Yangtze-river cruise

LUXUS! That is the only word to describe our cruise on the Yangtze. When we arrived to the port there was a guy carrying our luggage. Then we went to our cabin...NAIJS. We had a corner cabin in the back of the ship, very nice view, two large windows and a balcony. Excellent soft beds compared to the ones we had before in China, hot water as much as we wanted and we also had the bar on the same floor. Almost heaven.

The weather was quite foggy when the ship departed so we were quite worried if we could even see the amazing view we had read about. We had a good dinner the first night and went to bed.

Next morning we had a quite early breakfast (at least in our standards) and then we had an excursion to the ghost city. There was a temple on top of a mountain, me and Esa took a chair-lift to the top since we where still recovering from the stomach flu. On the top there was temple where they checked who belongs where and then there was hell where apparently most of the people belong. On the way back we had to choose a between two bridges, other one was for health and other one for wealth. My strong suite is financing so I decided that wealth is a given so I chose health, but Kennet and Esa chose wealth cause they don't have the head for investing, but at least now they will die young and rich. Najs.

After we returned to the ship it was time for lunch. It was always western style buffet and we loved it, every day. It was actually better than the Chinese style set dinner we had in the evenings. But you can't beat a buffet, all you can eat after all! In the Restaurant we had the same seats every time and we were seated with a really nice American family from Minnesota. Their son was studying in Beijing and the whole family had joined him to spend the Christmas in China.

Next day it was time for an excursion to the lesser three gorges. We took a smaller boat to go up the smaller river and then changed to even smaller boat to go up even smaller stream. The scenery was again unbelievable. The best part was that towards the end of the day the weather cleared and the sun started to shine. We got some really nice pictures.

When we returned to the ship it was time for lunch again. After that we went to the bar with Kennet for couple of drinks and to admire the nice scenery. We joined the couple westerners drinking wine in the bar and soon all the western people were in the same huge table drinking wine. We met a banker who was working somewhere in southern China for Citybank, one family who lived in Hong Kong who we actually visited later and then the Kagin family who had been eating in the same table than we. We made some new friends and drink a lot of free wine (free for us, not for them :D) and had a lot of fun...Esa also had a lot of fun playing Nintendo DS in the Cabin.

The next day was our last on the cruise. We had an excursion to the worlds largest dam, the three gorges dam. The weather was quite foggy so we couldn't see the whole dam from the other side but it was still really impressive. The dam is about 2,3 km long, the maximum capacity of power it can produce is 22,500 megawatts, the reservoir for the dam is 660km long and more than a kilometer wide, they used 27,200,000 cubic tonnes of concrete and 463,000 metric tonnes of steel to build it. Impressive, yes. Actually the water level on the Yangtze river had risen more than 50 meters and whole cities have been covered under water. Millions of people had to move to new cities.

In the afternoon we arrived to Yichang and we had already booked a flight to Shanghai. Our "Christmas cruise" was quite expensive but it was a nice bit of luxury on our China-tour and we really enjoyed it.

-Samuli