China 16 May 2018 Wu Gorge

We woke in time this morning to go to the Tai Chi session on the top deck. It was an interesting half hour, mostly attended by westerners. I was surprised how flexible I was/wasn’t!  Some movements were much easier to do than others, Deb thinks she might be a bit sore tomorrow morning, I’m still in denial.

The morning activity today was a boat excursion to the Goddess Stream. This is an area that retained its natural bushland setting even after the inundation caused by the dam.  The boats were small, 20 person boats and they took us up into a ever narrowing tributory stream valley/gorge to a floating platform where we were given the opportunity to see the local guides perform traditional local songs and dances. Yes, we were cultured at! 🙂

The boats then took us further up stream, until we reached a point beyond which they probably couldn’t have turned around, the water depth got down to 2m, from over 100m deep in the main gorge. There were so many boats, it was like a convoy on the water as one followed the other one in front.

Around 11:30 our boat continued up the Wu Gorge with commentary describing the local features.  In the early part of the afternoon we just kicked back and watched the scenery go by. We passed a relocation city, purpose built for many of the displaced people from when the dam was built. My guess is that most were farmers, and the city they built for them is all high density high rise. Now where are the farmers meant to keep their chickens?

The middle gorge  Wu Gorge, has less steep sides and since lunch there were many areas of crops being grown. Some serious effort has gone into terracing the “hills”. There are even gardens in the lower banks that will be covered with water come the winter rains.

We had a quiet afternoon, I lisetened to a podcast I downloaded in NZ, Wolf 359, a bit of fun SciFi, and Deb read and had a nanna nap.

We are in Wushan County and in the third gorge, Qutang Gorge. The goege has got very steep and rocky again

Around 3:30 we stopped at a small town called Kuizhou. There was an optional tour but we opted to stay on board and go to a hotpot cooking demonstration. The cruise manager talked us through the process of preparing a hot pot as a chef did the cooking behind him, at the end we got to savour the finished product, very tasty.

I went ashore for a walk around the town (and maybe to do a little Ingress, got the only 5 portals in town and fielded them up). There wasn’t a lot in town, a few street vendors selling fruit, dried fish and some interesting looking meat products (I could only work out what a couple of them were, the rest remain a mystery), and a few touristy craft shops selling all sorts of wooden trinkets. It was hardly worth the 200 odd step climb in high heat and humidity. The view from the town over the river was hazy, the high humidity doesn’t help that.

Our nights entertainment was The Crew Cabaret Show. It opened with a “Magic” routine where the boats Kung Fu master was dressed up in a red cape and had a mask on. His magic was to continually change masks during his act without us seeing how he did it, ooooooo, lol. This was followed by a number of dancing performances. We dragged ourselves away after about 45 mins into the riveting show, another tick off our bucket list, we really don’t need to go there again.