GREAT WALL OF CHINA, BATMAN! Beijing, China. Ok, well to be fair, I haven't been to the Great Wall yet. It appears that that will come to pass tomorrow. In the meantime, I have successfully navigated the weirders (like Wonders, only, stranger) of the Yangtze River, from Chongqing to Yichang, traversed the river AGAIN in Wuhan in search of dry hot noodles, and made it to Beijing by a train ticket I booked my own self at the train station, in Chinese, amidst the full-on melee of post-Chinese New Year traffic. I have seen Mao in all of his embalmed glory and the Forbidden City, and tomorrow I will walk 10km along the Great Wall of China. I can scarcely believe that these days are mine. But the devil is in the details...

It all started about a week ago in Chongqing, the capital of Western China (as told to me by a nice university student from there). It is a bustling city on the Yangtze river that is populous and modernizing, but with pockets of preserved Old World charm along its sprawling periphery. Chongqing was overcast and grey the whole 3 days I was there, and cold... except for the kernel of brightness I found in the English book section of their bookstore... (a work of Dostoevsky that I am enjoying immensely), and excepting, too, the RIDICULOUSLY spicy Chongqing hotpot, an inhuman brew of chilis that is a type of soup (read: LAVA) that is the signature dish of that region. Sichuan is known for its chili affinity, but Chongqing likes it even hotter. Perhaps the highlight of my stay in Chongqing besides my insane roommate at the youth hostel was the taking of that Chongqing Hotpot with a friend I made there, who has given himself the English name Frank Debor, after a Dutch soccer player. We went together to sample this mysterious dish in one of the many specialty restaurants that serve this "soup" to order, with add-ins of your choosing. Since the menu was in chinese, he ordered. "Do you like beef?" he asked me. "Yes, " I said, "Beef is fine." The plates of add-ins arrived: hard boiled quails eggs, "fish rolls", mushrooms, potatoes... and then some green plastic sachets. "What's that?", I asked naively. "Oh, that's the beef... Beef stomach. This is really an essential part of Chongqing hot pot. It's delicious!" Oy vey, the horror. I guess parts is parts. Anyway, we had a half and half bowl of hot pot- half mind-erasingly hot, half mind-numbingly mild (and when I say bowl, imagine a bowl the size of a hand hammered Chinese wok) between us, with all the add-ins added in, and it was awesome. This was the first real Chinese food I had eaten since recovering from being smoted in my stomach around the Chinese new year, and it was a treat. (In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I didn't eat any beef stomach. Though I really considered it several times.)

Then, it was time to board my long-awaited Yangtze River boat.

The Yangtze River is the third longest river in the world, and it is being dammed in a project that will displace 1.5 million riverside residents and is scheduled to be completed by 2009. Thus, the days of travelling this stretch of the river by boat are numbered, and I have been excited about this part of China for a while. I had stopped by the French supermarket Carrefour in town to pick up some groceries for the boat trip, and this left me with my 20kg backpack, a "day bag" (8kg) small pack in each hand, and two full bags of groceries. I got dropped off at the wrong tour office by my taxi driver, and my too-kind tour operator, Mr. Hu, came and fetched me and helped me porter my bags the half mile or so down to the boat from the bustling harbor streets and all the way to my room, which I was to share with 3 chain smoking chinese people in a second class suite. Sweet.

The boat tour itself was full of surreal surprises and views that were beyond belief, each more suprising than the one before. It was so strange to keep seeing these overgrown rulers on hillsides that show how many meters the Yangtze is rising. These rulers are frequently visible next to cozy looking farm houses and well-tended plots of land sprinkled on unforgiving looking slopes along the water- in fact, just above those houses. So every time we passed one of these, I couldn't help but stare at the people out next to those houses, thinking of how those homes and those people would be gone from there in a year. Someone told us that the Chinese government has given each of those families 3000 Yuan to relocate- a sum equivalent to about $375 USD, which is not enough for many. So many are waiting, farming, harvesting until the last minute, hoping for another year's worth of payment to make a move feasible. Thinking of the fact of a river rising that much- a river thousands of kilometers long, rising uniformly 100M in water level over a year or two- is crazy. Seeing how many former lives, temples, relics, natural structures will be underwater is hard to grasp. And it goes on and on...

