To book the trip we went to one of the many travel agency shops in the city center about a week before. They didn’t speek English so we had to discuss and understand the plan in Chinese.
They said something about taking the bus first, but during our conversation we changed the trip options a couple of times, that at the end we weren’t sure anymore at all whether we would start by boat or bus.
They told us to meet at the peer. So we assumed it would be the boat.
We arrived half an hour earlier but couldn’t find anyone to help us and ran between peer and bus stop back and forth. Finally a women called me and explained (of course in Chinese) where to find the bus. When we finally got into the bus we were 10 minutes late, the last that arrived and the bus was so full that we had to sit on completely opposite sides of it.
The first stop after about four hours on the bus was at an fake old village. It was full of tourist shops and restaurand and the main purpose of the stop was probably having lunch there.
We arrived at the boat around three a’clock. The boot didn’t leave until nighttime so we had time to check in, unpack a litlle in our cabin and have dinner on the mainland.
The room was old and basic but we had it to ourselves and it even had a little bathroom.
I already loved the view on the harbour and the scenery around it when we arrived in the afternoon, but at nighttime it was even more beautiful.
The next morning loudspeaker started to play chinese music at 5:30am to wake up everyone for breakfast at 6am. We didn’t get up although it was impossible to sleep through the music and the noises of people running and yelling on the boat. At 6am people started hammering at our door and we had to tell them at least three times that we didnt want to have breakfast.
We couldn’t sleep anymore, instead we started a morning foto shooting. The boot made a stop at 7:30, but we couldnt get off. Instead we watched a movie and the scenery out of the window. A group of old people went swimming in the river, tied to an orange ballon to keep them above the water (Second picture)
Almost the entire rest of the day we spend taking pictures and sitting outside the window until the security came to our cabin and forbit us to climb out the window again. Luckily we had already taken about 500 pictures outside…