Three Gorges, Yangtze River, CHONGQING PROVINCE

(J) Following on from our long day in Chengdu, it was a day of bus riding. We had a very modest breakfast, for me interrupted by constant reminders of the previous nights spicey food. We were on our way at 7:00 am. The bus ride was subdued. Eventually we arrived at some Buddist rock carvings. These were quite amazing...as so many things here in China seem to be. They dated back to around 1200 AD and depicted life and times, standing many meters high and occupying a scenic gorge. The whole thing being started by a local.....let's call him a war lord, who was feeling a bit guilty about his past deeds and wanted to redeem himself in the eyes of heaven....maybe he should have become a catholic and confessed....would have been quicker and cheaper!

After the rock carvings we had a lunch then another long bus ride to the place where our cruise was due to start. Unfortunately, at this time of year there is inadequate water in the Yangtze for the cruise boat to rendezvous with us at this point, so we fair welled our guide, Andy, and our driver with a generous tip and on to another bus with lots of other cruise patrons for a three hour journey to the new starting point.
Numb bum is the only turn of phrase I can come up with for how I was feeling when finally we arrived at our destination, Fengdu. We hired what we thought was two porters to carry our luggage to the ship across numerous pontoons. As it turned out one modestly sized man undertook the task, carry two cases on one end of a bamboo pole that rested on his shoulder with two others nicely balancing things on the other end...all up around 80kgs. He received a very generous tip indeed.
The ship was pretty nice and after negotiating an upgrade to a better room was absolute luxury after the last few days. It was a perfectly timed down time for us all, being tired and frayed...China is not the easiest holiday.

We had heated pool and sauna access plus more food than we could handle. The gorges were something to see and we managed a couple of shore trips, one to a 12 storey pagoda and the other down a tributary of the river, where an indigenous minority lived.
The dams on the Yangtze have changed the behaviour of the river and now there is more water than was previously the case up stream of the dams. This means a number of villages have been relocated, as in the wetter part of the year, the old villages were being inundated. We walked through a new town when Ian and I visited the pagoda (it was raining so the girls dogged it), it was clean and tidy but lacked vitality, it was actually rather depressing. There were only old people and their grandchildren living in the village, with the younger adults working in the big cities, only visiting the children at Chinese New Year!!! There were lots of local market stalls for tourists but nothing in them was worth buying, nothing that was regional or different. It was all very sad and a bit desperate in my view.
After we returned to the boat that evening, there were welcoming drinks in the bar being held by the captain. I wore my best wrinkled t-shirt for the occasion and accordingly thought better of having my photo taken with the skipper. I did however suspect that the captain was in fact a cabin boy I had seen earlier in the day but decked out in a white uniform. There was a table of finger food that was not touched until after the captains welcoming speech and a "gam bei" (cheers) with a very sweet champagne. The table of food was attacked as if no-one on board had managed a feed in a week. It was like a plague of locust!

The three gorges dam is an engineering marvel. To navigate the dam, the boating traffic has to negotiate a lock comprising 5 separate compartments (probably not the right terminology) and dropping over 100 meters in total. We started through this lock at midnight on our last night of the cruise. About 200 ships can move through the lock system in a day. A lift is also being built that will move a large number of small craft down steam of the dam in a much quicker time period. It takes a ship about three hours to go through the 5 compartments of the lock.

It would have been nice to stay longer on the boat. But refreshed we ventured onward to out next destination, cosmopolitan Shanghai.
(C) On our second day we had an excursion up a smaller tributary stream called Shenny stream where we were ferried in smaller chinese style timber boats in groups of 20-30 people to a rock platform where we watched some singing of the local minority group and did some of their traditional dancing with them. Quite an unusual thing to do but relaxing and enjoyable as we had a reasonably sunny day.

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