"Cruising" the Yangtze River

The Yangtze River is the third largest river in the world and plays an important role in China. In recent years it has been in the news for the decision to build the Three Gorges Dam which cost over 70 billion dollars and is very controversial.

We took a bus from Chengdu to Chongqing, which took about 4 hours. When we arrived we arranged our 4 day 3 night "cruise", then went to explore this massive city! We had no idea how large Chongqing would be so in our little time we only saw a small portion. We took a cable car across the river during the day and we bought our food supplies for the trip. The deal with the "cruise" was that we would get on the boat in Chongqing and get off in Yichang with 6 stops along the way. The cost of the trip was just the price of the room on the boat, no food, no side trips, and no access to the roof of the boat were included.

We got on our "SHIP" and I use the words ship and cruise VERY loosely! If you have ever been on a cruise, then take that image out of your head, that is NOT what we were on. We were escorted to our room and immediately noticed the smell of urine. We were in a 4 bed room, but so far no roommates had shown up. Some guy, not working on the boat, tried to upgrade us to a 2 bed room, but we are budget travelers.....so we opted not to. Then with some negotiation we bought our tickets which allowed us on the top deck. The boat had 3 floors and a top deck. The only place to get fresh air was the top deck, so we had to buy the tickets to get away from the urine smell!! We unfolded a small card table pulled up our plastic stools and took in the scenery. We were the only foreigners on the boat and no one spoke any English. All the announcements were in Chinese and for 4 days we had no idea what was going on!


The boat was a mess, and I don't know how it floats honestly. The welding was coming apart in many places. In our room we had cockroaches and other bugs crawling around. Our life vests were covered in mold, webs, and mouse droppings! Thank goodness I had some incense to burn or we would have been choked out by the scent of urine!! It was not nice at all.....BUT it did get us across a big chunk of China! On the second night as Agustin and I sat in his bed watching a movie(on our mini computer) our roommate started to scream and throw something our way, we didn't know what he was saying and he didn't know what we were saying...I managed to get to the light in the dark only to see a huge cockroach dead on the ground. It had crawled on his face as he was sleeping~ and he ripped the legs off and threw it towards us!!! GROSS!!!!

We arrived at the small ports at 6am and the boat left by 9am, so one day we totally missed the port as we just slept in!

The river was very large and in parts had beautiful limestone peaks. We had good weather and we spent our days eating the food we brought, playing cards, and watching movies! There are many other boats doing the same cruise down the river and we all stopped at the same ports. Our boats were tendered together and we would have to walk through other ships to get to land.

Over all we took some pictures, had some laughs, saw the Yangtze River, and learned what a Chinese Cruise was like! We were glad it was over, and glad we can check it off our list, of course it is never to be done again!

The point of the trip was also to get us closer to a smaller chilled out city named Guilin. When we arrived in Yichang we had to take a 5 hour bus ride to Wuhan, then a 12 hour train ride to Guilin!