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Week 5
This week we made our way to Chongqing to begin our 4 day tour on a ship for the three gorges on the Yangzi River.
We made it to Chongqing on a fast train that took 2 hours, left our stuff at a ticket office and went for a wander around the town. It is already so built up with high skyscrapers and then you have many high buildings where lots of people live as well.
Have to say it is being renovated and we only saw a small part of the town, it seemed like a right dump! I'm sure there nicer parts to the town, however I was not feeling it here. When it was time we headed back to the office to pick up our rucksacks and walked over to the pier part, where the ship was.
Had to pay 2 Yuan (kwai) (20p) for a ride down a 'cable car' more like a crane that slides you down to the ground. Got to the ship and have to say it looked nice, smelt a little of mould, but was clean. The cabins were even nice; it also had quite a thick mattress, at last a good night's sleep. Been sleeping on wood for the past 5 days and my back is killing. I had a new roomie, Niamh from Ireland, at last some female company. Nice spending time with the boys but sometimes you just need girls…:D
So the next few days we saw the following Fengdu - Ghost city where it says spirits come to rest after death. There are three types of bridges here one for wealth, health and marriage; you have to cross them to get the good luck. It was filled with many statues of the good and evil and also a torture chamber, which showed what, would happen to you if you were a horrible person before death.
The other things we saw on the Gorge was the Dragon gate gorge with a red arch bridge; on the lesser three gorges we went to the misty gorge where the hanging coffins were and a few monkeys in that area; also saw the emerald gorge - named after the green water around, however this is long gone and now filled with polluted water, which is a shame.
Also saw Qutang gorge, Wu gorge, Xiling gorge, Emperor City - where the scenery is taken from for the 10 Yuan note; the three dam project and went through five ship locks.
The gorges are set in a beautiful place, have mountains terrain all around it, however due to the poor weather conditions we had, could not see a lot of it.
The highlight for me was the going through the ship locks, I watched the first 3 then headed to bed as it takes 4 hours to get through all 5 locks and it was 12 am when it we arrived at the locks. We went from 175m down to below 100m in 4 hours, was amazing to see the locks and the way we went down quite quickly.
So after the three gorges we got took a bus to Wuhan which took 5 hours.
Arrived eventually after about 7 hours and then we had to find our hostel. Was getting late and we hadn't eaten since breakfast so checked in and headed out.
Wuhan has an old town and then across the river the new modern town. But have to say I preferred the old town better, found a food market full of street food.
Also met some really nice people from America and Europe.
We left a few days later for Shanghai
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pete@jacqui keep well from p@j