The Yangtze River

We spend three nights on a river boat on the Yangtze River. This post will serve as a collection of links to information about the Yangtze River and its surroundings:

Wikipedia article on the Yangtze, which is the venue through which I found the image at left.

Here is a "tour review" of an OAT river cruise aboard the Victoria Queen by Laura Lindbergh. Assuming that OAT still uses this cruise company for its river cruises, this should be similar to what we experience.

Here's a report from someone who also did what sounds like the same OAT tour that we are on: "Mike, I did four night cruise as part of a land tour. I did Overseas Adventure Travel, 22 days. You can check out the trip at the OAT website. www.oattravel.com The trip I took was the Imperial China, Tibet and the Yangtze. I see that next year it comes with a 3 night cruise instead of 4 nights. It was a great trip. OAT hits the normal tourist sights plus tries to give you adventure experiences. We actually stayed at a farmer village in private homes one night. We ate dinner and breakfast with our hosts and danced with the entire village in the park in the evening. Definitely not a 5* hotel but a very memorable experience! OAT is real great because there are always 16 people or less in the group. We had only 15. We did miss Shanghai on this trip, so I'll have to go back again. This trip did go to Tibet which was extremely interesting.
The cruise I went on started in Yi Chang and ended in Chungking. This was an upstream cruise. The three night cruises typically cover the same distance as the four night cruises but go downstream therefore the ship can go faster. You will really enjoy the cruise. It was the only restful time we had on our trip."

Some more first-hand info from 2004 from a traveler who was still there as he posted. One really interesting hint from him: "Hints: If the owners suites are empty, you can negoiate a lower price for an upgrade. member of our tour did and we all had a front deck to ourselves to go through the gorges." We'll have to see about that! :)

And this tip, from the same guy, will eventually go into a "shopping" post: "Money: Lots of small bills if you want leverage in negioating with free market vendors. No credit cards here and US money seemed a solid 10-20% bargaining chip verse the same Chinese Ren. Hotels will cash travelers checks and US money into Chinese with no service fee for guests. They will not break US money into smaller US bills. Credit cards only really worked for upscale markets (Jade,Silk, Art) and Chinese government stores."