Good Friday, 6th April 2007
Up at 5.45am after a rough night’s sleep, awoken in the night a few times due to rock-hard bed and runny noses probably from the bugs we were sharing the beds with!
Got off boat at Wushan and onto a smaller boat to do the tour of the Little Three Gorges. We were joined on this cruise, like on the other boat, by better-off Chinese tourists and before we’d even set foot on the deck they were all bundling into the lounge to grab the windows seats, lighting up despite all the ‘no smoking’ signs! So we retreated outside and enjoyed the stunning views!
We made a couple of stops including one at a Buddhist temple a steep walk up the cliff and the other to do the Little Three Gorges tour, where we saw the most breathtaking scenery. Throughout the tour we passed marker after marker of where the water would eventually reach once the dam is completed. It’s very difficult to try and get a handle on how much has already been flooded, the number of towns/communities displaced and under the water is staggering.
In the afternoon we stopped off at a ‘new town’ (i.e. new because the old one, further down the hill, had been flooded), Fengjie. We had some time to kill so sauntered off the boat for a wander round. We’d remembered there was supposed to be a museum so with time to kill and a Mandarin phrasebook to hand V approached a local and asked where it was.
Somehow she understood and led us up the road to the museum. From the outside it was most unassuming but we felt that after all the effort of getting there we’d have a look round. A bloke of about 60 took us upstairs to the exhibits, and what a surprise was in store!
Armed with just a phrasebook and no lingua franca, he proceeded to give us a guided tour through its 15 rooms, showing us artefacts rescued before the flooding, vases, plates, bowls etc, dating back thousands of years; historical documents relating to more recent history; models of how the city had looked pre-flood and how it looks post-flood.
The sheer scale of the whole project and its effect on the area is just staggering. More staggering still is the way in which the locals accept, even seem pleased, with what it’s done to their part of the country. I guess this is ‘progress’, China style.
In fairness to them, I think it’s given the younger generation the chance to escape repeating the cycle of their parents’ lives. When the tour was finished we bought the guide book. When we started reading we discovered that our guide, clearly the curator, had spent his entire life savings rescuing, preserving, setting up and running the museum, and he was just an ordinary member of the public. It’s hard to imagine anyone being so selfless in our culture.
We rejoined the boat before the scheduled 6.15 departure and later sat down to dinner with the rest of the group, swapping stories about our afternoons.
This was followed by a Qi-Gong lesson from Eric, showing us the stance to adopt to harness our ‘Qi’. Then to bed in preparation for yet another early start.
Got off boat at Wushan and onto a smaller boat to do the tour of the Little Three Gorges. We were joined on this cruise, like on the other boat, by better-off Chinese tourists and before we’d even set foot on the deck they were all bundling into the lounge to grab the windows seats, lighting up despite all the ‘no smoking’ signs! So we retreated outside and enjoyed the stunning views!
We made a couple of stops including one at a Buddhist temple a steep walk up the cliff and the other to do the Little Three Gorges tour, where we saw the most breathtaking scenery. Throughout the tour we passed marker after marker of where the water would eventually reach once the dam is completed. It’s very difficult to try and get a handle on how much has already been flooded, the number of towns/communities displaced and under the water is staggering.
In the afternoon we stopped off at a ‘new town’ (i.e. new because the old one, further down the hill, had been flooded), Fengjie. We had some time to kill so sauntered off the boat for a wander round. We’d remembered there was supposed to be a museum so with time to kill and a Mandarin phrasebook to hand V approached a local and asked where it was.
Somehow she understood and led us up the road to the museum. From the outside it was most unassuming but we felt that after all the effort of getting there we’d have a look round. A bloke of about 60 took us upstairs to the exhibits, and what a surprise was in store!
Armed with just a phrasebook and no lingua franca, he proceeded to give us a guided tour through its 15 rooms, showing us artefacts rescued before the flooding, vases, plates, bowls etc, dating back thousands of years; historical documents relating to more recent history; models of how the city had looked pre-flood and how it looks post-flood.
The sheer scale of the whole project and its effect on the area is just staggering. More staggering still is the way in which the locals accept, even seem pleased, with what it’s done to their part of the country. I guess this is ‘progress’, China style.
In fairness to them, I think it’s given the younger generation the chance to escape repeating the cycle of their parents’ lives. When the tour was finished we bought the guide book. When we started reading we discovered that our guide, clearly the curator, had spent his entire life savings rescuing, preserving, setting up and running the museum, and he was just an ordinary member of the public. It’s hard to imagine anyone being so selfless in our culture.
We rejoined the boat before the scheduled 6.15 departure and later sat down to dinner with the rest of the group, swapping stories about our afternoons.
This was followed by a Qi-Gong lesson from Eric, showing us the stance to adopt to harness our ‘Qi’. Then to bed in preparation for yet another early start.
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