Yangtze River Cruise Day 4

Our last day of cruising. We left at 9:00 for our shore excursion to Fengdu, the “city of ghosts”. The weather was so hot and humid that even walking to the bus left everyone sweating. Rather than trek the 600 steps to the top of the hill, we took a chair lift and our guide hurried us through the sites.

At the top is a temple to the God of the Underworld, Yinwang and is supposedly the final place of judgment. Before reaching the temple, you have to perform 3 feats- cross a bridge in three steps, run up a flight of a hundred stairs in a single breath and balance for 3 seconds on a round rock.

If you fail, hell will claim you and your destination in the underworld will be dire. The site is a mix of Chinese theme park, Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian temples and the final temple of Yinwang. The unbelievable thing about it was that it was active- people were making offerings and prayers in these temples.
After our exciting excursion, we had lunch, a quick tour of the engine room and had a lecture on the Three Gorges Dam project.

A few additional facts; one of the main reasons for the dam is flood control. 60% of the flooding comes from the upper Yangtze, 20% from Lake Datong and 20% from The Han River in Wuhan- so about 60% of the flooding will be controllable as a result of the dam. The other reasons include electrical power and transfer of water to the Yellow River from the stream of Xiang Xi in the town of Zigui. The new dam will form a lake from Chongqing to Yichang. Part of the relocation of the people will be to Xinjiang Province.

We had a champagne “Captain’s Dinner” and ended up at the boring family’s table. He was a doctor for Kaiser Permanente who spent the entire trip avoiding his family and she was a perky, liberal teacher who kept talking about socializing children rather than holding them accountable via testing. Enough to make your skin crawl. Our last night in our room-- if there was only a way to take it with us throughout China.