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This is what much of the 6-day cruise looked like from above, this picture taken from one of the tour books we bought along the way (yes, the water is actually brown.) The trip through the Three Gorges area was especially spectacular, with high, steep rising peaks and narrow river valleys, lined with beautiful rock formations and foliage.
Although most of the trip looked like this, we saw many small cities and farming villages spread out along the bank with terraced fields high up into the mountains. There were also several big cities with port facilities filled with boats of all kinds, numerous high rise apartment and office buildings, smoking factories, hustling and bustling people all over and, unfortunately, lots of pollution, both in the air and water. Fishermen were everywhere, and cargo ships of all sizes and types passed us going in both directions.
Part of the cruise was through what is known as the Three Gorges. These scenic river valleys, the Qutang Gorge, Wu Gorge, and the perilous Xiling Gorge, extend 192 kilometers (120 miles) from Yichang in Hubei Province to Fengjie in Sichuan Province and offer the traveller a spectacular view of sheer vertical cliffs facing each other on opposite banks of the river with mists and clouds shrouding them much of the year. The geology is spectacularly varied with rock formations of every imaginable type, shape and size: jagged rocks, many, with a little imagination, taking on identifiable shapes, boulders worn smooth by the river's current, deep caves, stratified rock formations tilting at every angle and other natural elements making up the mountains and shoreline. The Three Gorges are also joined by the Lesser Three Gorges on the Daning River, a tributary of the Yangzi. We found the Lesser Three Gorges even more inspiring than the gorges of the Yangzi.
All along the Yangzi River, centuries-old historical monuments can be seen. Walkways carved in the sheer cliffs served as transportation routes between settled areas, ancient pagodas and temples dot the shore, huge Chinese written characters are painted on or carved into the cliffs or on cave walls (a sort of ancient grafitti, but with historical significance), natural rock formations are named and revered, and areas along the route are associated with famous poets and historical figures who lived nearby or visited or just commemorated the beauty of that area in a poem or work of prose. Everywhere you looked, around every bend, there was something to be seen.
The following pages contain pictures of various sights we saw along our 841 mile
journey up river from Wuhan to Chongqing. They're in no special order, nor are they
catagorized. They're just a general collection of the amazing beauty (even the dirty
big cities possessed a certain beauty of their own), the unexpected sights around each
curve of the river, the lives of the people on the banks, and, well, the country that is
China.
