On the 2nd of April, 2011 we flew into Chongqing (pronounced Chong Ching) as part of a tour with the BYU China Teachers group. We had about 50 of the 80 or so teachers in the program with us. They are a fun group to travel with! We had never heard of Chongqing before, but as it turns out, it's the biggest city in the world!!!! There are 32 million people in the metropolitan region. That's a lot of people! It's a hilly city, and what we saw of it was nice. I'm sure they didn't take us through the slums though. Their airport was the nicest airport that we've seen in all of Asia.
In Chongqing we visited the Flying Tiger's Museum. This was a very small museum, commemorating the 120 American fighter pilots that flew for China in the 2nd World Ward fighting the Japanese starting in1942. It was very interesting!
Attached to the Flying Tiger's Museum was a small art gallery. A very accomplished artist demonstrated his talent while we were there, and we chose to purchase his painting!
We also visited the Three Gorges Museum where we learned about some of the great scenery that we'd soon see on our trip up the Yangtze River.
We boarded the M.S. Yangtze at about 9:00 PM. It was a nice cruise ship (small to American Standards). It was built in 2006, so was still in great shape. Our cabin was smallish, but had everything we needed. We were thrilled to have a balcony as part of our stateroom.
Our first adventure after a nice night's sleep was to stop and visit the town of Fengdu, the Ghost City. We expected to see something like an old west ghost town -- all deserted, with cob webs and very dusty. That's not what we got here. The Chinese had gone to great lengths to renovate this deserted town. It was built over 1800 years ago, and one large part of it depicted what hell would be like in Chinese, Taoist mythology. It was actually just a tourist attraction.
There were lots of statues of devils devouring sinners. They had some pretty gory depictions of what would happen to the bad people.
This picture shows Sue trying to balance on a small ball inside a box. If you can balance for three seconds you are considered a good person! She made it!
The dining room on our cruise ship was nice. The food wasn't quite like our stateside cruise ship spreads. By the third day, we were ready to be finished with it all. It all looked pretty good, but many of the dishes were especially spicy. Dave liked that! We were in the Schezuan area of China though. . .
The weather on Sunday was pretty over-cast, and we got rained on a little. The main problem was the haze. It spoiled the view for us. On Monday, the haze lifted, and there was no rain! Hurray, Hurray!!! This was the day for the really nice sight-seeing and we were so relieved that we had nice weather. Out side, and especially at the front of the ship it was a bit windy. It wasn't cold though.
This is basically the picture found on the back of the 10 yuan bill in Chinese currency!
The Three Gorges were beautiful! We took the optional excursion to the lesser, lesser gorge, and it was worth it. So pretty! We got the chance to try a couple of different boats in the process!
The last day we visited the Three Gorges Dam. This is the largest Dam in the world, and it generates more electricity than any other Dam in the world. The Chinese always think they have to be number one! The dam does generate enough electricity for several large cities including Shanghai. They also have a lot of ship traffic that passes the dam through a series of locks. Our ship went through the series of 5 locks overnight the day before we returned home.
We took a bus trip from the dam to Wuhan where we flew out to our home cities. It took several hours and we passed through some beautiful farm country where they were growing a lot of canola plants. They had bright yellow flowers and made the countryside quite beautiful.
We also saw a lot of tombs or graves. Most of the farm houses had associated mound where the ancestors of the farmers were buried. We happened to be traveling on "Tomb Sweeping Day" which was the reason for the holiday and our travel opportunity. Each grave mound or tomb was brightly decorated with flowers and other decorations. It was quite interesting and similar to our memorial day or decoration day.
We had a great time on this wonderful trip!
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