27. Going home

Day 18

This morning we were in the lobby at 6:30 AM so we could see 31 of our fellow travelers off for the Beijing Airport. Most of them were headed for California by way of Tokyo. One was returning to his family in Israel by way of Hong Kong and Tel Aviv.

Lily, our new Armenian friend, gave Virginia her address in California so that they can correspond. She was so afraid she would cry before they got on the bus. Such a sweet lady! She is as emotional as Virginia is.

Our tour guide was to see us off at the airport, but because he was anxious to get back to his family in Shanghai, he changed his flight to an earlier one. Our local guide took on the task of getting the airport tax paid and making sure we were all headed in the right direction. She accompanied us until we hit the security line. We made it through all the red tape in plenty of time.

While we waited, Glenda and Virginia went to the Duty Free Shop to pick up a few last minute items. Ladies!

The temperature in Beijing had reached a blistering 96 degrees.

Our flight left Beijing at 4:35 PM bound for Chicago. Flight time was 13 hours, 5 minutes, arriving in Chicago at 4:40 PM same day. Don't we wish this air time was only five minutes? Those 13 hours in the air seemed like an eternity. And after that, we still had to fly from Chicago to St. Louis. We enjoyed pizzas while waiting for take-off on this last leg.

When we arrived in St. Louis, here were our wonderful neighbors, Ed and Marge, welcoming us back home. What would we do without them?

Back at home ... having emptied our baggage ... counted our souvenirs ... we turned our thoughts to catching up on our e-mail. What a surprise to find two messages from Pure (Gu Wei Wei), the Chinese girl who had come to our rescue at the New World Department Store on NanJing Road in ShangHai! She was the best 'souvenir' of all!

Will we return to China someday?

Certainly no tour could ever top this one. We traveled the Yangtze from the Yellow Sea through the flood plains of southeastern China, the mountains and gorges of central China to the bustling metropolis that is Chongqing. We had visited Xi'an and BeiJing, cosmopolitan capital of China. What did we miss?

Actually, that's the wrong question. If we could, we would like to have had more time in ShangHai. And then, we would like to have visited more of the smaller towns and villages along the Yangtze ... learned more about the people, their history and their traditions ... maybe on a self-driving tour. Wouldn't it be a blast to drive along the road that parallels the Yangtze through the mountains that form the gorges ... and have enough time to capture more memories on film. We would like to have seen more of Chongqing. We hit the high spots in Xi'an and BeiJing, but there's so much more.

Of course we realize that to really enjoy such an adventure, we'd have to learn to speak Chinese fluently. Many Chinese have learned a few English words ... it's just that it would be so much more fun to visit when the language barrier has been breached.

By 2009, the water-level in the gorges regions will have been raised so dramatically that much of the present charm will be gone ... replaced by what?

We would love to spend some time with Pure, with whom we have traded e-mails regularly over the past year. And we'd like to meet her parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins ... face-to-face. They all seem like such nice people.

And we'd like to see some of the young people we met on the cruise ship. That's highly unlikely, but maybe we'd meet some new friends.

Again, will we return to China someday? We certainly hope so! Hardly a day goes by that we don't think about it.

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