After being worried that our personal wake-up call would disturb the Swedes (they weren’t doing the morning trip, apparently they were ‘templed out’) we discovered that in fact the entire boat was awoken by announcements over the loudspeaker at 6am. This was tourism Chinese style, collective and controlled!

We headed off the creaky, cramped vessel and were paraded past two luxury cruises on our way to the jetty as if to confirm our social status on the river. Our trip was to the ‘City of Ghosts’ , a Taoist series of temples covering a hill and the ground below. The intention seemed to be to show you the trouble you’d be in if you misbehaved, a jarring contrast to the peaceful Buddhist temples we’d been visiting up to now. We observed grotesque statues and models that drew equal measures of repulsion and schoolboy sniggering for their graphic content.

On our way round Dave and I encountered a young Chinese lad who spoke excellent English, though with a North American twang. He interpreted a little of what the guide was saying (we were dutifully following a girl with a flag at this stage, terrified we’d be left behind as we had no idea what time we were meant to return to the boat) which made the trip more interesting. Back on the boat Dave and I mused over the possible reasons for his English being so good. Expertly piecing the clues together we decided he’d learnt while going to University in America.

After an afternoon of lazily dozing and watching the world go by a jolly chap plonked himself in front of us and started chatting away. He was an entertaining chap with an unpronounceable name from Lijiang, near Tiger Leaping Gorge. He was a tour guide and was evidently checking out the competition as he told us a great many reasons as to why his Gorge was way better than the ones we were seeing. The conversation was stilted but still offered us intriguing insights on the way some Chinese people think.

Our new friend asked us if we remembered the Earthquake in Lijiang. We diplomatically lied and told him of course we did. His description was interesting, he called it the ‘lucky earthquake’. His reasoning was that it had brought world attention to the area and had resulted in a tourism boom. He went on to tell us that the Sichuan earthquake was very fortunate for that area too. The death toll and immediate suffering didn’t seem to faze him at all, obviously they were merely a price to pay for the future prosperity of the area. The second revelation of the conversation came when he was telling us that 1.5 million people had been relocated in order for the Dam to be built as their houses would’ve been submerged by the new lake. I immediately asked what the people had thought of being made to move away from their homes. For the first time in the conversation his face seemed to shut off and he merely replied ‘I don’t know’. It seems that despite the relative relaxation of rules on criticism of Government action there are still some subjects that you just don’t broach.

Sadly we couldn’t take up our new friend’s offer of dinner on land as we weren’t allowed off the boat at the next stop so Dave and I went to try the café on the boat. It actually turned out to be reasonably nice and we spent the rest of the evening back in the bar. The last incident of note was when the official boat policeman walked into the bar. We feared the worse for the rest of the bar as they were all engaged in frenzied illegal gambling at the time. Brilliantly though, the cop briefly retreated to cover his uniform with a jumper before sitting down on a nearby table and adding his money to the pot.
As we retired to bed we tried not to wake up our Swedish roommates. Our estimate was that they’d been out of the room for about an hour all day.