The highlights of the boat trip were the KTV (on board Karaoke- woo hoo!), the small boat tours of the Lesser Three Gorges :

and what we had all been waiting for- a glimpse of the beast itself, The Three Gorges Dam. The itinerary said we were to arrive at the dam for a 4 hour tour in the late afternoon. But somehow, we were behind schedule, and we arrived at 10:30pm. We were all wondering how we might proceed with a tour at that unlikely hour, but we were assured that we would proceed as planned. What we GOT was the following: a 30 minute bus-ride to a view point where we could take PICTURES of the dam. Would we get to stand on it? To walk around? See it up close?

Things were said in Chines

e, I followed the others back o

nto the bus....we arrived at a building with an entrance to an exhibit. Was it information about the Dam, a museum about the plans, the contruction? Close... it was the Chinese Sturgeon Aquarium.

Hmmm, several of us thought aloud. Maybe these fishes and strange water beasts are residents of the river. Maybe from here we will move along to The Ghost of Yangtze Future. Ahh... around the corner we trundled... the signs

were hidden in the dark. Into... an outdoor amphitheater. To see?... "The Horse War Show of Three Kingdoms"- A show in which about 15 men, about half of which were in some sort of old-fashioned war garb, rode around on galloping horses with old-fashioned weapons, performing stunts and showing how horseback battles might have been fought long ago. 1:00am.

And then back onto the bus, to the pier, to wait outside in the -5C crispness for the boat to catch up to us. We arrived at the port of Yichang at about 4:30am and it was straight onto the bus to Wuhan. You may still be wondering what the Horse War Show of Three Kingdoms has to do with the Yangtze River Three Gorges Dam Project. For the 4 hours in the bus from Yichang to Wuhan, I was still wondering that myself. If any of you comes up with any good hypotheses, let me know. Where was I? Oh yes...

Wuhan was a cute city that is known for its intense steel production, and is also exhibiting the neon stretchmarks of modernization. But I enjoyed its streets and restaurants, and sampled some dry hot noodles, the Wuhan signature dish, in parts of the city on both sides of the river. And some belgian beer and fries at a cool Belgian joint on ONE side of the river. It was a very pleasant pit stop.

I was also delighted to book my own train ticket for Beijing. Instead of a 22 hour regional train ride from Yichang (4 hours west of Wuhan), I was able to catch one of the fast trains that runs frequently between Beijing and Guangzhou (in Canton to the South), and arrived in a miraculous overnight 10 hours in Beijing! I have walked most of the center of the city, around and around Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City, a few nearby parks, and the hutong, or maze-like old city, which abuts various portions of the attraction-rich Beijing center. I popped into a Peking Opera show last night and will be off to walk along the Great Wall tomorrow, and I still can't believe that these days are actually happening.

Speaking of I can't believe things are happening, in only 3 more days, I will leave Asia and the first part of my trip behind, and fly (via San Francisco) to Sao Paolo and then Fortaleza, Brasil, about a week in advance of Carneval. I will have far easier internet access in San Francisco while I am there, and hope to upload photos from there. But in the meantime, I have plenty of internet-free time to consider how Asia has been a huge surprise. Before I arrived in India, Asia loomed ahead of me as a big, scary thing. I thought I would like India (I loved india), but I was so afraid of the rest of Asia, and I thought that it wouldn't speak to me, that I would appreciate it, but maybe not feel super connected. And I thought that South America would be more accessible, make more sense to me.... But now, as I prepare to leave here, I find that I have made a lot of connections in Asia, and that it has been safe, SO interesting, and exciting and I have really enjoyed my visit here. And I am sad and scared to leave for South America, which promises to be less organized, more chaotic, and probably a bit more dangerous. I shall be interested to see how it unfolds...