Cruisin' on the Yangtze

As I told all in my email, I have been having trouble sending posts but aparently that is because blogs are usually intercepted and blocked. Sorry. I am trying to write a blog and then copy and paste it and send to Gerrie for him to add to the blog......

We just finished our Yangtze cruise.  I was a lot of fun and a very interesting view of China outside of the cities - all the best and the worst.   The highlight Robert was experiencing the 3GorgesDam site and hydroelectric station. The latter is at present the largest in the world. We were up from 23:00 until after 02:00 yesterday morning to watch our approach to the first of the 5 locks. It takes 40min per lock. We went to bed after entering the 2nd lock!! Fascinating and exciting. There are 8 Westerners and 128 Easterners as passengers. The 3 other men are academics, one from USA, one from Australia and Prof Gerald Nurric from UCT and us. It has been fun sharing our impressions with these people.

 Here is picture of Robert at the 3 Gorges Dam.

Some of our first impressions in China:

# Bridges, bridges, bridges. Towns along upstream Yangtze are all brand new as millions of people have been relocated to make way for the rising water due to the massive dam building projects. Many, many apartment high rises (30-40 storeys). Every town has umpteen bridges which put the Bloukrans Bridge on the Garden Route to shame. What is remarkable is that there is hardly a car or truck on any of them! The roads are super and are made especially beautiful by the complete lack of traffic. Our guides claim that there is much congestion at rush hour but the rest of the time very few vehicles (possibly the party line?!?)

# Towns we drove through were really very clean. I believe the area around the Forbidden City looks pretty much like Kyalitsha but we have not been there yet!

# Most guides were a bit skittish about talking about 1 child policy. One told us that the authorities have relaxed their policy somewhat - if the parents are only-children then they are now allowed 2 children but if one of the parents have a sibling then they may only have one child. The punishment can be loss of job or loss of all prospects of promotion (very strictly adhered to)

# Robert has been watching out for the agriculture. It was ofcourse very mountainous next to the Yangtze and of course all farming on beautiful man-made terraces. Our trip from Shanghai to Beijing (on the bullet train) was over very flat terrain with smallish farm lands. In all this time we have not seen one tractor or any mechanical farm implement.  Not even a farm shed big enough to house a tractor.  Oops, I was wrong, as I write this we have just seen our first small tractor - a bit bigger than our garden mower. (Yes we have now seen a few but all very small and for a 1400 km stretch of farming area, very few.) Farming does not seem to be very mechanized- at least not in this area. The housing seems to be communities of people rather than small spread out farmsteads.

# All ticketed entrances to airport, train etc has a VIP entrance too! Of course we should not expect that the very busy commissars running this fast growing country to should stand in the long queues with ordinary People!!!

# Newspapers (English translations) are very bland. Just reports what is happening with not a breath of criticism, sarcasm or judgement. Our one guide told us that he was really wishing and waiting for another Mao to lead the country!

# As said before the internet is totally censored. Prof Nurric tried to look up "Famine in China" and could get no results. He Skyped his son in Korea and he got the info from him. According to reports on the internet, 45 million people are starving (real famine - not just under the breadline!) There is a population of about 1 billion so this is 4.5% of population.

# Chongqing, the start of our 3 Gorges trip, is described by Chinese as "the largest unknown city in the world". It is the largest city in China! The greater Chongqing metro area is home to 40million people (nearly whole of SA)

# Very few old buildings down the Yantze - everything is new. When compared to a river in Europe one would often see castles or the remains. In Shanghai we saw the Bund and all British contribution. The traditional garden (and house of a very wealthy Chinese man) from the Ming Dynasty time but not much more .

Today we are seeing some of Beijing

P.S. Clive, Robert says that if you get any business inquiries from China, he would like a cut - he has been wearing your ZeeGroup fleece all the time!!