Yangtze River Dispatch

I’m floating down the Yangtze River right now, on a big lovely boat. For a communist country, they sure charge a lot for beer on this cruise. (Another Mao anomaly: a first class on the flight from Beijing to Chongquin, where the river trip begins). What’s up with that, comrade? As usual, I shuffled to the back with the peasants.)

Cans of beer and coke are four bucks a pop on the boat right now, water even more, which should tell you something about water here. This is quite a blow--large bottles of Tsingtao, we’re talking 630 tasty mils, set us back 17 cents in Beijing.

I’d never had a challenge drinking a dollar’s worth of beer, ever. After less than 50 cents of drinking I had to call Charlie and a few other friends on my cell to boast (Andy, the tri-band rocks!), raising the price per bottle to oh about $20 per call.

The stacked, rolling hills are lovely against a backdrop of cloud-piercing mountain ranges. Every patch of green is terraced with vegetables, some on impossibly steep hillsides. How can people possibly garden at such harrowing angles? Can you see the terracing top left? Below are some vertical vegetables.

The Yangtze, the third largest river in the world, is a good 4 or 5 times wider than the Sacramento River and maybe a zillion times dirtier. I wasn't going to show this one, but oh well.

Our safety debriefing crew told us, “If you fall overboard, wave your arms, wildly, like this! Scream for help. Loud as you can. Maybe fishermen going by. But they don’t speak English, so best you get is they enthusiastically wave back to you! Some might even say ‘hi’!”

I’m sure my flesh would dissolve before a rescue raft could follow me overboard. As we float along, it’s bewildering, yet poignant, to see people crouching on flat rocks pounding their laundry with sticks and rinsing them in this muddy brown river.

The visibility is disappointing, and I really don’t know how much is attributable to fog, how much to air pollution. We pass coal-bearing barges piled high and spilling over with the black stuff, soon to be transformed into the air and all our Made-In-China goods. (Cheap at what price?)

We just passed a Buddha statue about 4-5 stories tall—whoah—near Feng Du, a legendary ghost city.

A third of the way up the hillsides you can see red markers (in Chinese, of course) that show how high the water will rise once they finish damming it at the three gorges site downriver. Whole villages (displacing over a million residents), not to mention important archaeological sites, will go under within the next few years. Ten percent of the Chinese population will thus have damned electricity, to the tune of some $70 billion.

Looming upslope are skyscraper apartment cities. These living pods have electricity, plumbing, running water—not to mention washing machines—in contrast with the crumbling villages just below, where generations have lived in the same houses for centuries and villagers queue up to share one outhouse.

These doomed old villages are the soul of the river where the people work, trade, watch everybody’s business while leaning on their mud-brick window ledges. Those who have already “moved up” from their ancestral homes and farmlands experience amenity isolation for the first time in their lives. Progress.

And here are more such cities, engineering without “soul” in the equation, just outside of Chongquin, along the riverfront–I’ll take a picture for you as we pass by.

Occasionally I do see caves and intriguing round houses built into the mountainside and charming pagodas and temples dotted along the hills. My guidebook says we passed a cave site that has 500 carved Buddha statues. I wish we could stop and explore all the caves–before the Buddhas drown and come back in their next life as pebbles.

Chongquin itself had a fine skyline, I feel obliged to say. Our overhappy overtalkative tour agent tormented us with centuries’ worth of history and admirable things on our five-minute drive through the city. From the airport, she informed us we were headed to a Szechuan restaurant, since we were in the very heart of spicy China, before being released at the boat dock.

Hers was the very kind of spirit to fill the youth Red Guards uniform decades ago, during the “Cultural” Revolution. I was afraid to let her stop talking at us. (To be fair, the guide who pulled us off the boat at the other end and shipped us to our next airport, was sweet and sweetly verbally spare.)

This dinner in Chongquin was acutely embarrassing but the most delicious meal I had in China. We arrived around 9:00 p.m., unwashed and way underdressed, when most guests were leaving. The establishment was festooned with red banners and round lamps, carved cherry woodwork, very cheery Chinese. The management kept the entire staff there, the first ominous sign, while Jackie and I sat down to our first authentic Szechuan feast—the famous hotpot.

What an extravaganza of vegetables and meats and delicacies–six or seven attendants bearing dishes took turns hurling morsels into bubbling broth (the pot is situated in the middle of the table, the gas heating elements below the table). These swirling delicacies we fished out with our chopsticks to dip into lovely sauces, while pressing our attendants into fetching more, and yet more, beer, to wash it all down.

Unaccustomed to royalty treatment, and ill-equipped to play the “rich American tourist” card, I anxiously peered round to the kitchen and noted young women standing around, staring off, tapping fingers or feet, their complement of boys pacing and jumping off things outside our window in the darkness, shouting, getting attention.

I tried to communicate to the people in charge to let their people go. I got uncomprehending stares and yet more delectable things in return. We felt compelled to enjoy it all.

The muddly brown river is yielding now to cleaner green water and steeper, wilder mountains. Time to leave urban thoughts behind.

At seven this morning I joined some people doing Tai Chi on the top open deck, shy at first at jumping in. Tai Chi is best described as a meditative martial art. My body caught onto the movements quickly, thanks to ten years of hard karate training. Our leader wore a royal blue silk outfit that stood in sharp relief against misty river mountains.

Ah, looks like the sun is trying to poke through, just in time for us to pull over and hike up Jade Seal Hill to Shiboazhai Temple. I hope the inevitable souvenir hawkers will have among their wares cheaper cans of Tsingdao beer for me to haggle over. I’d love to bring a whole case of souvenirs back to the boat, to hell with American-style beer pricing.

Have souvenirs--will travel!

I’m sitting in the upstairs portion of a bar, now; below is an acupuncture demonstration. A volunteer from the cruise is onstage, hoping that being stabbed with long thin needles will take her mind off some neck and shoulder pain. Somehow being lanced through acupuncture points along a particular meridian will straighten out whatever yin-yang issues are causing her trouble. I’m hoping he can find these elusive meridians under her copious white American flesh.

Our doctor inserts, oh, twenty, thirty needles, one at a time, sloooowly, of course. She tells us it feels, not quite like a bee sting, rather like intense pressure. The doctor says to the porcupine, “The pain you feel, it is from longtime stiffness, so hopefully needle gradually open up and unblock your energy channel.”

As he probes her troublesome meridian and inserts another foot-long needle I pray to the river gods for no turbulence. We are on a boat on a rushing river, after all. But thinking back to Tai Chi guy balancing on one foot while crouching in some animal shape, without the slightest tipple, I know these Chinese guys have intense control.

Jackie and I found an opportunity to offend our kind hosts, on this very same stage, when the crew sent out word for a talent show one evening. We performed kanku dai, an advanced black belt kata, for the crowd. Anything remotely Japanese is vile to the Chinese people. The MC introduced the next act, after a courteous bordering on curt thank you and dismissal.

“And next we have our own Tai Chi Master and onboard masseuse, ‘Magic Hands’ to demonstrate for you the beauty of Chinese culture and martial arts, the true superiority of Chinese ingenuity in the martial art and in fact in all the arts.”

And it was true, Mr. Blue Silk did some kung fu sword fighting dance that sent him spinning sideways through the air, making me want to call him Mr. No Gravity Magic Feet, too. It was more beautiful compared to the linearity and blunt force of Japanese punching and kicking. But which one kicks more ass, huh?

As the river narrowed, the water got even greener, the landscape more luxuriant, I marveled at being on this ancient waterway, in a landscape so rugged and remote in the midst of the most populous country on earth.