Day Ten - Red Pagoda and Fengdu Ghost City

The Red Pagoda - built without nails

Misty morning on the Yangtze

When we awoke we were moored near the Red Pagoda. It was an atmospherically misty morning and as the sun came up we watched local people doing their washing in the river.

Doing the washing!

Low wooded hills border the river

The morning was spent watching the banks of upper Yangtze slip past. There are beautifully wooded hills in this area, quite different from the steep sided gorges.



In the afternoon we visited Fengdu Ghost City via a pontoon bridge and the ubiquitous market stalls selling not only souvenirs but also local snacks including - pig's noses. We passed them by! 

Modern Fengdu across the Yangtze

Fengdu Ghost City is actually a large complex of shrines and temples dedicated to the afterlife. The temples of the Ghost City are on the northern bank and are the only remaining parts of the original city of Fengdu, the rest was flooded when the dam was constructed and a new city has been built on the southern bank. 

The complex combines the beliefs of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism and reflects the belief that good people will be treated well in the afterlife and that bad people will be punished by demons. It is constructed to resemble Youdu the capital city of the underworld in Chinese mythology which was just like a Chinese city except that it was dark. 

Judges of souls

Judges of souls

Souls of the dead, deities and demons lived in Youdu and the records of peoples lives were also kept there so all souls went there to be judged when they died.

Bridge over troubled water

Ghost torturing demons

It was believed that there are various tests that the soul has to undergo, these are represented in the statues and buildings of Fengdu Ghost city.

 One of the tests is the 'Bridge of Troubled Water' that the soul cannot cross if it is bad. 

Another test is the  'Ghost-Torturing Pass' where the souls of the dead present themselves for judgement by the King of Hell. 

Three Buddahs

Female Buddah

As well as statues of demons and judges there were also many statues of Buddahs - some of them female.

Last glance pavillion

The oldest of the temples is more than 300 years old but the Last Glance to Home Tower which was built in 1985 is the most recent. It marks the place where, it's believed that, the dead could have a last look back home.

No wonder nobody stays there!

We not only saw the temples of the 'underworld' but also a huge golden head on the hillside which turned out to be an ill-fated hotel project - no windows and no guests - really it's almost as strange as a temple complex modelled on the capital of the underworld!

This was our last night on the Yangtze and we had the 'Captain's Farewell Dinner' which was similar to regular dinner except that the waitresses wore their red cheongsam and we had red napery on the tables and the Captain made a speech.

Leo translating the Captain's speech to English

The food seemed to include more fried things than usual and many of the dishes were sweet including the breaded garlic chicken - though the bread is sweet tasting anyway - and the lotus root stuffed with sticky rice. This must be to the Chinese taste as we noticed one man putting his dessert on the same plate as everything else - gravy and all!

Day Nine - The Shennong Stream and Goddess Peak

The first gorge - Longchuan Canyon

We took an excursion ferry up the Shennong stream to see three smaller gorges. They were much narrower than the gorges on the Yangtze river and very beautiful.  The second gorge is called the Parrot gorge because apparently the peak looks like a parrot, much laughter ensued because we thought the guide had said a pirate!  

Qia (swallow) cave in Parrot Gorge

Hanging coffin in Shennong canyon

We passed an enormous cave which is home to thousands of swallows and also saw caves which contained hanging coffins. In ancient times the mountain people had little land in which to bury their dead so they only buried them for a short time and then exhumed the bones and placed them in a wooden coffin suspended (away from any predators) in a cave high on the mountain. Since the dam has raised the river level these caves are no longer so high up and are more visible and some have even had to be removed as the water would have covered them.

The Shanghai-Chengdu bridge!

Before the dam was built the people of Shennong used to partly earn their living by hauling boats over the shallows, some still live by agriculture, others have gone to the city. There are some however that still live so remotely that their only access is by walking down to the waterside and their children do this walk and boat ride to go to school and then stay in the town for 10 days at a time because it is such a difficult journey. Their difficult transport options contrasted starkly with the new express way bridge we saw later.

Really inappropriately placed girls

Local herbs

Of course the less remote Shennong people also earn some money from tourism and they had a small commercial centre selling local dried herbs and clothing.

They also put on a show of local singing and dancing against a poster showing naked men hauling boats through the shallows which made for a very inappropriate backdrop to the performance!

Empress Wu Peak!?

The thinking man!?

In the afternoon we sailed through the second and third of the Yangtze gorges. First the Wuxia gorge and then the Qutangxia gorge. The on-board English-speaking river guide, Leo, described the scenery as we passed. Wuxia gorge is so called because one peak looks like Empress Wu. Another peak looks like a man thinking with his hands on his knees. Up the Shennong we'd been told of a peak that looked like a monkey and another that looked like an elephant, Leo however finally told us one was called Baseball Cap Peak! We thought he was just making them up for a joke but Mike, one of our group, told us it's called 'Pareidolia' where the mind perceives a familiar pattern of something where none actually exists! In that case the Chinese seem racially disposed to suffer from it.

