THE GONDOLA AT HANZAI.

Our guide Wu pushed us to leave the quaint  Naxi village of Yunshangping and head  up the mountain to Hanzai.  The road is gravel out of the village but is paved as we near Hanzai.  In the middle of nowhere, no town, no warning, we come to a huge modern restaurant that Wu tells us is the only one that serves travelerson  on this rural  mountain road.
I grabbed a quick picture of a man adjusting his feathers, just because he was so exotic looking. Haven’t a clue who, what, why; no one near by to ask.  A five star restaurant in a place like this?  Obviously government run.

Under a bridge over terraced falls, locals are bathing their yaks in the glacial waters. Vicki okays a one minute stop for a picture because there is no place to park the bus.
The cowboys were quite laid back, taking a break, with plenty of watchers besides the few of us who got out and grabbed a picture from above.

Lunch time is in full swing as we arrive in Hanzai.  Braiziers and  portable woks  reveal a fascinating variety of  foods we don’t recognize and would love to try. One can’t blame Vicki, or any tour guide for that matter, to ask us not to eat at vendors like this because then she has to deal with someone who gets sick on the tour.

 Some of the foods are recognizable, but the hot pots with boiling oil, spices and chilis scenting the air mixed with a bit of burning incense wafting by?  You know you aren’t in Kansas.
I’m such a foodie. Oh how I wanted to taste the hanarabi made by taking a piece of flat dough with rounds of what looks like salami wrapped  inside of it and then fried in a wok that measures three feet across.  And boiled peanuts. Ah…well, its a good thing Vicki made sure we were well fed. The sights and smells really are an unforgettable memory.

This young couple appeared to be getting ready to cook duck for their lunch on the sidewalk.

But, we are here to see and photograph the mountain, and we load into a gondola in Hanzai at 7,800 feet elevation that carries us to a flat, beautiful meadow at 10,000 feet.

We take the boardwalk about a half mile through the woods and run into exotically costumed Naxi people from the Mossel tribe and they are not shy about  picture taking.

Since it is lunch time, these people appear to be enjoying a picnic on the grass.

We arrive at the meadow and see 30 or more kiosks and soon learn why these Naxi people are readily photographed.

For what to us is a small fee you can have your picture taken with a costumed Naxi with the beautiful mountain in the background.  Chinese tourists line up for the pose but our group avoided the commercialism and simply enjoyed the atmosphere.

Riding the gondola back down was particularly enjoyable for the  beautiful view of the surrounding area.

I talked to my gondola mate and she couldn’t understand a word I said. She spoke to me and I couldn’t understand a word she said. We smiled and talked. She accented to a picture. As the gondola nears the bottom it slows for the photographers to take a picture with their polaroids. They quickly lay them out so that by the time you get unhitched you can see your picture and buy it. I thought I’d buy the picture for my friendly companion. She held up a hand and said, “No pay!”  She bought the picture for me, instead. I was grateful that I remembered how to say thank you in Chinese. She indicated that I should walk with her and she took me to meet her daughter. Annie, it turns out, spoke perfect English. She was on vacation from San Diego. What a delightful exchange.
When I got on the bus, everyone was talking about the Chinese sex manuals. Sex manuals?  It turned out I was the only one who hadn’t seen them. One of my tour mates pointed at a kiosk in the bus parking lot. The bus was running but Vicky wasn’t aboard yet. I got off the bus and bought one. Tedd told me at dinner that night that some of the workers on board the ship had surreptitiously tried to sell him those same carvings. He didn’t buy and I did. We laughed. I was curious and obviously so was everyone else or they wouldn‘t have been talking about them. I passed them around the bus for everyone to see. They are 2 inch square pieces of bone joined together in a circle like a bracelet, showing sexual positions.
I complained about the pit toilets at the tourist center?  Oh, these were much worse. Thank goodness I’m a camel and could choose to wait until we got back to Jiliang.

THE THREE GORGES DAM.

Aboard our ship, we eat sumptuous meals and last night, we danced the macarena. Our guide is obviously a political person. She tells us that the employees aboard the ship work horribly long hours. They get up before dawn and begin breakfast, cleaning and all those things that make our trip a smooth, seamless adventure. It is the army of workers that, after their toil, stay up late to entertain us. The costumes, the music, the dance.  It is a sobering experience and for our group, not unwelcome information. Today, we offload from the ship and are delivered to a landing where we take a motorized sampan ride up one of the canyons.

Many fishing families live on their sampans, most are motorized like this one. At one time they were hand paddled or poled along the river. The boatman demonstrated the woven rush garment the old-timers once wore when it rains. Now they have plastic tarps and jackets. Several members of our group were invited to try out the rain coat and pole the sampan.

We happen upon just such a family as we continue up the gorge.  Like the subsistence farmers, these people live hand to mouth. They have no medical care. We see a few monkeys and birds in this gorge and our guide tells us the locals kill and eat them.  In fact, it is eerie to realize that you hardly ever see a bird except domesticated ducks. You see no insects or animal life of any kind in the “wild”.  The monkeys are the rare survivors in this steep canyon where they cannot be hunted to extinction-yet!

This entrepreneurial fellow has positioned himself in this cliff house to take pictures of the tourists in sampans. Then he scurries ahead to the ship and has the pictures posted for sale before we leave the following morning.  Our guide says he also catches sturgeon and delivers it to the back-end of smaller tourist boats that serve meals. Fishermen below the dam love it. Sturgeon get three feet long. There are no fish ladders and they cannot get past the dam. Their environmental problems are still ahead of them.

From the sampan we see a wall of inaccessible caves.

Those that are within reach are not lived in as much as simply used for night-time shelter.

The next morning, we are bused to Wuhan City. There are newly built, modern apartment buildings here. Farmers have few city skills but many of their wives work as maids. Wuhan is in Hubei (hoo-bay) Province. We stopped at a brand new beautiful tourist center in Wuhan only to find the worst awful pit toilets on the trip so far. It kind of boggles the mind, this newly built center, in a newly built town has pit toilets? At the tourist center we saw a fight between two bus drivers from two different tours. We wondered if the Mau Zedong government had somehow erased every human emotion, but this proved it had not.

At the dam, this lock was in working condition and the engineers were testing operations by putting these empty boats through the lock.

This is the kind of traffic they will be getting through the locks. Notice the workers “hotel” at the back end of the barge.

They built a wonderful overlook to see the dam being built.
You get the idea of the immensity of the project even through the morning haze.

A view of the unfinished “front” of the dam. Our guide told us the power generated here will only supply 5% of China’s electrical needs. Seems kind of a shame to have displaced 1.24 million people, over one thousand villages, and I’ve forgotten how many cities for 5% of their power.

The visitor’s center did a good job of explaining the dam, its building process and design. They had a mock-up of the dam in a reflecting pool of water and it was all very interesting.  And this sculpture on the side of the overlook?  I was disappointed that it didn’t have one dragon sculpted in the stone.  In fact, the dam has been a very controversial project. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam
There were many sites on the internet covering the controversial issues of this dam if you wish more detail.