YunNan, Lijiang, Day 3

paiseh, paiseh... you guys must be trying to check what happen to my Shangrila trip. i was not able to keep up with the live posting as i was traveling to Shangrila for the last 2 days. the hotel did not have internet access so...

quick summary of the tour. a little dispointed not because of the group or guide but due to the weather. it was foggy when we went up to the 石卡雪山 (ShiKa Snow Mountain), therefore the best was not accomplished. further more, due to the altitude of the 4500m, i was getting light headache and my son was feeling very lethargic (sleepy because of lack of oxygen). my wife get pretty serious headache the first night at Shangrila at 3300m. The guide 阿洛 Ah Lou was very professional and helpful. Accomodating all requests if he could.

Update for 22nd Apr
anyway, we left 8:30am from lijiang with Alladin tour, our first destination for the 2 days tour was 长江第一弯 (Yangtze River First Turn), then to 虎跳峡 (Tiger Leaping Gorges), 3rd destination was temple (forgotten what the name) and finally Na Pa Hai. On the way, the guide introduced himself and also let each and individual to introduced ourselves because we were all from different area. through, introduction, i noticed that there are two main groups of people come to yunnan for tour. the first were mainly southen china, those from dong guan, shen zhen, guangzhou areas and the other groups are mainly from sichuan.

enough of saying... time for pictures.
this was the first stop, nothing much so Ah Luo told us that 10mins including a toilet break will be good enough, and it was true. I only took this picture of the "first turn". What a great turn of the Yangtze river?

at the stop, there are many stores selling stone/rock. not too sure what these stone for or from...

there are 3 sessions of the tiger leaping gorge. the lowest, the middle as well as the upper. the best view would be the middle session that i understood from many tour agents. this is the upper session and i do not find it great. the reason for it to be not that great was because it best view in July/August time frame when the water is higher and faster.

i am going to stop here for the day. a bonus picture for those who visited my site... haha... let me know if you like this picture so that i would post more of this. haha...


to be continue...

continue update on 27th Apr... for 22nd Apr

after visiting the tiger leaping gorge, we visited the "月光城"

a picture of the city taken from the temple.

as "松赞林寺" was not part of our agenda, we did not manage to visit the place but the Ah Luo was helpful enough to get the coach stop for 5 mins allowing to take picture of this beautiful budda temple. this temple is like the "布达拉宫" in Lhasa but a smaller version of it.

next destination before we headed to the shangri-la old town for a night stay was the Na Pa Hai "依拉草原、纳帕海". it is the greatest and gorgous grassland of shangri-la.

the strong sun was penetrating through the cloud with it ray...

a young loving couple from chengdu taking pictures, this yunnan area is very suitable for newly wed couple.

group photo, actually only half the group. the rest are somewhere around the area taking more pictures with the great scenary.

that's it for Day 3 of the trip. have fun reading and i will be back.

长江三峡游 - The Yangtze Three Gorges Cruise

Make use of the China National Day holiday for a 4 nights Yangtze 3 Gorges cruise. 4 families from Delphi went to the cruise that was fun, bore and exciting, I will explain that later.

Day 1 (27th September 08, Saturday)

As we understand that the boat will not sail off till the next morning 8am so we decided that there isn't a need for us to reach the boat early like 6pm. We started off from our place at about 12:30pm, reaching airport by 2:30pm for checking. The airport was actually pretty quite since the National holiday had not really started. Checking went smooth and the flight took off with a slight delay. We reached Wuhan domestic airport by 6:30om. The local guide took us to a dinner place nearby the airport. Food suck and expensive.

After dinner, we are surprised that the journey from Wu Han (武汉) to Yi Chang (宜昌) will take us 5 hours of bus ride instead of the 3 hours that we were told of. So, now we would have reached the boat by 2am in the morning. If we knew about this, we would have took an early flight. So, by morning 1:30am, we reached the boat and tucked in for an early morning the same day. The room was excellence to my surprise. This is a standard twin hotel room with full facilities such as bathtub, TV, mini-fridge and big window for viewing. It is not the cabin with pot hole as in the cruises in Singapore. All rooms come standard with full length glass window.

Day 2 (28th September 08, Sunday)

The wake-up call music sounded off at 6:15am waking my wife and myself. We were tire as we sleep late early this morning. I was dragging my tire body to the bathroom for a shower, only start to feel the energy after warm water sprinkle on my body. Feel so good.

We had a sumptuous buffet breakfast with scramble egg, fried noodles, toasted bread, salad and many other pastries before leaving our boat for a visit to the dam at Xi Ling Gorge (西陵峡).

The dam was built with 3 purposes, first, flood control, second, power generation and lastly, navigational improvement. The annual power generation is 84.7 billion KWh.

After visiting the dam, we got back to the boat for our lunch and proceed to sail upstream through the ship lock. Boats have to pass through a 2 way 5 steps ship lock to get upstream or downstream. We took about 3 hours to get through the lock after lunch. It was exciting to follow through the operation of the lock initially but it was boring to look at it again and again.

The boat proceeded through Xi Ling Gorge and finally docked at Ba Dong (巴东). After a banquet dinner that were excellent. We proceeded to deck 5 for dance performance by the crews. The performance includes dance, act, taichi and saxophone. I was very very impressed with performers. During the day time, they could be a waitress serving food to us and by the night, they were performing right in front of us.









Day 3 (29th September 2008)

Day 3 was the best throughout the whole crew. We visited Shen Nong Xi (神农溪). There live the last generation of boatmen who make a living on premitive small wooden boat look like "Wang Duo Jiao" (碗豆角 - pea). Generally, each boat has 6 members from the same family and it is used as the only transportation along the river. During upstream when reaching shallow stream, the boatmen become tracker where they need to pull the boat from the shoreline. This is the exciting part of the trip.

In the afternoon, we proceeded to pass the Wu Gorge (巫峡) and the Qutang Gorge (瞿塘峡). Too bad that I slept through the afternoon so I miss the Qu Tang Gorge. Night activities are cultural performances by the crew members. The boat sail non-stop upstream through the night.

Day 4 (30th September 2008)

The boat were a little late today. It reached Feng Du by 8:30am instead of the original time of 8am or earlier. We headed to Feng Du ghost city at 9am. Not much fun for today day activities.

During the night, it was time for the passengers performed instead of the crew members. All four Delphi families' member participated the performance. Adithi sang a chinese song that impressed the whole crew members as well as the audience. Issac and Amada kick in synchronisation in with their Taekwando stunts. My wife and I sang a song 请跟我来 (please follow me).



Day 5 (1st October 2008)

In the morning, we checked out from the boat and headed to Chong Qing city (). Visited a couple of places such as People Theatre, ELing Park, Walking street. Since today is the China National day, the walking street was full of people. It is really (人山人海) People Mountain People Sea.

Overall, this was the most relaxing trip that my family had in China. Most of the morning, we will have offshore activities and back to the boat by lunch time. The afternoon were lazing around on the boat chatting, scenery viewing, card playing. All the meals were so good that my weight increase by 2kg after the trip. My wife and son enjoyed it very much as well.