Hubei, Sichuan and the Three Gorges of Yangtze River

[milton]

Three of us spent 10 days on the road, starting from Shanghai and ending in Chengdu 成都, from 9/3 to 9/12. The plan was to visit the Three Gorges of Yangtze River and its surroundings, including Shennonjia 神农架，Enshi Canyon 恩施大峡谷 and 张家界. We were all riding JH600, with mine just over 14K km in mileage and other two almost new 2011 models. We covered about 2800km in total distance for the trip.

Our bikes:




The background is the biggest dam in the world, the Three Gorges Dam on Yangtze River, 长江三峡大坝.

I am not sure about the “web identity” of my fellow riders, and therefore will just refer them as R1 and R2.

It was a tough trip. The rain had been following us since the third day, which just about totally blanketed the interesting part of the trip after getting passed Yichang宜昌. In the rain the visibility was rather poor with tricky road condition, especially in the mountains. From a distance the mountains were belted by clouds showing great ephemeral beauty. However, those clouds typically spelled medium to heavy rain when we actually placed ourselves in them. And there was no getting there without riding through the twisties from mountain to mountain in the rain.

Besides, the dark grey sky ruined all my photo-takings, giving the fact that I was only capable of using my camera in dummy mode and not knowing how to compensate for the poor light. The below picture is a good representation of what we had been seeing during the trip over the span of 10 days:




However, it was not without rewards, such as:




I still have their coordinates, which are not in Shanghai by the way.




Day 1 & 2

We left Shanghai on the night of the 2nd and stayed in Huzhou. That trimmed away 120km off the total distance. The plan was to get across Anhui and reach Hubei through G318 then hop on G50 in Hubei as we were told Hubei allows motorcycles on the expressway. Then we ran into an extremely bad bone-jarring section of G318 in Guangde with the immaculate expressway right next to us, which changed our plan. We decided to crash the expressway tollgate in Anhui. We managed to get on the G50 earlier in Anhui and entered into Hubei on expressway G50, claiming our tickets at the tollgate. The guards in Hubei obliged and we made good distance in the first day and got off at Huangshi 黄石.This is the first of our expressway receipts:




Later traveling on expressway from Huangshi to Yichang 宜昌 was more money: 285 rmb, but we paid it happily.


The first 2 days were uneventful, with only the following picture to share:




Notice that this unfortunate event took place right in front of a police station, which I guess saved them a 911 call. The turned-over truck had been lying there for2 days.



In Huangshi, there was a chilling warning sign in front of an ATM:




Translation: Those criminals identified in the event of a bank robbery or armored cash carrier robbery can be legally shot on the spot.


This is indeed a reflection of the Chinese-styled legal system.


In the service area of Hubei expressway, no longer feeling like gate crashers, we toll ticket holders chatted away with other automobile riders:





There was still daylight by the time we reached Yichang in the second day, so we went ahead and visited Xiling Gorge 西陵峡, the gorges downstream from the big dam.






And got across the Yangtze River by ferry a few times and quickly became disoriented about which side of the Yangtze we were on:








Surprisingly, the “big dam” that everyone accuses of changing the global climate and severely affecting the ecological condition is not all as massive as I had envisioned, even considering the fact that current construction is only the first half of the project with the other half still ongoing. It did raise the water level from the original 66m to the current average 175m now, which translates into an enormous amount of water and bounds to produce significant environmental impacts.









We were quite happy at this point, warm and dry, in nice scenery not knowing what was in store for us weather-wise:



We stayed in Zigui 秭归, with high expectation on what to come in the days following.