10-12-2005

We then docked at Wushan and boarded a smaller boat to navigate three smaller gorges named Dragon Gate, Misty, and Emerald. Do I even have to mention that it was so GD HAZY that all the vegetation and rock formations looked grey! Do I sound like I’m getting very tired of this? Tomorrow’s forecast… Cloudy and hazy. Most all of what we visited today was impossible before the dam. What is a couple hundred feet wide now was a white water rafting stream before. The Yangtze river/lake still has ~40 meters more to rise. There are markers along the bank showing the 175 meter mark that will be the final level. To give scale to just how much more is to come, we passed under a tall bridge whose roadbed will eventually be the waterline. The city of Wushan was built solely to house people displaced by the dam’s flooding. It was amazing to see crops being grown along the steep banks of the gorges. It is hard to imagine how the people keep from just tumbling down into the river. There were monkeys living in the hills. Several feeding stations were placed along the bank to lure them down for display to the tourists. We also passed by "Hanging Coffins". While these mysterious coffins do exhist in China, I'm not 100% sold on what we saw. These looked more like large chunks of wood laying on a ledge, not coffins suspended on a cliff face as depicted in most articles I've seen on the subject. We stopped for a “picnic lunch” along the way. It was upon a hill overlooking the river catered by the ship's staff who raced ahead to make the preparations. Of course there was shopping. These were some of the pushiest peddlers we have encountered. The constant calls of ‘Hello” and “Hello look” soon became quite annoying. They were persistent to no end. If you even acted like you were going to take a photo of them or their wares you were accosted by “Hello one dollar” over and over. I finally gave in to a young woman who was pimping photos of her toddler daughter along with cigarettes, beer, batteries and anything else she should find to sell. I negotiated one pack of awful cigarettes and photo privileges for my dollar. I did manage to get some good shots of ‘pigeon on a stick’, but not without a fight over the modeling fee. As we left to board the boat she was still scowling at me.