Yangtze River

We leave Chongqing on Friday night for a three-day cruise down the Yangtze River (in China called 長 江－changjiang, or the long river).  The famous Three Gorges have been filled in by the construction of the dam, so the water is 60 meters higher and the gorges are not as spectacular but they still impress.  Of course everywhere we got the party line about the dam being an unmitigated good, saving lives (flood control), producing hydro-electric power (the generators there supply power for a 1,000 km diameter, including Beijing and Shanghai), and enabling a greater volume of river traffic. But creating the reservoir (raising the river) displaced 1.3 million farmers, who were located to new villages higher up on the mountain or to Chongqing. Raising the river permanently destroyed valuable agricultural lands, has provoked landslides (we saw concrete reinforcements on the banks everywhere), and has endangered various species of fish and wildlife. See link at left for more on Three Gorges dam controversy.

Chongqing at night, viewed from our ship. We love sailboats!

Entering the Qutong Gorge

"Ghost City" - shore excursion. 300+ steps up in heat for gods that determine who goes to hell.

Goddess Mountain in Wu Gorge

 To see the goddess, click on the photo to enlarge. Look carefully for the tiny figure to the right of the double peaks.

visit to the ship's bridge (just have to ask!)

When we got to the third gorge, the Xiling, we transferred to a ferry and then to wooden boats to travel up the Daning River, a tributary, into the beautiful, narrow Butterfly Gorge.  The people in this area are Tujia （土家）an ethnic minority (and we later saw some awesomely scary Tujia opera masks at the Shanghai Museum).  The boatmen work really hard, in a long tradition of arduous physical labor and including "tracking"--walking in the river and along the rocky banks and pulling boats by long ropes in strong currents.)  They now mostly work for the tourist industry and we were told that they work shifts of 4 or 5 hours a day, which made us feel slightly less guilty.  We saw wild monkeys and mountain goats; and the "hanging coffins" in the cliffs, a "burial" practice hundreds of years old (some of these were lost when the river was filled--click on photo to enlarge to see coffin in the crevice)

Hanging coffin

Boatmen on trip up Butterfly Gorge

That night we went through the ship locks, at 1 am (took two hours).  In the morning we toured the dam, but it was very foggy and we couldn't see much.

ship's locks at dam (5 steps)

entry to top of Three Gorges Dam