May 28 – Wuhan and the Yangtse
The next morning, we’re up in time for the buffet breakfast, which I expected to be a waffle, juice, and coffee. Instead, we were treated to an absolutely first-class buffet! It’s a 24-hour thing, so there’s everything from pork chops to Chinese food (duh!) to a fruit and salad bar. I ate too much. It’s a very cosmopolitan restaurant, with delegations from Africa, the Middle East, etc. All here to do business, I’m sure!
After we checked out, our tour group, who were all strangers at this point, were standing around in the lobby waiting for the tour guides to start loading us into buses. I decided to wait outside and catch a little of Wuhan’s ambience. It was 20 at 09:00, a perfect spring day. The first thing I noticed was that the air had a very distinctive odor. Egg roll with a bit of machine oil? Deb says the air smells a bit sweet. Not unpleasant at all, but definitely not Kamloops!
All of us chickens were then herded onto three buses, and we headed out for a city tour. That’s not the right description; if we actually toured the city, we’d still be there. At 10 million, Wuhan is not a first-rank city like Chongqing (33 million), Shanghai (24 million), or Beijing (21 million), but it still gets the job done. When I told Charley, the tour guide, that I lived in a city of 80,000, he laughed and told me that it would be called a village in China. It was hard to get a grip on the city. We’d be driving towards a bunch of brand new high-rise towers which looked like the city centre, but there was another cluster off to the left that looked the same, and when we got to the first cluster, there were three more bunches ahead and off to the side. Where the hell was the city centre? It just goes like that for miles and miles. Wuhan is growing at over 10% a year, which means that they build enough new housing to hold everyone in Vancouver every 9 months. Eeek! The city is on the Yangtze River, which is bigger than the lower Columbia (it’s big), and getting across it is a pain in the butt. Bridges aren’t going up fast enough, so they’ve started on a planned 7 tunnels, and by 2040, they expect to have 21 crossings built. Yikes. The energy level here is spectacular.
We then went to the city museum for a guided tour of a Bronze Age tomb. Some folks were excavating for a new building a few years back, and they came upon a prince’s tomb, estimated at 3500 years old, late Bronze Age. It was completely flooded with cold, oxygen-free water, so everything in it was virtually perfectly preserved. Apparently, this guy decided he was going to take all his stuff along with him (hard to argue with), so his four-room tomb had eight types of musical instruments, including strings, horns, drums, and bells, as well as a complete kit for wine-making on an industrial scale. Clearly, this guy wasn’t planning on running out. We spent a couple of hours there and then went for a look around the rest of the museum. Tres cool.
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This is apparently a wine carafe. I like this guy.
A rack to hold musical bells. Note the intricate bronze casting in all these pieces.
We were headed out the door to the bus when I glanced to the side, and there were Jack and Irma, our very good Mexico friends who live in Vernon. After hugs and kisses all around, we were chattering away when Debbi glanced across the entry, and there were Ginnie and Randy, Deb’s sister and her husband from Hinton. This planet is just getting tooooooo small! They had all just gotten off the ship we were going to get onto. We all went to lunch together, and much information was exchanged in the limited time we had available. Bottom line, they had a really great time, so it sounds like we don’t have to worry about any significant unforseens.
It’s getting so you have to go to China to see your friends. Ginnie and Randy from Hinton, and Irma and Jack from Vernon.
The museum grounds, with the city in the background.
Then it was on to the ship for the rest of the day to get settled in and find our way around. The ship is very nice, with a buffet restaurant and lobby on the second floor, accommodations on the third and fourth floor, a very large forward lounge on the fifth floor, and a high-end restaurant and large open afterdeck on the sixth floor. The Untermenschen live on the first floor (and possibly the zero-th), I guess. Everything is arranged around a circular atrium with open mahogany stairs that go through all five floors, and there are little shops and service providers scattered all over. Very nice, and everyone is friendly and very helpful. Our room is great, it’s 250 sq ft with a flatscreen tv (hbo, cnn, bbc are the only English channels), a coffee machine, a great shower in the bathroom, and a nice little two-person balcony. The maid comes around twice a day. All very clean and well-maintained. The only surprise was that the mandatory tip for the staff (300 yuan, or $60 each for the full trip) had to be paid in cash upfront. Don’t forget!
Our stateroom with the balcony behind the curtains.
The Rotunda with the central staircase.
We went for a bit of a walk that afternoon and found a tiny little shop that sold decent red wine for $20/bottle. Since that’s half of the $40/bottle they want on the ship, we got a couple for the room. Unlike most cruise lines, they have no issue with bringing booze onto the ship. Crossing the street was an experience. They WILL run you over if given a decent opportunity; crosswalks are just an opportunity to run over pedestrians in bunches rather than one at a time. So be careful out there! We ended up in the middle of the street with cars and trucks swooshing by about a foot from our noses, and the ones behind us going the other way were just as close! Cross with the locals. The river is very busy here, and it’s really interesting to watch as they have ships rigged out with 5×10 metre video screens as floating billboards, and quite a few ships were covered in fluorescent light or laser light displays. We began to steam up the river around 9 pm, and after everyone watched the light show until we cleared the city, we all headed off to bed to shake off the remnants of jet lag.
This is a boat. The ads change every ten seconds.
These boats are covered with rippling, constantly changing light shows. I think they’re for excursions.