Monday 24th March

It was quite a long approach to Shanghai, we took on two pilots at 2:30am, one for the approaches and the other for the Chang Jiang estuary of the Huangpu River close to where it joins the Yangtze River. The Yangtze is Asia’s longest river at 3,900 miles and is the scene of that famous Incident involving HMS Amethyst. Both rivers are light brown to yellow with the sediment brought down and are known locally as yellow river (or sometimes, mud river) which is probably the origin of the Yellow Sea’s name as they both flow into its southern end. Shanghai is the fourth busiest port in the world and it looks it, as a constant stream of ships has passed us inbound and outbound sometimes two or three abreast. We went ashore for a trip on the maglev train out to the airport and the journey from the port to the station took over an hour through what appeared to be thousands and thousands of residential high rise tower blocks. With a population of 8.8 million, Shanghai is not what you call an attractive city though it is impressive by virtue of its sheer size. Some of the individual buildings are unusual, but as they seem to have been placed merely to outdo their immediate neighbour and the whole effect is one of piecemeal development, all a bit of a hotchpotch really. We arrived at Longman Road Station and boarded the train to Pudong International Airport station. The journey was to take eight minutes and reach a maximum speed of 431 km/h but we only got up to 301 km/h in both the outbound and inbound journey, but it was an impressive journey given the rate of acceleration for a train full of passengers and the closing speed of some 700 plus km/h when two trains pass each other. From the maglev we moved on to the Jinmao Tower to see the city from the observation platform taking the express lift at a speed of 9 metres per second to height of 384 metres (approx 1300ft) in 45 seconds. From there we got the true scale of the city (and the true scale of pollution in the form of smog), however looking down inside the tower we had a stomach churning view of the foyer of the hotel some 54 floors below us, not a view for the faint hearted. All things considered it was an interesting visit but Shanghai is not the sort of city you can take to your heart and the journey back to the ship underlined that fact as it took, getting on for 1hr 45mins for the return journey, put people who were taking second trips under some pressure. Interestingly enough for a city with so much traffic (55,000 taxis) the cost of a driving licence alone is twelve thousand US dollars, and at one stage the council was issuing two new ones a month. Extreme measures for parking spaces such as sharing a space with another car on alternate days, I don’t know where they park when it’s the other persons turn. Some streets are closed at night and turned into car parks. And get this, you can be given the death sentence for drunk driving at the most extreme. Driving is a bit of a nightmare, as to give way is to lose face and that goes for giving way to pedestrians at a pedestrian crossings, so to cross the road you launch yourselves as a crowd with your fingers crossed. They call it the sticky rice technique, you just have to hope it doesn’t turn into a stick mess technique.