5th December: Wuhan, China to Yichang, China

On the train west, citrus trees and rice whizzed past. Remaining in Hubei province, the journey to Yichang was a short one. We hopped on another BRT and made our way to the centre.

Russian pop-up stores are everywhere here, although the goods are mainly overpriced. Presumably this is some sort of diplomatic exercise as they seem more a curiosity to locals than a place they really buy anything from. Still, we found chocolate and some biscuits for train snacks.

Yichang marks the point where the middle reaches of the Yangtze end and its lower reaches begin, as it tumbles from the Three Gorges onto the plains of Hubei. Walking along the riverbank was peaceful, as we’ve often found outside of the big cities and tourist areas. The river also has a calming effect. We walked down the vast embankments to its edge. Flow is currently less than 20% of the peak, which occurs during the summer months when all of the historically damaging floods have occurred. The current was still strong as ships and swimmers alike struggled to fight their way upstream, both effectively treading water. Big fish leapt and splashed back into the stream. Impressive bridges criss-crossed the waters, with roads piercing into the mountainous landscape on the far shore.

Walking back into town, we had the best buffet for a while. Local delicacies such as crispy skin were replicated in tofu, along with our usual go to favourites. These places have made our lives so much easier in China.

So much construction, demolition, and reconstruction was ongoing in central Yichang. Surprisingly, even some fairly modern looking buildings were being knocked down, seemingly without a thought for the embodied carbon. This isn’t something we’ve seen much of in China – the scale of construction is enormous without the need to replace existing structures – but the growing emissions must be reckoned with. Of course, the total historic emissions of US, UK and rest of the west are much higher and therefore they are more responsible for our changing climate than those of China. The argument for pulling people out of poverty the world over (not closing the drawbridge now the west has achieved it) is also a powerful one. Despite now being the highest net polluter, China is doing this at a much lower person capita rate of emission than the USA and had much shorter phase of dirty industry. It is also doing more than anyone else to drive renewable energy rollouts and push down their costs across the globe, allowing some countries the opportunity to skip stages of fossil fuel driven development. However, that might be too late to ensure a liveable planet for the next few generations of humanity. We are at a point of unprecedented global heating and who knows what tipping points we might have already unknowingly passed.