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!