowledge of Chinese I think that’s what they were saying and many of the numbers given by Lonley Planet just were not right. We decided to take our chance and get a cab to take us to one of the listings, hoping that that hotel still existed. At the taxi stand we were lucky enough to recognize the “ctrip.com” advertisement and took advantage of the good reviews we heard from other travellers. The people working the kiosk couldn’t speak any English but put us in contact with someone at the company who did using their cell phone, he booked us a room, they got us a cab and we were off!
Chongking Guesthouse cost us about $40/night through ctrip.com, pricer than what we would have like to spend but we took advantage of everything they had – a MINI bar and HBO!!!! Yay!!!! We had oursleves a little party, complete with Canadian Club from the mini bar stock!! We also called housekeeping and got them to bring us 3 more of those little mickeys! We haven’t seen this favorite since we left home! Ahhh, again,m these small pleasures!! Unfortunately HBO only had Steven Segal to offer us, but it was English just the same and we sucked in all the familiar language. We have had enough of the CCTV 9, sensored China news and all the talk shows we’ve watched telling us how great sensoring is for the public good – what have we been missing??!!!! No BBC, no CNN, just some talk about how life would be great if they could just surpress and quell the independence movement of Taiwan. WOW…….that’s a little scary isn’t it!
On day 2 we took a walk to the boat piers cause we heard that you can book your trip on a boat right at a boat of your choice and you also get the advantage of looking around on the boat to see what room and facilities you’ll get on board, so no surprises. No difficulty getting to the pier as we had a fansy concierge to get us a canb and told the driver where we wanted to go.
Our first look at the boats was pretty frightening. They all looked like barges! We just stood there and stared at them for about 10 minutes wondering how much we wanted this trip. Before we left the hotel room we had called the famous Victoria Cruise line from the US to see what prices theyt had for the cruise. They quoted us $3400/each!!! We hung up on them. But if our second option was to ride in a barge, well, we don’t think we’ll be going! So we just kept walking and walking and eventually we realized that we were looking at the wrong wharf. We walked down to the waters edge and there were about 6 different ships, not barges, sitting at the end of makeshift piers. YAY!! We picked a couple to go on to look at – The East Queen was amazing! But no rooms…..we didn’t even ask what the price was – it had a big ballroom, dining room and I think it had a gym as well. We walked to our next choice – CITS Presidential Cruiser #4. These guys showed us all kinds of rooms from standard to deluxe to the Presidential suite. The prices were not bad either considering the manner of style you were going in. For 500 Euro total for the both of us, we got a deluxe double room with a big bathroom complete with bathtub, private deck, sitting area, self-controlled air-con and all meals included (complete with an absolutely fantastic western breakfast buffet) and site visits with an English guide for 3 nights and 4 days. We packed up on booze, picked the room we wanted and promptly checked out of our hotel as this boat was leaving tonight!!!! Whoopee! Unfortunately that meant we had to leave our HBO behind 🙁
On check out I decided to raid the last of the minibar – London’s Gin, California Wine, Finlandia Vodka – just about everything that we haven’t seen for the last 6 months and the prices were great! The girls at the front desk were giggling since everything from the minibar was gone…….Crazy Canadians I think I heard someone say!
When we returned to the pier with all our stuff our cabbie decided that he wanted to drop us off at a place where he could make a little money……we stopped in front of a swarm of about 20 men that crowded around the cab and they started reaching into the windows to grab our bags! We told the driver to NOT open the trunk until we got out. These guys are here to “help” carry your things down to the boat and since you’re going on a cruise, you have money and they will charge you accordingly. Their friend the cab driver gets a cut of this as well hence the wonderful drop-off point. When we got out and politely said, no thanks in our Chinese that we have become quite familiar with, they still insisted on grabbing at our stuff. I said “dso-kai!!!” , which very rudely means GO AWAY you ass, or something like that. They started to move away but then decided it was fun to mock me. This was by far the craziest thing we have ever experienced. In a couple of minutes we were walking down the steps to our little paradise on the water……….Maybe they’ll stow us away for the entertainment???
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