April 14-15, 2018
The drive Thursday night from the airport to Wuhan was very
interesting. Wuhan is the 5th
largest city in China with a population of 13 million people, yet we had never
heard of this city before. In 1927 three separate municipalities combined to
create Wuhan which encompasses 3000 square miles. Wuhan’s main claim to fame is that one of the
three municipalities had an uprising in 1911 that resulted in the overthrow of
the last dynasty leading to the formation of the Republic of China. As the bus
took us into Wuhan we passed mile after mile of 30/40 story high-rise
apartments either completed, under construction or standing partially
constructed with no work going on. Our
guide told us that 10% of the apartment buildings under construction in China
have been abandoned without completion.
Since being on the river we have observed this same phenomena in every
city we have passed through.
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| High Rise Apartments |
Friday morning Tim was going to go on a tour that included a
bell chime concert performed on 64 bronze bells covering 5 octaves that were
replicas of the original bells dating from 475-211 BC. Unfortunately Tim was
confused on the meeting time for the tour and missed the bus. Fill in your own joke here.
After the tour buses returned, we began our cruise on the
Yangtze River. The Yangtze River is the third longest river in the world and is
a major thoroughfare for the transport of goods in China. As we cruised on Friday and Saturday, there
was a steady stream of commercial traffic going in both directions on the
river. Unfortunately, the scenery those
two days on the river was pretty bleak.
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| Yangtze River traffic |
The Viking Cruise Company is a Norwegian
based company that appears to have a conscience. Since 1996 Viking as been providing funds to
three schools in China that provide educational services for underprivileged
children. One of those schools is in
Jingzhou. A small group of children from
this school came on board our boat and entertained us with song and dance for
about 30 minutes. These kids were the reason that professional entertainers
have said that you should never try to follow a children’s act on stage.
Immediately after the children finished we
boarded buses for a brief tour of Jingzhou that included a botanic garden of
middling interest and the reconstructed wall that surrounded the city. Each passenger on the cruise has been assigned
to the same guide for the entire trip.
Our guide, Joshua, is a very nice person but leaves much to be desired
as a guide. He never stops talking and
many times what he is talking about has nothing to do with what we are seeing. For example, today, for the entire 30 minutes
it took us to get to the botanical garden, Joshua discussed Tibet included a 15
minute lecture on how Chairman Mao rescued Tibet from the Dali Lama who had
turned Tibet into a slave state. We
usually end up dining with people from our bus and there seems to be general
agreement about Joshua among us all.
It is Sunday as we write this blog. We just passed through the first lock of our
cruise and have entered the first of the three gorges. The Three Gorges Dam was opened in 2008 and
is the largest artificial generator of electric power from a renewable source
in the world. It also controls flooding
along this portion of the Yangtze River. The scenery along the river in the short time
we have been in the first gorge is spectacular.
Unfortunately, the construction of the dam displaced over a million
people and destroyed significant architectural and archaeological sites.
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| Three Gorges |
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