Long River

I'm writing once again, in the hope that it'll get through. I don't know why but it just seems that just about all the websites I regularly use are not working from here anymore, apart from my Lycos mail... I'm grateful for that, anyway!!

I left the temple a couple of days ago, although the place was absolutely lovely and the master and everyone else treated me wonderfully, things in general were getting quite rough.

The master was launching into longer and longer speeches on what side of the table to walk from and how to treat him and how to put our soup bowls and so on and so on, and getting really upset if someone did the least thing 'wrong'.

On my last night at the temple, after the evening prayers, he made one of the women kneel down in the middle, in front of all of us and say she is sorry for her mistakes (such as drinking water while the master was speaking) - she had really been making him mad for a couple of days, just laughing at his threats and then crying for a whole days.

He wasn't very pleased with the sincerity of her confession, so suddenly he just got up, slapped her hard across the face, and kicked her straight in the stomach, so that she flew back into the altar table. It was really horrid. But she was ok after that, she just marched into her room and slammed the door. Later that night, she still tried to send text messages on a mobile phone to the master upstairs, I don't know what happened afterwards as I left early the next morning...

Anyway, it was a big change of scenery, coming from the peaceful mountain and the rural southern Anhui into the big city of Wuhan in Hubei province. I stayed one night in another skanky hotel, in another windowless box - but it was cheap ;)

And yesterday, while walking down the street in central Wuhan, i met another lone laowai traveller, a bloke called Ben from the UK, with whom I spent the rest of the day walking around, ferrying across the Yangze river, exploring the night market...

And as I had no real and concrete plans as to where to head next, we decided to stick together for a bit, and so here we find ourselves in Yichang, still in Hubei, after a wonderfully luxurious bus journey for a change, with a cheap hotel room in a good hotel (they do exist, apparently), waiting to catch a ferry up the Yangtze river (which the Chinese just call Chang Jiang, 'the long river') to Chongqing, where we are supposed to be arriving after a 3 days' journey.

It might be 3 days locked on a stinky public ferry, with nothing else to do but to wait to get off again, or it might turn out to be really nice. In any case, it'll be another Chinese adventure and I'm looking forward to it.

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