Wanzhou, China, Asia

I was woken up by soft Chinese music coming out of the speaker in my room at 6:30am. I was actually pretty happy to hear that music, because the only other things I had heard come through that was a lot of Chinese babble, and nothing in English. So at least I didn’t wake up to that. I went to the dining room and sat down at table 12 and eventually met Staffan and Jessica, a Swedish couple who are really nice and speak excellent English. I’m really glad they’re on this boat because it would have been hell otherwise.

We have six Chinese people at our table as well, and they don’t look very impressed with us, so it’s not the best atmosphere at meal time. Either none of them speak English, or they don’t want to speak to us, so it has just been the three of us chatting while the others stare very intensely at us. Awkward! The breakfast wasn’t great, it was almost all Chinese food (noodles, steamed vegetables, plain dumplings), so it’s pretty clear that this is NOT a foreigner’s boat, and all three of us had been screwed when we booked this.

Our first excursion started at 8am, where we got off the boat in Fengdu to see the Ghost City. This is obviously the first stop for every boat on the way down the river, so we were there with about one billion other tourists at the same time. We’d been told that we were going to have an English tour guide as well, umm, not quite. There was a Chinese tour guide who spoke to his twenty Chinese tourists for about 15 minutes, and then told us something in about two minutes that was supposed to be our tour. It was garbage. We walked around this Ghost City for a couple of hours, so some temples, got almost no information, and then went back to the boat.

We got back on the boat and relaxed in our rooms until lunch at 12:45pm. We were all disappointed with our meals once again and then really had nothing else to do for the day. Staffan, Jessica and I hung out for the afternoon just trying to keep ourselves busy, but that wasn’t easy. Happy hour started at 2pm, so we checked that out at the bar only to find out that it meant that their outrageously overpriced drinks, were now only very overpriced. The Swedes were smart enough to buy some beers before they got on the boat, so we drank their warm beers while relaxing on the sun deck. The beers were warm because apparently no one has a fridge that works in their room. The sun deck sucked because it was covered with crappy Astroturf and there are no lounge chairs!

We hung around until 5:30pm when the “Welcome Party” started. We went up there at about 5:33pm, and it was finished. There were piles of paper cups in the trash, so they were all gone. Someone had obviously drank ours, or the staff couldn’t count the right number for the amount of guests. There were three serving plates on a table that looked like they had been licked clean, so I’m not even sure what kind of food we missed, but it was well and truly gone. It’s just unbelievable how I think I can’t be more disappointed with how this is going, and then something like this happens.

We went down for dinner at 6:45pm, where the food was less than impressive again. This time the Chinese people at our table actually smiled in our direction when they got up to leave the table, so I think we’re making progress. Of course this is after Jessica and I both spilled our glasses of tea we’d been given. Mine went right in the old man’s lap, so he was probably just happy to get away from me. It’s a terrible design on the table though. There is a massive lazy susan in the middle of the table that only leaves you about 10 inches of clearance. In the western world we’re all used to putting our glasses up at the top of our plates, so every time someone spun the lazy susan, it would hit our glass. Not cool.

The three of us just chilled for the rest of the night, which was the most fun I’ve had on the boat so far. We polished off a bottle of wine and a couple of six packs of beer just sitting in the Swedes room until about 11:30pm. It’s been a good night considering how poorly everything else about this trip has gone. It’s a really good thing that Staffan and Jessica are here or I would be hating life right now!