Traveling cross-country by cruise ship and airplane, one really comes to appreciate the contrasts of this land. One is reminded not only of the country's vast size, but also how surprisingly different things can be just a short distance away.

Last week, I spent a short vacation on the Victoria Cruise, a Yangtze River tourist line. I took the train from Beijing to Yichang, a riverside city in Hubei Province, where I boarded the ship for a trip upstream. I arrived four nights later in Chongqing, the largest city in Southwest China.

My journey included both the scenery of the Three Gorges, which, to me, are still beautiful and spectacular even though partly flooded, and the ultra-modern waterworks of the Three Gorges and Gezhouba dams.

But this was not where I saw the greatest contrast. Much greater was the contrast I found in Chongqing - between the city I saw and the one I can still remember from the hectic but eventually fruitless time I spent there when I was working for a Hong Kong investment firm in the late 1990s.

In less than 10 years, the skyline of the city (along with some major sections of it) had become unrecognizable.

Yes, people did talk about the recent floods caused by torrential rains. But after cursing climate change - which has alternately brought them drought and flood over the last couple of years - they mainly laughed off such transient difficulties.

It seemed like the way people talked had also come a long way from the gloomy conversations I had heard among the dirty, damp alleys in the 1990s.

There is more confidence now. And indeed old friends competed to show me around, even though I had just a few hours before my flight back to Beijing. They showed me the newly built boulevard lined with trendy restaurants to the north of the Yangtze and the ever expanding middle-class housing estates.

Part of this confidence must have something to do with money. If there had not been so much spending on Chongqing's public infrastructure, or if the city had not been able to resist the drought last year and the flood this year, people might not have been so proud of their hometown. There were few signs of such pride when I first visited as an investment representative from an obscure Hong Kong company.

However, money is not the only thing that makes a city work and thrive. In sharp contrast with the service that one would expect from a cruise line reportedly run by a joint venture between a privately held local company and a company in the United States, the Chongqing airport, now housed in a pleasant looking new building, was a total mess.

Over the course of a single hour, I was made to go to four different boarding gates and witnessed one mass protest in the waiting lobby - after passengers were made to disembark from another flight shortly after boarding because the plane had not been properly refueled (at least that is what a ground staffer said). The whole time, the blinking electronic bulletin boards were showing the same old information that had been put up hours ago.

Airlines and airport management - these are areas still under the State monopoly. And they have remained as unproductive, and unpleasant, as they were in the old times.

(China Daily August 27, 2007)