The Mighty Yangtze

Greetings,

We're in Yichang now, having spent 3 days cruising down the third longest river in the world (for those keeping track, the Mississippi was bumped to number 4 in the 1990's). Here's a few of the photos we took along the way...

Our cabin on the "Yangtze Princess". Much better than we'd expected.

The Taoist gods of health in a temple in the City of Ghosts (so named because it's believed that the god of the underworld dwells there...not because it's a ghost town, which is what I thought).

Shayne posing with one of the newer statues in the City of Ghosts. This is one of a series of demons that punish sins...Shayne took to this one right away.

The entrance to the first of the Three Gorges from the west.

It's a house...made all the cooler by the fact that it's in one of the Three Gorges.

Us in the second Gorge.

On the second day we took an excursion down a small tributary, and we spotted this up in the cliff face. If you zoom in you'll see it's a coffin...I guess the wild dogs won't get you all the way up there.

One of the many new towns and cities built along the Yangtze and its tributaries in the past 10 years or so...the townspeople's old houses are either underwater now, or soon will be.

As the river got more shallow we switched to traditional river boats guided by teams of "trackers". For how much work they did paddling us upstream, I'm amazed they were still smiling.

The view from the back.

Back on the ship in the evening we finally made it to the Three Gorges Dam and spent 3 hours going through the boat locks.

On the other side the next morning. Now Shayne can add yet another "world's biggest" to his list. That's the real reason he's smiling.

Next we're off to Yangshuo and the Li River.

Until then,

Jo and Shayne