Chengdu was where I finally crossed the path of my previous trip to China. It looked just the same. But then it looked the same as Xi’an, too — all the big cities look alike in China. The only major news was the metro: four years ago it was still under construction, and now it’s running, new and sparkling, filled with excited citizens for whom it is still a novelty. The nearly identical hostels completed the picture. No matter where you go, you’ll have English-speaking staff, a bar, a restaurant and people from all over the world. Sometimes I think it’s too much, all this sameness: you can almost forget which city or which country you are in.
We lazily dragged ourselves to see the Wenshu monastery, but found out that we had no more energy or interest in sightseeing. Our trip was coming to a close, and we were spent — all we wanted was some rest. We went to look for Chengdu’s new contemporary art museum, which was located inside a vast complex of IT companies — Chengdu’s Silicon Valley. I almost felt at home there: IT people are the same everywhere. I could even make out the project managers in the crowd — they have the same hawkish eyes as they do here at home. At night we sampled Chengdu’s bar scene, and found it to be quite satisfactory. The rest of the five days we spent inside the hostel.
One great thing that this hostel offered, which others didn’t, was a cooking course. The Sichuan kitchen is very special, and Dana seized the opportunity and took the course three times, preparing two new dishes every time. The spices used in Sichuan are unfamiliar, except one, MSG, which we know very well. Each dish receives about two teaspoons of sugar-like transparent crystals, a rather scary thought. MSG, mouth-numbing Sichuan pepper and chili sauce are the main spices used in Sichuan cuisine.
Before concluding our trip in China we decided to go for one last adventure — a cruise on the Yangtze river and the famous Three Gorges. Rather than going on an organized tour as is customary, we decided to try to organize it independently. Some online research revealed the timetables of the hydrofoil boats that zip along the river. We took a night train to Wanzhou, and there things started going wrong: the online timetables were incorrect. There goes the first of the Three Gorges — we had to take a bus to Wushan and leave it behind. On the way a truck overturned before us inside one of the road tunnels and blocked it for two hours. There went our planned side trip to the Three Little Gorges. The hotels in Wushan that I found online did not exist in reality. Things were not looking bright. Independent travel in China is not for the faint of heart.
We wandered the streets of Wushan with our backpacks, quite exhausted, looking for a place to stay, and stepped into a hotel. It rates itself at five stars, but it had only opened ten days before, and they apparently still hadn’t figured out the prices, so they gave us a suite for $18. As we were settling in they produced a photographer from somewhere who asked us to pose by the front desk, “for memory and advertisement”. Our weary and disheveled faces are apparently going to grace their future advertisement materials. I really wish I could see that.
The next day things improved considerably — in the morning we successfully boarded a hydrofoil to Yichang. The river scenery is amazing, even though the Three Gorges Dam has raised the water level by more than a hundred meters, turning much of the river into something more like an elongated lake. The gorges themselves have mostly disappeared, too, and are much less impressive now than they apparently were before, so the trip is best appreciated for its whole rather than specific spots. The boat ride ends at the dam itself — there are ship locks, but they take three to four hours to pass so the passenger ships go no further.
We boarded a bus for a tour of the dam site. The dam looks much smaller than it actually is. It’s hard to appreciate its massive scale — 2.3km in length, 180m in height; there’s quite a lot of concrete in this thing. The guide took us to a “memorial park”, where the Yangtze river before the dam is immortalized in a series of hideous murals, and some of the machinery used to build the dam is displayed, but it was worth it for the views of the dam alone. Another bus took us the rest of the way to Yichang, where we boarded our final train ride to the southern edge of China.
September 12, 2011