The highlight or our four day aquatic adventure included drifting through Yangtze’s tall green gorges.
We started out the beautifully perfect and sunny morning on our regular cruise ship with a packed deck ready to look at the first gorge, the Qutang gorge.
We saw many sights such as houses built into the gorge homing goats, caves inside of the rock of the gorge, and huge freighters carrying sand for future concrete projects… the best part was the clear day and being able to view the large protruding gorges as we sat and drank tea on the deck listening to murmured mandarin from boat mates.
At noon we were able to board a smaller ship which was allowed to go through the three lesser gorges, a more beautiful and pristine route where only small boats could travel through. We loved seeing stalactites falling from the mountain, and if you look closely at one of the photos you will see an iron coffin hanging in one of the photos, a coffin from the 18th century! Villagers hung many individuals coffins from the cliffs, there are 13 total still remaining in that region.
This boat was definitely interesting as there was a woman, the tour guide, not only talking about what we were travelling through, but she would sell photo books or food from the gorge. What was interesting was after her speech people would run to the back to buy it, literally run… And wave their money and budge in front of others to get gorge grown corn in a bag… fascinating. Yesterday on our train a member of the train staff talked for 45 minutes about a book, and had people clapping, cheering and chatting, and then they ran back to buy the book. One woman was literally shrieking to buy it. Tangent, but an interesting sight in China which happens a lot.
These lesser gorges were just GORGEous 🙂 many interesting mountain shapes, and the sunny day along with the ivy green water made them so interesting, nothing like we had ever seen before in Alaska or on our boat cruise in Greece. Christina spotted a monkey but wasn’t able to snap a photo in time! He was just running along one of the sides of gorges!
Because we don’t speak mandarin, this last boat came to us as a pleasant surprise.
An hour into the lesser gorges cruise we got on a tiny boat you could hardly stand in, mostly made of bamboo, you sat on wooden planks and donned a life jacket the whole time.
Our tour guide sang to us, there was a man across the river playing flute in a tiny thatched tent, and our tour guide tried to sell us heart shaped key chains with photos of the gorge. He also let certain individuals wear traditional boating garb, which was very entertaining.
This boat was fun and was just the kind of experience we hoped we would get on the trip!
Tomorrow is the worlds largest power dam!
Christina & Josh in Asia 