Trip of a Lifetime - Day 9

We were up bright and early this morning as were were going through the Three Lesser Gorges. I have neglected to mention that when we travel, I always take my family with me. Even though they are not there physically, I have their photographs where I can see them when I first wake up, and I say a little prayer for each of them for their safety and blessings for the coming day. This always makes me feel as though they are on the trip with us. After breakfast, we went upstairs and watched the people do their morning Tai Chi on the deck. It was then that we discovered that it was raining. It was the first inclimate weather that we have had so far where we are to be outside. We then attended a lecture on the Three Lesser Gorges so we would know what to expect.

After the lecture, we boarded smaller boats which probably held about 75 people. It was a foggy day as well as drizzly, and we had to wait on board our Riverboat to board our tour boats. I took advantage of the wait, stood on our balcony, and got what I consider to be some nice photographs of people boarding one of the them.

As I've said before, the Chinese are a very clean and neat race of people. They even wash their boats in the rain

and eat a bowl of rice while waiting to start to work and help us on our Gorge cruise boat. Once on board the smaller vessels, we were on our way to the Qutang Gorge, the Wushan (The Lesser of the Three Gorges) and the Wu Gorge.

The Three Gorges region is located along the Yangtze River between the cities of Fengjie and Yichang in Chongqing municipality and Hubei province. The Three Gorges region attracted attention globally due to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, which is changing the scenery of the region. The water will be up to these marks soon.
These Gorges were absolutely spectacular. I was afraid that my photographs might not be good since the day was dreary and foggy, but that only added to the mystery of this wonderful place. This is a highly populated farming region and two of the main crops are rice and sesame seeds. They stack the sesame stalks up like the frame of a tee-pee for them to dry out in order to get the seeds. I'm learning SOOO many new things. I always thought sesame seeds came in a bottle at the grocery store. Never really thought about their real source. We cruised for about two and a half hours before lunch and saw many local sights including the nets that the fishermen used. They would hang lights over these huge nets at night and the light would draw the fish into the lowered net so they would have a good catch the next morning. They had water "taxi's" for the local people to go from town to town as you can see here. They would walk to their small villages up the hill which were out of our view after they had been in another village doing shopping, business and visiting. If you weren't outside photographing, it was like sitting in your living room watching a wonderful, storybook world float by. We also cruised by the "Hanging Coffins" which I had never heard of until now. We were told that they first appeared during the Spring and Autumn Period in 722-481BC. A hanging coffin is a unique funeral and sacrifice custom of the minority groups in southern China. People put the bodies of their ancestors into wooden coffins that were later placed in caves of precipitous cliff sides. Most coffins were made with one whole piece of wood into various shapes. It was said that the hanging coffins could prevent bodies from being taken by beasts and also bless the soul eternally. If you look closely you can see one of them in the cave. It was over 100 feet above the river. Our destination for a picnic lunch was perched high on a hill (but was not a hanging coffin!) and we had more dratted steps to climb. I should be used to this by now.

The steps were steep and slick due to the weather and we had to make our our way through the "Hello, Hello" people to get to the place where our lunch was to be served to us. Once we were UP at our destination, we were served a very strange lunch. There were ribs like I had never eaten before and decided not to ask what animal they had come from! Luckily we didn't have to take advantage of the hanging coffins after we had eaten our Mystery Lunch. When we were on a barge trip in France several years ago, one of the passengers said that she had spent the past month in Morocco eating "Mystery Food". Now I understand what she meant :-) Some of the crew from our boat, the Century Sun, had cruised along with us in their own little boat and served us our meal. In fact, one of our table waiters was there so it was good to see a familiar face. He's the one in the red coat on the right. We then retraced our steps through the gorges to get back home and then attended a lecture on the Three Gorges Dam where we will be going tomorrow. We continued to see sights that we had not seen before on the way up and enjoyed them all.

After dinner, there was a Country-Western dance but we opted out since we were pretty tired. It's been another long, wonderful day.

I forgot to mention that I wore my Canvas by Canvas T-shirt yesterday with the photographs of my painting group on the front and it was the hit of the boat. Everyone asked me about it! It pays to advertise ;-)

Pcasso