From The Sublime To The Ridiculous - The Final Chapter contd...
We headed out for dinner and met up with a local lad, Jiang, who was eager to practise his english. It was a most interesting meal, his insights into the Chinese perspective was a real treatise on brainwashing. He was very jealous that we had been to Tibet, - every Chinese person's dream, since it was so beautiful!! It was explained to us how lucky the Tibetans were, with Chinese building such wonderful roads, airports, and liberating them from the clutches of the Dalai Lama. They now got terrific state handouts, and must all be delighted! Chinese human rights were expounded upon, - when Mick asked about executions Jiang was shocked at such Western barbarity, fundamental to the Chinese legal system was the belief that all wrong-doers could be reformed by mind remoulding. The fact that the mind is regularly remoulded by a lump of lead in the back of the head is obviously NOT common knowledge!! It was a good end to a bad day.
But we had reckoned without "Chinese Police II, the sequel". We returned to the hotel at 3am, a little the worse for wear, to stumble in on a major incident. First we were met by our browbeaten travel agent, who looked very sorry for himself as he asked us to check in, obviously his back-hander had been caught red-handed, so to speak!! Then we were asked to follow another guy, who led us up stairs, along a long dark corridor (getting slightly nervous now) and into a back room where 6 people were waiting (obviously, from the cigarette butts and coffee cups, waiting for a very long time by now!!). They introduced themselves as police, and for the next 2 hours we retold and retold the incident until there really wasn't anything left to say! Then we waited another 20 minutes while one of them drafted several pages in Chinese. Realising it was probably a statement; Mick and I agreed (in Irish) that we were not signing anything we couldn't read! This was exactly what they had had in mind, - the several sheets of chinese characters were handed over with a brusque "sign here please". A polite refusal caused considerable consternation, but eventually they agreed to sit and wait until Mick wrote out an English statement, and signed it. We were now free to go, to get 2 hours sleep in our free hotel before the travel agent arrived for us in the morning (by which stage he wasn't on speaking terms with us in ANY language) Before we headed to bed, with difficulty we finally got through to the police that we also needed a copy of their report for the insurance company. It was now 5.30 and we were leaving at 8, but they agreed they'd have a copy to the hotel for us. So they did, on the button of 8, in perfect Chinese!!!
Our river trip through the Gorges was spectacular, two days cruising down the Yangtze through the three great Gorges (largest over 80km long, with cliffs rising to 900m on either side). There was also half a day spent in a small boat going up a tributary river to the "3 lesser gorges", - lesser, but still gorgeous, culminating with lunch cooked on a sandbar in the river at the base of a cliff!! The cruise ended with a visit to the construction site for the 3 Gorges Dam, the largest such project in the world. The Gorges will be flooded to a depth of 135 metres by next year (Phase I) and up to 175m by 2007, creating a lake 550Km long, and displacing over 2 million people in many towns and villages along the way. All the way along our cruise we passed (and visited) towns where high on the mountainside new skyscrapers were being prepared for the day, coming shortly, when the current villages will join Atlantis. Strange walking down streets which next year will be 135m underwater!! The real-estate agents are all advertising the new tower blocks and housing estates, but it's bit like moving the inner city dubs from their atmospheric bustling city centre streets out to Ballymun!! However, a Chinese girl we met on the boat, Xia Sheng Li, part of a group of Chinese teachers on a government paid sightseeing trip (we met her at the ship's Karaoke bar, the only such establishment in China, it seems, where "Karaoke" does not translate loosely as "Brothel"), explained that they were very lucky people, - new houses, money to move, all very happy. 5 elders from one village had committed suicide by throwing themselves into the river when they heard the news, but what was 5 people out of 2 million lucky ones! !