The Goddess Peak

As we exited the Qutangxia gorge we saw the Goddess Peak. This is the symbol of the Three Gorge area of the Yangtze and is shown on the 10 Yuan note. 

10 Yuan note

The weirdness of the day came from the evening entertainment, a so-called Dance Party. This consisted of a half dozen disco tunes sandwiched between two episodes of Chinese language karaoke. It was as bad - to Western ears anyway - as it sounds! 

Day Eight - Xiling Gorge and the Three Gorges Dam

This morning was our first day sailing on the Yangtze in the area of the Three Gorges. The first of the gorges is Xiling gorge and the dam is built about halfway along the gorge.

Pagodas near Yichen in the early morning sun

Our morning sail took us from the dock at Yichen to Sandoupingzhen below the Three Gorges dam where we docked for a visit to the dam. 

Bridge over a tributary

A big river vessel 

 After our hectic travelling day it was beautifully relaxing to sit back and observe the scenery of Xiling gorge. The Yangtze is a very large river and as well as the scenery there wasa always a wide variety of passing craft to see. 

A small river vessel 

A very strange vessel

Sandoupingzhen community hall

Our upgraded room came with an unexpected extra - access to the select dining room on level 5 - which we didn't really want. As two other couples had also upgraded we had lunch up there. On comparing notes afterwards we discovered the food was no different to the main dining room so we decided to rejoin the group as the upper dining room was pretty empty and had no atmosphere at all and after a week we'd miss the company.

View from the road bridge,
the dam is on the left and the ship locks are on the right

Ship locks, looking downriver toward Yichen
with the road bridge in the distance

Ship locks looking upriver

After lunch we visited the Three Gorges Dam project. Although we were there for maybe three hours it can be summed up succinctly thus. The Chinese have built the largest river dam in the world with the largest river ship-locks and it generates the most electricity and they are very, very proud of the achievement. Quite rightly so, it is very impressive but the figures mean little to the lay person except that the (big) ships have to be raised over 100 metres in the 5 locks.

Outdoor escalators!

The actual dam

The project site is also of course a tourist attraction and, of course, ultra modern so it has an escalator between levels. We'd never seen outdoor escalators before!

It's a pretty big site as there 

The 3 Gorges Worker's monument

The flowerbeds were full of butterflies

are the homes built for the workers on the dam project - I think it took 9 years to complete - and has been nicely landscaped with a water feature and a monument to the workers and lots of flowerbeds and trees.

Deeper inside the ship locks

In the evening we went through the locks. 

Inside the ship locks

When you're in there it's very noisy and also when the lock is empty before the water comes in it's very dark. It;s also very hot because of the restricted space. 

Welcomed by the Captain!

Before dinner we had the 'Captain's Welcome Party' with sham champagne - definitely cheap Chinese copy, neither tasty nor alcoholic, slightly fizzy though! 

And after dinner the crew put on a fashion show of Chinese clothes (a) through the ages (b) of the Chinese minority peoples and (c) modern Chinese clothes - the latter of course were for sale in the on-board boutique. 

Qin Dynasty clothes

Ethnic dress

Tang Dynasty clothes

These beautiful scarves are available on Deck Four!

The weird (but nice) dish of the day today were deep fried taro balls for dessert - they were much like little doughnuts but not as stodgy.

Day Seven - Travelling to Yichen

We left Xi'an on a morning flight to Wuhan. We flew over some incredibly convoluted, fluted mountains. They looked as if they had been folded from a very thin cloth so that the folds were many and sharp.

Lunch in Wuhan was at a Tibetan themed restaurant which provided the weirdness of the day since Tibet is a very long way away from Wuhan. The restaurant though was rather jolly with prayer wheels outside and a large golden Buddha within.

After lunch we had a five hour coach drive to the dock at Yichen for our four night cruise along the Yangtze. Our route to Yichen was through the low lying valley of the Yangtze and the countryside was mostly made up of paddy fields, but not rice paddies. These paddies were either growing lotus for its root which is a food crop - we were to have it steamed for dinner with black fungus - or they were fish farms. 

Drawing and comment from my diary!

We also saw duck farms (definitely free-ranging ducks) and also a man ploughing with an ox (or more probably a water-buffalo) and another ploughing with a Rotavator. These farms are tiny and consist of only a field or two and aren't really viable any more. All the young people, we were told, leave for the cities where they can earn more money even doing very menial work like sweeping the streets.

Boarding Yangtze 2 in the dark

After dinner in Yichen we finally boarded our boat at about 8pm and were very pleased indeed when we saw our beautiful upgraded room. 

Our lovely berth

The main dining room

Bev in the reading room

The rest of the boat was pretty swish too!

Me in the reading room