11. - 4 MAY: Cruise on the Yangtse:

The highlight of an otherwise quiet day is the Shennong stream cruise. We leave our ship for a ride on a smaller ferry up the Shennong river, and after half an hour or so we are transferred to smaller wooden pirogues where skinny rowmen start working their oars up the stream. We float by serene and green areas, some fishermen, some villages, and an impressive contruction site for a bridge of the Chongqing-Shanghai highway. The whole thing is a bit touristy, a lot in fact, but pleasant nonetheless.

Our guide for the tour is a semi-professional singer dressed in traditional costume. She is trying to keep alive some traditional music from the area, and on our way back offers a little performance to her captive audience on the raw-boat: us. She also has CDs to sell of course, very entrepreneurial of her...


In the evening, after dinner, we reach the Three Gorges Dam. At this point the ship is lowered through five ship-locks, in a little over three hours, to the lower part of the river. Read more on tomorrow’s post...

10. - 3 MAY: Cruise on the Yangtse: Shibaozhai

map of our cruise on the yangtse, click here to view in full size

Peaceful day of cruising down the river. The most meaningful part of the day is our visit to Shibaozhai (Stone Treasure Fortress) located in Zhong County, at the south bank of the Yangtze River, 52 km away from Wanxian, it was first built in Qing Dynasty in 1750, with a height of 56 meters.

The original village has been inundated after the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, and all inhabitants have been moved to a brand new village 56 meters higher on the nearby hill. I can’t comment on the old village, but people here say it was pretty poor, no sanitation, damp wooden houses and gardens by the waterline that were flooded every rainy season. Now I can see brick apartment buildings with electric power and sewage systems. Of course there will be those who will regret the romantic old ways, but to me this is a net improvement of huge proportions.



Late at night I talk to Li about our day and we sip baijiu on the balcony of my cabin. As we look out to the river, several towns and a couple of large cities pass by, she is not even sure of their names, but they count millions of people. Row after row of brightly lit skyscrapers stick out against the black moonless night. I can't but be impressed by the achievements of China.

9. - 2 MAY: Dazu, legend of the country girl; board ship for Yangtse cruise

The highlight today is another Unesco WHS: the Dazu rock carvings dating from the 9th to the 13th century of our era.. I won't take time to describe them here, just click on the Unesco page linked above. It is a magical place, and worth spending a full day in. Maybe even two if your schedule allows.

Dazu Rock carvings

But I would like to share the "legend of the country girl", subject of one of the carvings, as reported to me by a local guide. I found it moving.

A beautiful country girl is invited to town by a bunch of boys she does not know. She does not want to go because she is shy, but they insist so much that she relents and accepts to follow them. And that's when her troubles start...

Once in town they take her to a party and force her to dance. But she is weak because of pregnancy and after many hours she collapses and aborts her child. Soon thereafter she dies of grief and goes to hell. Here she gemerates five hundred children with all the demons she meets in the ghastly place. Nonetheless, she never forgot her one child on earth and wants revenge against the town boys for her lost child. Strong of her afterwordly powers, she goes back to the town where she died, attends more parties and every night she eats a local child.

After this had been going on for a while Buddha Sakyamuni decides to intervene, sneaks up to her and kidnaps one of her 500 children. He then goes to pay a visit and finds her in a desperate state of mind and asks her why she is so cruel since, after all, she now has 500 children. What does she think of the mothers of the children she eats, Buddha asks her. She understands and stops eating children, at which point Buddha returns her kidnapped child to her. She then loved all children of the world for the rest of her life and became a goddess of children!

Recommended reading: This one below is one of several books on the Dazu carvings, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the best of the bunch, great binding, good photographs and detailed descriptions, in English, of each one of them. It is expensive: there are cheaper versions of this book but this is the one to buy if you can afford it. It is impossible to convey the sheer size and majesty of the carvings in pictures, but this is as close as it gets.


In the US and worldwide buy it here:



In the UK buy it here:





My guide tells me another legend, which I struggle to understand: a woman who had a chicken was sent to hell because during her lifetime she had fed this chicken lots of prime food. In doing so she made the chicken fat. One man thought the fat chicken would be very tasty, killed it, cooked it and ate it. If the chicken had not been fed so well she would not have looked so mouth-watering and the man would not have eaten it. OK I'll need some time to think this through.


