Happy Mother’s Day! We woke up at the Westin in Shanghai, a modern hotel in a modern city. We are going to bed in Tangkou, a rural town with, well, let’s call it a rural hotel. More on that later. We flew to Huangshan which is a small city of 1.5 million people. It’s tea…

Zhujiajiao is about an hour and a half from the Bund but still inside the Shanghai city boundary. It is on the Yangtze delta where there are many forks and bends making it a canal town. It’s been around a while, about 1700 years old. So it dates back to the Ming and Qing Dynasties.…

We arrived so late last night we decided not to set an alarm for this morning and have a leisurely breakfast. It was nice. We are about 2 blocks from the Hangpu River which is where the Bund is. The Bund is the old British area and used to be docklands. The word bund is…

The boat elevator on the Three Gorges Dam is only about two years old. It’s still in a slow roll out phase so there is only one ferry line that has permission to use it. We disembarked our cruse boat for the ferry, which is really more of a very small cruise ship. We cruised…

Day 2 of our cruise down the Yangtze was more about nature than temples. We were serenaded awake by the resupply boats. Loud noises from interesting outboards. Some sort of rough 2 stroke bolted onto a flat plate with fanbelts driving the prop. Our first stop of the day was at the White Emperor City.…

City lights in Chongqing just before ‘sail away’ last night. The booze cruise business is alive and well here too. Our first shore excursion this morning was to the Fengdu Ghost City. It is a large complex of shrines, temples and monasteries dedicated to the afterlife, located on Ming mountain on the north bank of…

We remembered to ask Royce what that tower was in the square. Chongqing was the capital of China during WW2, after being moved from Nanjing which was occupied by the Japanese. As it was the capital, major portions of the city were bombed flat. When the war was won they put up the “Anti Japanese…

People often ask how we choose our trip locations and why. For China it was the Great Wall and pandas. After we decide the reasons, Kris builds a trip around them. It always leads to more and interesting stuff of course, but the base has to be there to start. Since we’ve already done the…

This morning we had a fairly early start. We had a 930 train to Chengdu but an hour drive to get to the station. We had elected to stay closer to the terra cotta warriors as the air is better than Xian city proper. Perhaps that is why there was far less English in the…

The Terra Cotta Warriors of Xi’an are 2200 years old. More than 10,000 life-sized clay statues represent a funereal honor guard for China’s first Emperor Qin Shih Huang-ti who died in 210 BC. Each warrior is unique in face or clothing and are very real looking. Emperor Qui sought the key to immortality and had…