More scenes from the Yangtze

Street market

After visiting the relocated farmer, we spent an hour or so in a street market in their town of Fengdu, on the Yangtze. (Before the building of the dam, and the opening of the river to larger boats, the town was pretty isolated, being between the first and second of the gorges.) Our tour guide brought us there as an unscheduled side trip; it was certainly not on the regular tourist route. Several young people took photos of us (the "long noses" they say we are called), and we returned the honor.

The street market stretched for two blocks up a hill, and for one block off to the right, in a kind of "T" shape. Here is a picture of one of the vendors' stands. (Looking at it again makes my mouth water.)

Sanpan

Picture taken from our boat, cruising up river towards our destination at Chungqing.

Chongqing

This is officially China's largest city, with a population of over 30 million. But for some unexplained reason, the Chinese make the municipal boundary the size of a whole province. It's as if Miami's city line was the Florida state line, and Miami was said to have a population of 20 million. 

I asked the local guide what the urban population of Chongqing was, and he said it was only 15 million or so.

Chongqing ("Chungking" in the old spelling), incidentally, was Chang Kai-Shek's capital during the Second World War, after the Japanese chased his government out of Nanjing ("Nanking" in the old spelling) and massacring untold thousands of civilians after taking the city. The Chinese refer to that war as the "War of Resistance against Japan."

We arrived in Chongqing shortly after dusk and were blown away by the city lights as seen from the river. (The pictures I took just didn't capture anything like it.) Buildings not just lit up, but extravagantly lit up (and the bridges too), with animated displays covering the whole faces of the buildings.

Here's a picture of a porter reloading the boat with beer for the return trip down-river as we were disembarking.