Bound for Vietnam by Lydia Laube Read Free Book Online Page B

The mountains were interspersed wherever possible with tiny rice terraces and here and there harboured a house. It was now freezing. Heaters and reverse cycle airconditioners abounded, but not one worked.
    In the sitting room of the boat, I had company; four young men who played cards, a popular pastime, and smoked heavily, as did most Chinese men. Later the men played checkers, another favourite Chinese game.
    Arriving at the large town of Zhicheng, we found an enterprising row of vendors had lined up on the edge of the pontoon and were conveying noodles, rice and drinks to customers on the boat by means of a basket on a long pole. The money came back down, with any luck, the same way. Other sellers paddled up on the river side of the boat in sampans and also sent goods aboard by the pole method.
    The cook, wearing her red carpet slippers and still knitting – Chinese women knitted everywhere, even standing up –went down onto the landing and had a social gathering with her family who had been waiting there for the boat to arrive. I defied the spitting rain to go ashore in search of food. The word must have been broadcast that culinary delights on riverboats were few and flawed. Passengers were offered plenty of edible supplements at all the stops we made, and a profusion of buyers eagerly contested them. I bought hard-boiled eggs and bread sticks that were plaited in a pretty design, but rock hard, and on which I broke a large tooth filling.
    One day I looked at the sludgey mud pie that remained in the base of my empty thermos and concluded that by this time I must have taken in a fair slab of the Yangtze’s bottom. But what a blessing those battered tin thermoses were. They provided water for instant noodles, tea, coffee, a wash, clean teeth and drinking water, as well as adding a bit of silt to the diet.
    At each stop, crowds of passengers bustled on and off the boat. I noticed men holding pieces of bamboo loitering among the crowd. I wondered what this piece of equipment was for until I realised that it was the stock in trade of the porter coolie. This was the pole that he lay across his shoulders to carry burdens and bundles on each end.
    Early the next day, we came to Yichang, a walled city that was new in the days of the Sui, about 1300 years ago, and which is regarded as the gateway to the upper Yangtze. The riverbank here was high and reinforced by a stone wall. On one corner of it there was a pagoda, and a promenade lined by trees ran along its top for kilometres.
    We tied up at the town for an hour and then, moving into the middle of the river, dropped anchor with a rattle of chain. It was raining heavily and the boat’s red-painted decks were washed clean and shining. We stayed anchored in mid-stream all day, left at five in the evening, and arrived at the entrance of the massive Gezhouba Dam’s locks at night.
    By the ship’s searchlight, in the driving rain, I saw sheer concrete walls that rose, glistening, a hundred metres above me on both sides. It was like being in a grave. The lock was just wide enough to accommodate our boat. Seven ships, big and small, were tied to brackets in the walls, one behind the other. Then the gates were opened, the water poured in, and we were lifted slowly to the level of the road alongside the lock. As the boat rose, I went from only being able to see concrete walls, to seeing the lights of the town. Leaving the lock I looked down on the floodlit muddy water to see the salvo of polystyrene containers that our boat had left behind.
    We were now about to enter the beautiful, but treacherous, Yangtze gorges. The Sanxia (Three Gorges) run for two hundred kilometres through the mountain ranges that separate the provinces of Sichuan and Hubei. They were created by an inland sea that once flooded across the Asian continent to the Pacific Ocean. For centuries the reefs and whirlpools of the gorges claimed a thousand lives a year. The forces of nature on the Yangtze are so great