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Published: January 11th 2007
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Shanghai
The four of us enjoying the nighttime skyline view in Shanghai. Our heads are swimming with our visit to China -- we loved it!! Eleven days was not enough -- another place we need to visit again someday...
We started our tour of China in Shanghai -- a very modern, cosmopolitan city of 22 million people. But there were some quaint parts we were lucky enough to visit including Old Shanghai and the Yuyuan Garden. But oh, the waterfront and the skyline of Shanghai -- beautiful!
On New Year's Eve Day we were to take a flight to Yichang and then board our ship for our Yangtze River cruise. But the flight to mountainous Yichang was cancelled due to snow and we had to fly to Wuhan (a city of a mere 8 million) and drive for 5 hours to our ship's port. We arrived around 9:30 pm, had a late dinner and celebrated New Year's with a bottle of champagne, a couple of our tour mates and about 50 people from Denmark! Speaking of our tour mates, we got very lucky on this tour and had only two other families with us -- a family of 5 from Northern California with two daughters, Heather age 25 and Amber age 23, and
Along the Yangtze
A couple of spectators along the Yangtze River. a father and son from LA with the son, David, age 22. Tyler actually had contemporaries on this tour!
Next we spent 4 days and nights on the Yangtze River -- a truly once in a lifetime experience that we enjoyed immensely. For those of you who keep up on these things, you know that the Three Gorges Dam is being built on the Yangtze to control flooding and to provide hydroelectric power to China. It's an amazingly huge project that started 15 years ago and will be completed in 2008. We got to see the dam and some places along the Yangtze like the Xiling, Wu and Qutang Gorges, the Shennong Stream and Fengdu. It was cold and drizzly much of the time, but still beautiful. Many of the villages along this great river are now or will be under water once the river's water level is fully raised by the Three Gorges Dam and so they are being relocated to higher ground or other areas. An incredibly large project for this country.
We disembarked on January 4th in Chongqing, a city that claims to have 33 million people living in its "metropolitan" area. Only about 7 million in
Great Wall
Ted got this beautiful shot of the Great Wall during our climb. the urban center but hey, who's counting? In Chongqing we visited a house where the Nationalist Leader Chiang Kai-Shek and the Communist leader Mao Zedong met and signed a peace treaty in 1945 to unify China. But the terms of the treaty were not followed and most of you know that following the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Chiang fled to Taiwan and the Communist Party took control of mainland China where it remains in control today. Our guide in Chongqing was very interesting and gave us a good history lesson of China which we really appreciated -- and needed!
We next flew to Xi'an where we got a little more Chinese history -- only this time from over 2,000 years ago! We got to see the terra cotta army built for Emperor Qin from the Qin Dynasty, 221 B.C. to 206 B.C. Emperor Qin believed he needed an army to protect him in the afterlife, so more than 700,000 people worked over the course of 40 years to build his tomb which contained, among other riches, more than 7,000 life-sized terra cotta soldiers. The terra cotta army was destroyed by a peasant uprising after Emperor Qin's death and the
underground tomb was discovered by farmers in 1974. So far, over 1,000 life-size terra cotta soldiers and figures have been reconstructed from the pieces found in the tomb. The pictures you will see here can hardly do justice to the sheer magnitude of this archeological find. Definitely worth a trip to Xi'an!
Our last, but not least, stop in China was Beijing and we spent two very full days in that capital city of 16 million. We visited the Forbidden City which is where the Chinese emperors lived and worked -- called "forbidden" because the common people were forbidden to enter. We also visited the Summer Palace where the emperors spent time in the summer walking in the gardens. Our final stop was the Great Wall of China, truly a wonder of this amazing world that we live in. And one of the highlights of our trip so far. How can it get any better? Oh, but we believe that it can and we can't wait to move on to the next great adventure that awaits us!
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Rene Clark
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Awesome Pictures!
Thank you for sharing. I feel like I just left China. Miss you all so much.