There was a sudden end to the cruise (from my perspective!). Expecting the cruise to end at 3pm after the "3 Gorges Dam" tour (as stated upon my intinerary), I learned from a knock at the door at 10am that we were all checking out that morning, and the tour of the Dam occured after docking! This left me in an interesting situation with having to dry my hand washed clothes on the move!
The dam is controversial - many people had to be "relocated" to allow it to be built, and there are questions as to its effects on the environment. At the same time, the smog tells its own story about how much of a need there is for clean energy. The tour of the dam was included in the price. If I had to pay for it, I would have felt ripped off. We took bus journeys to look through the haze from 3 different angles. Each time it looked concrete and soulless! From an engineering perspective it is somewhat interesting, but there was too much gift shopping and "isn't Chinese engineering great" interspersed between the bus rides!
After the tour, I had time to kill before my late train. Looking for somewhere "safe" to eat, to delay using the lethal train toilets as long as possible (I was riding cheap hard seated class all night), I took special steps to avoid Macdonalds and searched long and hard for a Chinese burger alternative! At the same time, I found a Chinese Walmart, laden with open spices, strange fruit and vegetables (extra points to anyone who can identify the one photographed - it may be what's been in my curries), and most bizzarely, live frogs waiting to be bought for people's dinner.
I had time to kill at the station, and as usually happens, I was spoken to. This time by "Zhang Ning", who was doing a long wait until 5am for her husband's train to arrive. She had little almost no English, but it happened that there was an Internet Cafe upstairs at the station. So she showed me pictures of her wedding and child, and I showed pictures from my trip. Then we used translate.google.com to have a conversation! It seems she had a very challenging childhood which was partly a result of what Chinese customs. More on that some other time!My train finally arrived, and I made my uneventful trip to Chengdu - uneventful because most passengers were already asleep when I boarded at 23:31. So another strange night of sleep at akward angles ... I chugged towards Chengdu.
P.S. It's mum's birthday today - so happy birthday! I hope you got my loving tuneful song on the phone!
