Check out this morning – bags out at 8.30am never to be seen again! Well I guess we will but not sure when! Han luggage for our flight later today is loaded on the bus and off we wander to Tiananmen Square – Tony out in front with his cardboard APT sign to follow.
Tiananamen Square
Once again a huge crowd on Tiananmen square with our usual 5000 tourists! The square is surrounded on 4 sides by one side a huge building able to seat 10,000 people or buffet 5000 (ahh that’s where my 5000 comes in!). 2nd side is Chairman Mao’s Mausoleum with (here we go again) 5000 people in the queue – and I’m not kidding! Apparently Mao is still revered as a God to many Chinese and they flock in their thousands to see him. Another side of the Square is the Tiananmen Gate we went through yesterday to enter The Forbidden City and the 4th side is some ginormous museum! As already said, everything here is big!
Leave Tiananmen Square and wander down the backstreets to find our bus amongst the other (you guessed it) 5000 buses! Anyone ‘really’ desperate could always use the open air squatting toilets on the footpath along the way! None of our group appeared that desperate though!
Onto the bus finally and head out to the airport with a stop along the way for a bite of lunch at a Chinese equivalent of Subway.
Back on the bus again and out to the airport – all very civilised, handed our boarding passes inside the door – still haven’t seen our bags – they’ve already gone somewhere! Currently writing this on the plane – on to our 4 day Yangtze River cruise later today.
Arrive in Yichang.
Considered to be a new city by Chinese standards with wealth coming in from the Three Gorges Dam project but not really sure who’s getting the ‘wealth’ bit – appears to still be a very impoverished area. Due to fog and no river traffic we now have a 2 hour bus trip to meet our cruise boat above the dam lock system! It’s not all bad though, the bus trip takes us past the ‘real’ China – poor, dirty and very over populated. The Three Gorges D, project however has seen the construction of what we now drive through – these AMAZING road tunnels under the mountains through the gorge system. The longest tunnel is nearly 4km long and there are 5 of them!
Finally arrive at our cruise boat ‘Victoria Anna’ and greeted with a pleasant surprise of what we now know to be a ‘typical’ cruise boat. Rather luxurious with staff running hand over foot to please. We were all very tired and hungry after not having eaten anything since before we left Beijing, so it was straight to the dining room upon boarding where the buffet dinner was ready and waiting. A hearty feast was had by all then we were given keys to our rooms where most of us just headed for bed. Kemm and I decided we would check out the boat in the morning. I was one of those many amongst us, absolutely pooped!
