With a makeshift marching band of ship
crew, dining room staff and below-decks hands lined up to play
exuberant if tinny pop tunes as passengers disembarked, the
Victoria Anna, Victoria Cruises' newest and grandest vessel, made a
triumphal return to Chongqing in early May. The city, it turns out,
is the home port of the busy Dongfeng Shipyard, where the final
touches of the vessel's yearlong construction had been applied only
months earlier.
The jog home
marked the ship's first four-night, upstream voyage on the Yangtze
River from Yichang, a city of no particular distinction other than
it is a regular departure point/terminus for Yangtze cruises. It's
also a few hours' sail to the construction site of the Three Gorges
Dam, China's muscular bid to stand alone among the 21st century's
inchoate Wonders of the World.
Although the
spanking-new Victoria Anna is at best a minor achievement compared
with the dam, she's an achievement, nonetheless, for she represents
the best that luxury river cruising offers in the
Orient.
At 348 feet long
and almost 55 feet wide, with a draft of 8.5 feet and a
displacement of 6,200 tons, the Victoria Anna -- propelled by two
Chinese-made, 1177-kilowatt diesel engines -- is one of Victoria
Cruises' six new or rebuilt Premier-series vessels.
Today's fleet is
a "Great Leap Forward," as it were, from the line's inception in
1994, when the leased Victoria I carried only 3,000 passengers in
its inaugural season.
By comparison,
last year Victoria Cruises, with seven ships in the water -- its
smaller Victoria Rose is in a lesser category than her upscale
Premier sisters -- hosted 47,000 passengers, many of them clients
of tour operators such as Ritz Tours, Pacific Delight, Travcoa and
Uniworld, which with Victoria Cruises co-sponsored my
voyage.
According to
Lawrence Greenman, Victoria Cruises' manager of public relations
and customer service, 70% of passengers are from the U.S., with the
rest from the U.K., Germany and Scandinavia, as well as a
scattering from Australia and Asia. Most are also well-off,
seasoned travelers.
Accommodations on
the five-deck, 
308-passenger Victoria Anna
encompasses 154 cabins, including 132 standard cabins, of about 226
square feet; 16 junior suites, of almost 320 square feet; four
deluxe suites, of 373 square feet; and two Shangri La suites ,of
about 633 square feet.
Suites boast
private balconies, bathrooms with shower and tub, flat-panel TVs
with satellite programming that includes HBO and the BBC, and
hotel-style room placements, with beds set at a 90-degree angle to
the cabin door rather than aligned shotgun-style along the cabin
walls.
Top-of-the-line
Shangri La suites, which are located at the bow of the ship,
feature expansive private balconies, a kingsize bed, a separate
seating area with chair and sofa, and double sinks in the
bathrooms.
Roomy enough for two
The standard
units struck me as roomy enough for two; however, fellow passenger
Gary Tratt, a physician from Hyannis, Mass., said he found the
basic cabin "too tight" for him and his wife and chose to upgrade
to a junior suite. That was just one person's take, of course, but
worth noting nonetheless.
The interior
space of the Victoria Anna, which has an imposing silhouette one
deck higher than her sister ships, is serviced by two elevators --
she is the only Victoria Cruises vessel with lifts -- as well as a
sweeping staircase that skirts the three-deck atrium
lobby.
On-ship
facilities include two lounges, three bars, a lecture room, a
library, an exercise salon, a massage room, what is optimistically
described as an Internet center (one would be better off sending a
postcard or reading a book), a health clinic, a beauty salon and
two restaurants, the single-seating Dynasty Dining Room and the Top
of the Yangtze, Victoria Cruises" experiment in a la carte dining,
in a 50-seat venue at the crown of the ship.
Knives, forks and chopsticks
The cuisine in
both restaurants is under the direction of Bill Sederman, who, when
not cruising with Victoria, is chef de cuisine at the highly
regarded City Tavern in Philadelphia. Onboard the Victoria Anna,
Sederman presides over a kitchen staff of 26 that turns out a 50/50
mix of Western and Chinese dishes.
