Free The Peace Correspondent by Garry Marchant Page B

while the Chinese officials look on, straight faced. Later, the one-man Swiss acrobatic team is spotted wrapped in a towel wandering around the hotel corridors looking for his room.
    Next morning, in the parking lot, Miami eyeballs another rider and moans, “You look like a piece of shit.” He complains he is aching all over. “My skeletal is banging like an old Harley.”
    Eight days after leaving Hong Kong, at dusk on a Saturday, the HOGs reach a blue highway sign: Welcome to Shanghai. They have ridden an arduous 2,300 kilometers through country that few foreigners see. For the last time, they assemble the convoy and ride into China’s largest city on a freeway cleared of traffic. Ahead waits a noisy reception at the Olympic Hotel, with a lion dance and children in theatrical makeup bearing bouquets for each rider. Then the riders will fly home and swap the leathers for business suits.
    At twilight, just outside the city, an immense, roaring shape zooms by low overhead, lights flashing, as a jetliner settles into final approach to Shanghai international airport. It left Hong Kong just hours earlier.

THE YANGTZE

Slowly Down the River

August 1995
    IT is damp, stifling and grey in the Ox Liver. Then the mist lifts as swiftly as a stage curtain to reveal the sun gleaming on awesome cliffs and high crags pressing in all around us. Cruising down the river, the mighty Yangtze, on a smoggy afternoon, we are once more dazzled by the fabled Three Gorges, even the disagreeably named Ox Liver and Horse Lungs. Our slow boat through China is nearing the end of what is perhaps China’s foremost natural wonder.
    For committed travelers, cruising the Yangtze is a must, ranking with seeing the Pyramids along the Nile, walking along the Great Wall or gazing at the Taj Mahal by moonlight. Known locally as Chang Jiang, the “Long River,” this is China’s Mississippi, an Asian Amazon, with tributaries navigable for 30,000 kilometers. We are on a four-day cruise down a mere 1,354-kilometer stretch from Chongqing to Wuhan. But it includes the most scenic stretch, 200 kilometers of the massive Three Gorges, Qutang, Wuxia and Xiling.
    Since 1890, steamboats have navigated from Shanghai on the East China Sea, through the treacherous gorges, all the way up-river to Chongqing. Today, even aboard one of the large, luxury cruise ships, we can feel the surge of the silty brown water forcing us down river.
    From the deck, we look down on small wooden fishing boats, gritty coal barges, grimy little cargo boats and giant local ferries with tiered decks, like giant, floating wedding cakes crowded with rural folk, many still in Mao blue, brown or grey. There is acertain urgency to seeing the Gorges. China has started building the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric-dam project, to provide power for development and to reduce the risk of disastrous floods in the flatlands down river.
    The controversial and unpopular dam will force more than a million people from their homes, and flood the Three Gorges and other scenic spots and villages along the river. So, in recent years, local Chinese tourists have rushed to see the revered Gorges while they exist, jamming the rails of the big, but basic, ships we pass on the way.
    The modern boats built for overseas tourists such as Regal China Cruise’s three Princesses are scale replicas of ocean cruiseships, with bars, karaoke lounges, restaurants, barber shops, post offices, business centers and the mandatory souvenir shop. Like ocean cruisers, they have organized activities, with a decidedly Chinese flavor, with lessons in tai chi, flower arranging, mahjong and basic Mandarin.
    â€œIt’s a bit like a holiday camp, isn’t it?” remarks a rueful young American as the ship’s PA system bellows its announcement of folk dancing in the lounge, sending truants slinking off to the Observation Deck bar.
    The Yangtze is culturally important to China,