A Ride On The Black Dragon River

March 30, 2009 By: thenhbushman Geotag Icon Show on map Category: China, Travel

Photos by MJ Klein & Huichen

Hui-chen and I are going back to China next week on business. We’ll be blogging on our experiences there of course. But thinking about going back has prompted me to take a look at the photos we took back in August of 2005. We thought you might like to take a trip we took on the Black Dragon River.

The Black Dragon River gives it’s name to the Chinese province of the north east. It is a border river with Russia, who calls it the “Amur River” and a very important symbol of Chinese-Russian relations. The Black Dragon River is a very busy commercial waterway (as we shall see in a moment), and has a burgeoning tourist trade going on.

This is the view you meet when you first see the river.

I wanted to mention that this area is so far northeast that this hole is used as refrigeration in the winter time….

…. and also in the dead of summertime. The ground is still very cold down about one meter.

This is one of the many barges that travel up and down the river.

But it’s time for us to board our tour boat.

One of the passengers gives Hui-chen a steady hand.

The tour boat goes up and then back down the river and about 1/2 way across, always careful to not cross the international border between the 2 countries.

This is the Russian side of the river.

With the boat going about 1/2 across the river, and with a zoom telephoto, one can get quite close to the Russian side, in a manner of speaking.

The boat ride is quite pleasant and relatively slow speed. Tolerable by most people I would think.

This is a load of lumber on a barge.

Here you see the lumber being loaded onto a barge on the China side of the river.

Here is a Chinese ship managing a lumber barge.

There is a lot of activity on the China side of the river….

This is a Russian ship.

But notice that it’s flying two flags, one at the stern (Russian) and one on the wheelhouse (Chinese).

Notice the front of this ship.

This ship was designed to move cargo in barges up and down the river. Let me tell you, there is an amazing amount of commericial traffic on the river!

We’ll have some more adventures from China when we return! Be sure to leave us your comments below. Thanks for reading!

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10 Responses to “ A Ride On The Black Dragon River ”

# 1 Passing By Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
The red on the stones look very kitchy, but I suppose much of the tourist areas in China are that way.

thenhbushman reply on March 30th, 2009 8:46 pm:

thanks for stopping by. sorry, but i don’t know what “kitchy” means, but much of China is just as you see in the photos.
# 2 Dennis Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
not a big fan of china at all have to say, but i’d have a lot more to say about a certain faction of ppl in taiwan.

thenhbushman reply on March 30th, 2009 11:14 pm:

Dennis, the place is pretty cool, and if you can speak Chinese even a little, you can have a lot of fun with the locals like i did.
# 3 mike01905 Says:
April 1st, 2009 at 9:45 am
I clicked o nthe thing at the top of this article to view the area on a map… and all it did was show me some streets. Since you said it got its name from a region in Northeast China and its a border river with Russia…. I took a look for it on Google Earth.

WOW… that is a BMF river (I know you know what BMF stands for… not sure if others will). So… not sure where in China you were for these pics. I guess the Chinese ship that was managing the barge that had the lumber on it is China’s version of a tugboat.

thenhbushman reply on April 2nd, 2009 11:50 am:

Mike, you have to zoom out to see the river a few hundred meters away from that location. if the controls aren’t visible (happens with some browsers) then right double-click on the map to zoom out, and left double-click to zoom in.

yes, it is a BMF river and very important to the region. i’ve seen it iced over 2 meters thick with trucks driving on it, and i’ve also taken that boat ride in the summer.

2 weeks after those photos were taken, a chemical spill in China sent a chemical slick of benzine up into Russia. that caused a lot of harm to the area on it’s way up to Russia. and yes, that is their version of a tugboat.

mike01905 reply on April 2nd, 2009 10:52 pm:
Yeah… map controls for zooming and an out werehn’t showing up. I’m using Internet Explorer 7 on this computer (tried to put IE8 on it but I get an error message everytime I run it). I shold’ve tried viwing the map with FireFox which I also have on this computer. I could try it with IE8 on my laptop.

When looking at Google Earth… it looks lik it wsa considerably further north than where I am (me being around th 42nd parallel… I think this river was in the area of the 48th or 49th parallel). So… I can see it frezing and the ice getting really thick.

Did the chemical spill cause any “tensions” between Russia and China… since you said it caused “a lot of harm”??

thenhbushman reply on April 2nd, 2009 10:59 pm:

the map controls sometimes don’t show up for some reason. i don’t have any idea why or the time to figure it out.

yes, 48 degrees north – that’s above north Korea too. it gets damn cold up there in the winter time.

i read that Russia wasn’t too happy with China about that chemical spill. that was quite a few years ago so it may be hard to find anything about it now.
# 4 cfimages Says:
April 1st, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Nice report. Being that close to Russia would be cool – I’d love to actually travel overland from China to Russia.

cfimagess last blog post..Disputed Lands – The Case of Preah Vihear

thenhbushman reply on April 2nd, 2009 11:47 am:

Craig, we looked into getting a Russian visa, and it’s a nightmare. you can’t just get one casually like you could say, going to Laos from Thailand. virtually everything must be accounted for – where you’re staying, and with whom, your travel agent, itinerary, route, etc. etc. you can’t just go there and play it by ear, unfortunately, or else we would have gone there for a night.