Meals are served
buffet-style for breakfast and lunch and banquet-style for dinner.
A la carte dining, from a menu that includes Sederman's scaled-down
version of Peking duck, is a perk for passengers who have booked
deluxe or Shangri La suites; however, some tour operators offer the
Top of the Yangtze as a dining upgrade when clients book standard
cabins with a cruise/tour.
The culinary
highlight of each voyage is the customary Captain's Farewell
Banquet. The night of ours, Capt. Li, a man of steely naval
bearing, looked as if he couldn't wait to get back to the
bridge.
There, his 40
years navigating the Yangtze might have served him better than with
our crowd of hungry passengers waiting to dig into lazy susans
laden with appetizers such as sweet and sour spareribs, smoked
fish, Chong-qing beef and potstickers. Main courses included
teriyaki chicken; bird's nest shrimp; and cashew, stir-fried squid
and, in a nod to Western palates, lemon pie.
In and about
Although river
cruising can't compete with sun-and-fun voyages when it comes to
rock-wall climbs, water slides and casinos, there is plenty to keep
the Victoria Anna's passengers -- most approaching or already in
their retirement years -- mentally and physically at the top of
their game.
Onboard
activities include early-morning classes in tai chi, exhibitions of
Eastern medical techniques such as acupuncture and acupressure,
kite-flying lessons on the observation deck and discourses on the
history of China and the Yangtze.
Also available is
a rudimentary language class, Chinese 101, which in addition to
delving into the intricacies of the country's eight major dialects,
arms prospective shoppers with valuable expressions such as "Mei
you qian," meaning "I don't want it"; "tai gui," or "too
expensive"; and "Pian yi dian," which asks whether there's a
discount.
Out and around
Three off-ship
excursions start with a two-hour visit to the Three Gorges Dam,
which at its completion will be 7,665 feet in length, 607 feet high
and 427 feet wide at the bottom. The site is located in an area
called Sandouping, which is in the middle of the Xiling Gorge, one
of three narrowing defiles of the Yangtze where passengers can all
but reach out and touch jagged cliffs of limestone. The natural
scenery resembles a Chinese watercolor brought to life.
Dam construction
is a mixed picture; it is generally agreed that upwards of 1.5
million people will be displaced as the massive project throttles
the Yangtze and backs the river up all the way to Chong-qing,
raising water levels to heretofore unimagined heights.
In his book,
River at the End of the World, world traveler Simon Winchester sees
the ongoing inundation this way: "Some 8,000 recognized
archaeological sites would disappear, and scores of temples and
pagodas would vanish beneath the waters. The gorges themselves
would cease to be places of rapids and whirlpools, becoming instead
a mere section of a deep and placid lake ... ."
On the voyage's
second day, 
the ship docks for
two-and-a-half-hours at Fengdu, the ancient "ghost city" built
1,800 years ago on the north bank of the Yangtze, where legend has
it that "the dead come to Fengdu and the devils go to
hell."
Inside temples
such as the Hall of the Jade Emperor and the Ridge of Helplessness,
lifelike statues depict the horrors of an unforgiving
afterlife.
From the pier,
visitors can climb a winding cobblestone road to the top or, as I
did, take a swaying but quite safe cable car to reach the
945-foot-high complex, at a roundtrip cost of about
$3.70.
The third outing,
an all-morning excursion in flat-bottomed wooden sampans, takes
passengers by ferry to the Shennong Stream.
The Shennong is a
shallow tributary of the Yangtze where teams of men called
"trackers" alternately wield long wooden oars to paddle the small
boats forward and then, in the shallows and against the current,
run ashore and propel the sampans ahead by tugging on taut bamboo
ropes cinched around their waists.
Before the turn
of the century and the advent of steam-powered navigation,
according to Winchester, teams of naked men (with short life spans,
I might add) used to pull larger ships in swifter currents
upstream.
Today,
fortunately, the experience is merely a tourist attraction and a
wonderful photo op.
For more
information, contact Victoria Cruises at www.victoriacruises.com or Uniworld at www.uniworld.com.
To contact reporter Joe Rosen, send e-mail to [email protected].