Slippery little suckers

We have met our chopstick match! Skills have been improving dramatically and we can now even get the last of the rice out the bottom of the bowl but dinner today was a challenge. Mini shrimp dumplings in soup. Even the Chinese were using spoons to get from big bowl to personal little dish. Then they went for the chopsticks. Everything else was fine – even the sweetcorn and the very awkwardly shaped carrot but those shrimp balls – they were slippery little suckers. Fortunately the Chinese like to get their bowls very close to their mouths and just sort of scoop it all in with the chopsticks. This was nearly the only way to manage the little shrimp balls. Although we did have some success with balancing said shrimp balls across the top of two chopsticks. Of course if the boat happened to hit a slight swell the ball rolled off. It added a certain challenge to successful consumption of dinner anyway!

Breakfast was somewhat disappointing. Our lovely guide had told us there would be western breakfast including bacon so we all opted for breakfast and skipping lunch. There was toast. The bacon was in with green pepper and soy sauce. I quite liked my noodles and steamed buns. The rest of the group were not so impressed. I think they thought they might get a full English with the possibility of nicking a bread roll for lunch.

Martyn and I did better than the others with lunch as well – in as much as we thought to take some with us on our optional excursion (although it was the leftover crackers, chicken sausage and dried Heinz tomato soup stick from the other day). Others in the group didn’t. Oh dear, our lunch was processed gunge and crackers but our group members were staring really quite longingly at it. Ah well, they found a shop and bought a double packed of Oreos (which along with Chinese Pringles is pretty much the majority of their diet along with beer, bananas and the odd apple)

Anyway food ponderings over – today was excursion day. Very exciting. Drifted through gorge number 1 on our big cruise boat this morning – very pretty. Then got off big cruise boat. Wow. Got on smaller boat and drifted through the Little Three Gorges. Then got off smaller boat and on to even smaller boat (Sampan) and pootled down the Daning River for a while. This was the best of the gorges. Very beautiful and, our murky sludgy Yangtse River became a stunning blue/green colour. Very pretty. SO yes, our excursion involved getting out of our seats on a big boat to sit on different seats on two smaller boats. There is a theme here. Stunning scenery though.

Back to bigger cruise ship for gorge number 2 (which is actually gorge number 5 today but its number 2 on the Yangtse river in our cruise ship (sorry if this is confusing but it makes sense to us!). We missed half of this gorge as we popped to our cabin to await the little ‘bing bong lady’ (you know, a bit like Hi De Hi’s ‘good morning campers’ although to be honest I think Gladys’ xylophone worked a bit better than the ships ‘bing bonger’ which occasionally sounds like someone is messing with the frequency dial on a signal generator!) to tell us that we had arrived at the gorge. There was a ‘bing bong’ message but it was in German and I didn’t quite get it so we were half way through the gorge by the time we looked out the window and realized we were missing it – ooops. Ran up four flights of stairs to observation deck in time to get last pictures – phew.

Now sat trying to stay awake as we are supposed to enter the lock system sometime between 10 and midnight and we thought we would try to see it. Well, we’ll try anyway ….. let you know tomorrow!