Good old Jonathan, cute litte Chinese fella happily trotting down to the wharves with us chatting all the way until we got to the cable car to take us down to the boat and the guy running the thing wouldn't let him on. After a half-hour argument and finally Jonny-boy calling up some unidentified person on his mobile and making the cable-car guy talk to them, they finally let us all on. We'd been standing around mystified, but sitting on the cable car waiting for it to go Jonathan told us that they didn't want to let him down to the boat because he didn't have a ticket for himself, but he wanted to show us how to get on. I was about to mention that he could just give us the tickets, I'm sure we'd be fine, when suddenly another random guy jumps on the cable car, snatches all the tickets from Jonathan's hands and starts walking away. Jono is trembling with rage at this point, he flies at the guy and it's on for young and old - fisticuffs right there! Finally some uniformed men lead them both away and we're left standing ticketless and clueless in the cable car.
Chris (a lovely bloke from Phoenix, Arizona travelling with his sister Cherie - I knew I'd like em as soon as I saw her "Om shanti shanti shanti om" t-shirt) and myself wandered off to see what we could do, and suddenly a hatch opened in the side of the building and there was Jono with our tickets and a few long raking sratches on the side of his neck bleeding profusely. He apologised, gave us our tickets and wished us good luck and then the uniformed man next to him barked something, wrenched his arm behind his back and led him away, presumably for a night in the slammer.
With that auspicious beginning we turned around and boarded the boat. I'm not going to dwell on the trip, it was a pretty awesome experience though. Chinese package tourism at it's best with hundreds of people in matching coloured hats all pushing as if their life depended on getting out of the boat that very second, only to ruck like maniacs to get back on again five minutes later. But the cabin was nice, the scenery went from pleasant to incredible at times, the Three Gorges were stunning, we met some cool people and had fun watching some of the whiteys fire up when we were suddenly told that the Three Gorges Dam was broken and instead of taking the boat the very last little leg, we'd have to get buses for an hour instead to our final destination. Big deal you'd think, but there were hours of entertainment watching these guys angrily berating random chinese people with their mandarin phrasebooks bent permanently open to the page with "refund" written in Chinese. Needless to say, they got nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment