Yangtze River Cruise: Yíchāng

Monday, 15th April, 2013.

We flew from Shànghǎi to Yíchāng to begin our Yangtze River cruise.

 

We were going to cruise upstream from Yíchāng to Chóngqìng, a distance of about 200 km.  We would take four nights and three days, making some stops along the way.

Chóngqìng is pronounced “Chong ching”, which is easy to remember.  There must be some subtle difference between the pronunciation of the “ch” and “q” sounds, but I don’t think I’m linguistically ready for that yet. 

 

Yíchāng was much more how I expected China would be.  Lonely Planet rather unkindly describes it thus:

“A scruffy city of four million souls, Yíchāng is on the map as a hopping-on or hopping-off point for ferries to the spectacular Three Gorges”.

 

If you look on the far left of this rather poor photo (taken through bus window), you can just make out a man carrying a load over his shoulders with the traditional bamboo pole.

 

Another poor photo, although I probably should blame my shaking hand as much as the glare from the glass of the bus window.

The road from Yíchāng to the river, which looked as though it had been hastily built last week, was single lane, down a precipice, and with hairpin bends so sharp that the bus had to do three (or more) point turns to get around some of them.

 

I was so relieved to arrive at the pier, where our ship was waiting for us – I wasn’t expecting anything so grand.  I think the man with the red Chinese flag is stopping our bus from driving into the river.  If the driver was feeling as nervous as I was after that horrific descent, he’d need a bit of reassurance.

Our cabin was on Deck 2 (the one with no lights), but it was still wonderful.

 

Here is our delightful cabin, much bigger than I expected.  I thought of the tiny hole under the water level on the Fairstar that Carol and I shared when going to the UK in (yes) 1970.  There were four bunk beds, a shoebox of a bathroom, and only enough room on the floor between the bunks for one person at a time to stand to get dressed.

This cabin was our little, or should I say spacious, haven for the next three days.

 

Passengers who arrived after us were greeted by drums and two dancing dragons.  We must have charged down the cliff face too quickly, and caught the dragons by surprise.

 

Not quite the Grand Hyatt in the Jīnmào Tower, but the view down from the top deck to the ship’s foyer was still pretty impressive.

 

While the Yangtze is navigable all the way to Shànghǎi on the coast from Chóngqìng and beyond, it is the section between Chóngqìng and Yíchāng that is the most scenic, so here we were.

We settled down in our cosy cabin for the night.