It is a rainy day, and the long bus ride makes a few of us doze off... I stay awake, mostly, and from my seat at the front of the vehicle keep looking at the two flags our nostalgic driver has glued to his dashboard...

Nostalgic driver...

After the visit to the carvings' site we go for lunch, but first we stumble into another great temple. The Longevity temple, built in 1178, and now again in use after decades of neglect during Maoist times.

In the evening we board our cruise ship, the "President", for a 3-day run down the Yangtse, which in some languages is referred to as the Blue River, the longest river in Asia and the main artery of life in China since time immemorial!

8. - 1 MAY: Kunming Western mountains, flight to Chongqing

Morning to the Western Mountains, it’s May 1st, officially Workers' Day in China, so EVERYONE is out enjoying the sunshine and the city parks. There are so many Chinese tourists, and not a few foreigners, that it is literally difficult to move around in the park.

Hundreds of souvenir stands line up the walk from the parking lot to the site, and with tons of junk I spot a few nostalgic items, like Mao’s little red book, sold here in countless versions and many languages. I have already a few copies at home from my last trip, so I pass, and anyway prices are going up for the real ones, printed when Mao was alive. I suppose they must be getting scarcer, even though billions must have been printed during the Cultural Revolution.

Interesting talk with our guide Xu. He says Kunming is becoming a sought after destination for retirement: good climate (between 15 and 30° C year round, they don’t use much either heating or A/C), less crowded than the big cities of the coast, lower prices. Lots of effort to clean up the air, many scooters are now electric, cost about 400 euros and 5-6 euros per month in recharges. There is fresh fruits available year round, the red earth is rich and fertile, also lots of tobacco as cash crop. Quite a few from the West are moving here as well, he says, though that is more surprising to me.

I see a lot of police around, Xu says it’s because of drugs, we are near the “golden triangle” here and there is smugglers coming in from Burma.

Short visit to old downtown Kunming, just a street or two with a few old buildings and a live pet market that are included in all the tourist itineraries. Nothing much at all. Kunming is a new, vibrant and growing city, pretty impressive.

I am irritated by some of the comments of my companions who express regret that the good old times are gone, when homes in China were made of wood, there was no electricity, no cars, no plumbing... the usual litany of "it was better when it was worse".

More interestingly, I meet a couple of friendly old ladies, it is very hard to understand each other but they speak a few words of English and make it a point to underline to me that they are christians. They can say so more or less openly now, but remember well the times when they feared for their lives...

7. - 30 APR: Flight to Kunming, Shilin stone forest

A two-hour flight delay screws up our schedule a bit... Anyway we get to Kunming and head of to the Shilin stone forest. Shilin actually means "the stone forest". It’s a long drive, and we don’t get there before the early afternoon. Great weather and very pleasant walk in the karstic formations.

There are zillions of Chinese tourists, but when I ask our local guide whether there might be a less beaten track he says yes, of course, and off we go. In a second we are alone with the rocks and the water canals, taking pictures from the precisely designed walkways that snake around them.

 

All of a sudden it’s eerily silent! Great. After a while we meet some ladies who are returning from the fields, dressed in bright colors and all wearing a wide straw hat.

As we head back to the bus the sun is setting, and a few more ladies approach us. These are vendors of table cloths and little embroided wallets, five for a dollar. We all buy some, they are in heaven!

The ride back to Kunming is not easy. Lots of traffic. We don’t get to the city before 8pm or so, too late to attend a concert of local music I had planned to take the group to.

6. - 29 APR: Shangri-la, lake Bitahai, Shudu and visit of town, shopping

Lake Bitahai

In the morning we make a trip to lake Bitahai, the highest in Yunnan at 3500msl. Nice walk along the river, abou three kilometers. We also take a short ride on a boat, a rip-off at 5 dollars to sail 10 minutes locked inside an ugly ferry. Would have been nicer to walk that distance as well. Then a drive to lake Shuduhai and another pleasant walk of a kilometer and a half. Tons of Chinese tourists all around. Not as many yaks as we had hoped to see, but still we see lots of the archetycal animal of this region in the meadows that paint this landscape.