The Yangtzi River
Cruising Through the Three Gorges

After spending a day in WuHan, where none of my pictures came out, I took a ship down the Yangtzi River to ChongQing.  I had planned this to be in the middle of the trip to give me a chance to relax before going further south.  The trip ended up taking longer than expected, about 5 days and 4 nights.  The ship wasn't in the best condition.  Some of the showers worked, others were locked at odd times of the day.  Sometimes access was blocked from inside but not outside.  To avoid being stared at, I often took my showers at night.  The lights were often out so I brought along a flashlight.  Lunch was always the same ¥5 styrofoam box of greasy rice and vegetables with some type of meat.  Those boxes, along with everything else that people were eating, were tossed overboard.  You could tell where other ships had been by the trail of noodle buckets and orange peels.  In all, the trip wasn't that bad.  Gave me a chance to catch up on my reading anyway.  It was nice and peaceful just drifting along, watching the people who spend everyday living along the river.  In about five years it will all be gone, though.  The government is building a hugh dam that will submerge everything, creating the worlds largest manmade lake.  Everyone living along the river are now being relocated.  Considering the amount of waste in the river it'll probably be the worlds larges cesspool.  Or maybe the dam will just break and wipe out Shanghai.

  

Sunset on the Yangtzi. This is one of the best pictures from the vacation.
A house set half way up a mountain.  There were no fields or anything else around.  Not another building nearby either.  Why would some one decide to live here?  Maybe they just like privacy.
Lazy days along the Yangtzi.  My best memory of the trip is of this little girl.  When I met her I was sitting there where she is reading a book and listening to a tape.  She had been looking at me but I didn't notice because everyone else was too.  I noticed she had an English grammer book and she kept looking at something like she was practicing.  She looked like she wanted to say something but never would.  I pointed to the the English on her book and asked her if she could speak it.  She said in Chinese that she couldn't.  Then, she pointed to a sentence in the book that read "Welcome to China."  I fell in love right there.  After that everytime I'd go out on deck she'd give me a big smile and come running up to me.  She never said much, but when she did I could understand a little because she spoke so clearly for me, unlike most people who seem to think everyone speaks Chinese.  She sometimes gave me some of the peanuts her mother gave her.  After a while I got board so I decided to teach her some English.  We got as far as 1,2,3,4, and a few colors.  I wanted to give her something foreign to remember me by, but the closest I had was a book in Chinese and English.  I also gave her my name card and tried to tell her to write me a letter but she never did.  She never even asked me where I was from.
As I said before, everyday in China is laundry day.  It was very common to see women out washing their clothes along the banks and laying them on on the rocks to dry.
A gorge.
Imagine stearing a ship through all this.  The boat was constantly making right-angle turns.  A gorge is where a cliff face comes right up from the water.  Here you can see where the boat had just passed through three large mountains.
Some people are willing to struggle against the odds and  scrape out a living along this difficult stretch of land.  Many fields such as this dotted the hills where ever it was possible to clear the land.  I see these on many mountians.  I guess some people just like it up there.  No one can struggle again progress for long, soon this will all be under water.
Another sunset over the mountains.

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