Monday, November 27
When we woke in the morning the Victoria 5 was docked in Nanjing. After breakfast the bus picked us up and took us into town. I remember the tour guide was a woman who spoke excellent English, but I can’t remember her name. I was pretty saturated by this point in our trip.
Nanjing is an interesting, historical and attractive city, and I wish we’d had more time to spend there. It’s set on a strategic site on the south bank of the Yangtze River in a beautiful setting of lakes, river and wooded hills. It was enclosed at one time by a 32-km wall, parts of which remain today, and a section of which we saw. The Chinese lacked mortar; the wall was held together with sticky rice and straw. It has lasted 500 years! The wall reminded Art of the city wall in Galway, Ireland, which we visited last year.
The bus drove us through tree-lined streets on the way to Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s mausoleum. As I recall, Dr. Sun gave up a medical career to become a revolutionary for the Chinese people. The year after he died his widow held a contest to design his mausoleum. The mausoleum has 396 steps leading up to it, because there were 396 million Chinese people at the time of his death. Within the circular interior is what appears to be a sarcophagus with a sculpted statue of Dr. Sun. However, he is actually buried 5 meters beneath it. The place reminded me somewhat of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC. It felt good to be able to climb those steps without much difficulty – a testimony to my walking habit.
Next to the mausoleum was – you’ll never guess – a Friendship Store. When Art and I first came to look at the house we ultimately bought in 1995, the owners had a jade horse on display in a cornice in the living room. In this Friendship Store we saw the same horse for sale, but we didn’t have enough time to negotiate a good price. Besides, we currently have a priceless piece of ceramic art in that spot, a moon with craters created especially for us several years ago by a seventh-grade son. So it’s probably just as well that we didn’t buy the horse. I did pick up three bracelets at a “group rate” negotiated by one of our tour members. By the time we left the Friendship Store, I had just about reached my limit on these stops.
Our second stop in Nanjing was in old Chinatown. Art found a fabric hawk kite that he liked, and the “rear guard” tour guide, Doreen, gave us a hand bargaining for it. I think she helped us because we were lagging behind. She was concerned that one of us would get lost or separated from the group. I suspect the tour company may have had personal liability for our whereabouts. That would explain why Doreen had stayed behind at LuShan two days before to wait for the three young people who’d taken the cable car.
As we were getting on the bus, the tour group member just in front of us stopped by a street vendor selling some kind of food snack. The vendor handed the bag to her and she held out a 10-yuan bill, saying, “How much is it?” The vendor grabbed the bill. I said, “That much.” We all laughed.
We spent only about four hours in Nanjing, as we had another city to visit in this long day. The tour guide had the best English of any on our tour, and her talks were especially interesting. I was surprised to learn that many apartments have been built in Nanjing in recent years. The government used to supply apartments, but now they are purchased by individuals, at relatively low-interest loans.
The bus returned us to the Victoria 5 and we cruised during the day for the first time. After three hours we stopped again, at Yangzhou. It was 3:30 in the afternoon by the time we left the boat by bus for a visit to Slender West Lake, which has acres of lovely gardens in the classic Chinese style. However, it was late November, and dusk fell before we were halfway through the garden. Part of the problem was that, at the entrance to the park, there were five tour inspectors, who asked a couple of our tour group members how the tour was. Apparently the tour guide for this city was intimidated (this is Art’s opinion), so he kept the whole group close to him and moved along very slowly, talking on and on through a bullhorn about the charms of the garden.
Eventually I stopped listening and wandered off on my own to take a few pictures while there was still enough light. Very soon, along came Doreen, the “rear guard”, to remind me to stay with the group. I said, “Doreen, I can hear the guide and stay within the range of his voice. And I am not trying to get away.” So she let me stay a little separate from the rest of the group. In the meantime, the Terrible Trio (Natalie, Tamara and John) were off and about, and in the dusk it was hard to keep track of them. Tamara had indicated, as we got off the bus, that she wanted to leave the group and catch a cab to Shanghai. It was an all-night sail from Yangzhou to Shanghai, so that would have been quite a fare for the taxi driver. Tamara was not permitted to take the taxi.
By the time we left the lake it was dark, and there were numerous muttered complaints about how disappointing it was to arrive at the garden so late in the day that we couldn’t see it.
In my opinion, this day of the tour was badly organized. In the summertime the group would have completed the tour of Slender West Lake before dark, but not in November. If I ruled the world we would have spent all of the daylight hours in Nanjing and skipped Yangshou.