Trip to China
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Thursday, July 6, 2006 We arrived in Chonqing and boarded our ship on the night of the 5th. Chongqing, plus its suburbs, is home to 32 million people. Incredible. Heard of it? Heard of Chungking? Same thing. The Chongqing municipality is the size of Austria. It’s gigantic. It gained great significance during World War II and just kept growing. The buildings are all quite new because it was bombed heavily during the war. Chongqing is surrounded by lush green mountains and is very hilly. At night, it is completely lit up and its sparkly lights are considered one of the top three sights in China. We are on the “Princess Sheena,” one of the China Regal Cruise ships. These ships are the only foreign-built vessels on the Yangtze. They were built by Germany for use on the Volga river in Russia, so the ships’ markings are all in Russian. When the Russian company wasn’t able to pay, China bought them. There are about 500 people on our ship. There are 140 staff, 200 mainland and Taiwanese and the rest foreigners. The ship appears way too small to hold so many people, but somehow we don’t feel cramped and the common spaces aren’t crowded. We woke up this morning to customary Chinese music. A tai chi class was held on the top deck. We also attended a lecture about traditional Chinese medicine, learning more about acupuncture and acupressure. The ship’s doctor led it and used some of his techniques on us. The views from the Yangtze are amazing. At one point we see farming on steep terraces and another we see huge expanses of apartment buildings. Many are over 30 stories high and in groupings of hundreds upon hundreds. We’ve never seen anything like it. It makes Manhattan seem very tiny. Everything is shrouded in a film of fog or smog, so it seems particularly unreal. Especially because there are only concrete skyscrapers and barely any other types of buildings. All surrounded by immense, hilly greenery. We stopped at Fengdu, also known as Ghost City. Fengdu has a bunch of temples on the side of a mountain that are crammed full of scary demon statues. It was 99 degrees, and I think we managed all the hiking pretty well.

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