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Sailing the River Yangtze through the Three Gorges, in a 3rd class cabin, China.

Heraclites said that nobody can swim twice in the same river because, in life, everything flow non stop. The river will never be the same, and neither will you. We are sailing the river Yangtze, the biggest Chinese river, famous for his gigantic dam, but also for having the Three Gorges, three steep gorges that look like the gates of a new different world.

We are sitting on the bow, right in front of a big window. We are surrounded by dozens of Chinese people who seem to be arguing, or maybe they are just playing cards, their favourite pastime. Don’t think that we are in a luxurious cruise. Not at all. From our 3rd class cabin we can hear the rats scratching the hull with their nails trying to find a crack or gap to be able to breathe. But we don’t complain about it. If we were in a 1st class cabin, we would be lying on bed missing this moment without even knowing it. We were going over the trip and, without even notice it, we jumped from one side to another. From Barcelona to India, from Tibet to China. From one character to the next one. From Mohammed to Mao, all the way up to Gandhi, Buddha, or the Dalai Lama himself. From “have we already changed?” to “how do the countries change one from another?”. From how we heard the same stories here and there to how there is only one story and the places are the ones that change. From how kindness and evilness can be so far and so close at the same time, almost touching each other to the point that you cannot differentiate one from the other. It is the Ying Yang circle, the everlasting harmony of positive and negative, the basis of the Chinese philosophy.

Looking back and reading again what we wrote, we are probably judging too much in a very short period of time, taking our kindness and evilness intertwined and disembowelling them, mercilessly, until they are pulled apart to take sides for one or the other. Maybe it is not fair to do so without having more information, but we have always tried to have both sides of the story. If we don’t say anything, it wouldn’t be honest either. That would be like letting our thoughts flow with the current, dragged by time and lost in our memories. Like a river that is not always the same, our words will never be either. We don’t want to judge today. We prefer to wait until the end of this journey and see what it looks like then. Sweet or bitter. Mild or hot.