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.

CRUISE THE YANGTZE RIVER

Our first night aboard our Victoria Cruise Ship, we were given a champagne reception and attended a wonderful fashion show after dinner.

We think of  them as costumes, but we are reminded that each garment was the normal attire for Chinese citizens of the aristocracy during the eleven Dynasties represented.

The various models danced and sang period pieces from the particular dynasty they represented.

Our own puritan ancestors were pretty stodgy dudes by comparison. Learning about the various periods as the colorful fashion show proceeded, via a narrator with impeccable English…wow!  What a gig!

The ship carries us upstream from Chongqing (pronounced shawn-keen) to Yichan, (e-shan.) There is a certain amount of dead time aboard a cruise and we have tai chi lessons after breakfast and view an acupuncture demonstration as we float along. Then, we get our first view of a sampan. Not the old type of sampan but a modern one with a motor.

The Yangtze is a highway moving raw materials to various cities over hundreds of miles.

The Chinese call this Bye-Bye Bridge, because it will soon be underwater.  I wanted to see the famous river and the three gorges before they were inundated by water from the dam.

Families here have farmed the steep sides of the Yangtze for hundred’s of years. They don’t understand why the government is flooding them out and forcing them to evacuate from all they’ve ever known. They have never had electricity and they must sacrifice for the people who will benefit from the electricity this dam will produce.

This farmer could at one time walk to his neighbor’s farm. Then he could boat to his neighbor’s farm. Now his neighbor is underwater and his own buildings are partially flooded. Many older people hate it and hang on to all they’ve ever known for as long as they can.  One Chinese worker aboard ship loves it.  She has a new apartment in Wuhan  (oohan) City where she has more space. She now lives with three people in 120 square meters. In her old house she lived with an extended  family of eight in 400 square meters. She has electricity and, she can own her apartment.

These caves, once unreachable from the river , were the refuge of Japanese soldiers during WWII. They escaped to these caves and lived for years before they were discovered. Now, our guide marvels that you can actually see into them.  There are ancient bodies buried in some of the caves from an unknown past as well.

The steep canyon still has some beauty left and I’m grateful to have had a chance to see it before it disappears. To their credit, the Chinese government has taken extensive pictures of the canyon before the flooding began so people can see what it was once like.

As you look up into the clouds, its hard to imagine that most of this beautiful canyon will be underwater very soon.

TANG DYNASTY TEMPLE OF HELL.

The second phase of our trip to China in October of 2006 began with an early morning flight to the industrial city of Chongquin.  We walked from the landing (visible in the distance) across this pontoon bridge, settled our luggage aboard and then walked back across the pontoons to visit the Hell Pagoda from the Tang Dynasty.

First we climbed 200 stairs up the side of a mountain. The view of our landing below in the misty rain was exhilarating after our breathless climb. .

As we neared the temple, tortured statues lined the steps.

There was about  30 of them and their meaning was unclear.

Our guide explained that this old Tang Temple is backwards from normal for modern Chinese. Almost like Christianity, you suffer for bad behavior and are re-incarnated to a higher plane for good behavior.  On our bridge to the temple grounds above, one side is for women, the other for men, unusual.

Even the colors here are different, blue and gold instead of the preferred and popular red and gold. The roof is guarded by a dragon, though.

The main pagoda has a wild geese  for the roof  decoration. A wild goose flew into the pagoda and couldn't get out. He was starving and when the bird died, he ate it, thus the Wildgoose Pagoda.  A couple of smaller pagodas had dragons.

One of the guys in our group tried balancing the Xing Chen Stone. The bottom stone weighs about 200 pounds, the top stone about 90 pounds. If you are able to balance it, it will cure you of heart problems the legend claims.

Gary succeeded, but no one else attempted. I guess they weren’t worried about heart problems. The cure legend is unclear. Does it cure heart disease?  Or the misery of lost love?

All of us attempted the balancing ball. A perfectly round ball on a perfectly flat surface. If you can maintain balance for nine seconds, you will have a long life. I guess we are all destined to die young.

In  the Hell Temple, you come across  things that are twisted and not uniform so different from the ying and yang of balance in Chinese culture.

In the temple dungeon was a ghastly parade of fearful statues behind bars, a warning to behave or else. The Tang Dynasty incorporated fear in their religion to elicit good behaviors, as most religions do. Modern Buddhism encourages good deeds while reminding you of your human weaknesses, rather than fear of punishment, if I understand it correctly.

On the way back down the hill, I was tempted to give this young child a pat.  It was the only friendly looking statue in the bunch.

OLD TIME WHITTLER.

Before we left the park in Mt. Vernon, I got acquainted with Wade and Barbara Faries. Both work in wood,
but Wade is a whittler.
In his 80′s, he admits that whittling was the province of “old men”.  He told me he found a knife when he was seven years old and had to do something with it.


That something turned into a real talent for whittling and carving. I saw this old piece of wood, “cottonwood” he informed me, and saw these minute windows. He is making a twisted little house. A “whimsey.”

It will eventually look something like this. Wade invited us to his classes, open to ages seven to 105.  We didn’t get to the club house to visit his class, but we checked in a few days later on his progress and learned the difference between carving and whittling.

Whittling is when you simply create by using a single tool, a knife. Something you can carry in your pocket. Carving is something you do when you use a variety of tools. A scraper, wedge, drill, anything that gets the desired affect. He does both and showed us samples of pieces he uses to demonstrate in his classes.

Lattice work, chain links, and balls that move within a slot, are the most challenging. He demonstrates them all.

We checked on his progress with the twisted house.

“Its  fun and relaxing  if you aren’t  in a hurry”, says Wade

He buys a stock Buck knife, then tools the blades;  one is a vee wedge,  one is a gouge, and he other is a carving blade.  A pocket carving tool. His wife Barbara is afraid of carving because his tools are so sharp. Instead, she does wood-burning, a different skill. They both belong to the same carvers club, the Quilceda Carvers.

The Faries are from Marysville, Washington. What once was the province of old men, is now appealing to all ages.

A WALK IN THE WOODS.

Because the Bronco developed a transmission leak, we extended our stay in Mt. Vernon. Today, we haul it to Monroe  and settle in for Mike Coleman to perform his magic on it. I’ve enjoyed this park for its beautiful woods, great Olympic sized swimming pool and the hot tub.

Walking around the park reveals the forest’s past. Huge crumbling, rotting trunks that now sport a new tree with roots and branches twineing around them.

You soon realize as you walk from Motor Home to pool, or recycling, or just cruising the park, that everywhere you look is a transformed old stump.

We must have seen a hundred of them; remnants of a once majestic rainforest logged probably fifty or more years ago.

One day we opted for a walk through the deep woods on the property. It was quiet and peaceful. We found Lush moss on huge alders.

Ferns four feet high and five feet wide.

Deep shade.

Light struggling through the canopy.

Downed trees.

This tree was obviously cut. The moss quickly takes over.

We seldom get to walk where you could use a machete to fight through the growth.

Out of the deep woods, we saw wild flowers seven feet tall in the undergrowth.

In an hour and forty minutes we traveled but  5 miles distance through the woods.

Jim hasn’t spent much time in this park; we know we will be returning just to enjoy this woods again.

The park also serves as a preserve. For us it was a look back in time.