The Captain had timed our
arrival at WANZHOU (formerly Wanxian) very early Sunday morning so that
there would be time for a shore excursion of this city and still plenty of
time to cruise the balance of the Yangtze River to the city of
Chongqing by the next morning.
Still not feeling up to par, I stayed aboard
while Norma went ashore on the excursion. From the pictures and video
she took it was more of a bus ride around the city with a short stop at a
local museum which did not allow pictures or was too dark inside to take
pictures and a stop at a very large flea market area.
The bus ride showed them not only the older
part of the city which would be underwater by the end of 2008 (some by late
2002) but also parts of the newly constructed city which is being built
higher up on the hills and mountains.
Norma found one thing sort of interesting in
that the new buildings seem to all be only 10 stories high. The guide told
them that the reason for this is that any building over 10 stories must
have elevators and that the costs go way up.
After the tour returned to the ship we immediately
set sail up stream for our final destination the City of Chongqing which we
would reach on Monday morning.
I found it most interesting that Chongqing,
with it's current population of over 34,000,000 people, is the largest city
in the world. Frankly, I do not remember ever hearing the name
Chongqing before, except in the context of Frozen Food. It is hard to
imagine a single city with the same population as the entire state of
California.
The first thing I personally noticed on Monday
morning, as we cruised into Chongqing, was the fact that I could hardly see
it. There had been a smoggy haze over the entire part of the country of
China which we so far visited. This over all smog is caused by the fact that coal and
wood are the main sources of energy throughout the country. Electric
power for the most part is generated by coal, heating of homes is generated
by the burning of coal, Industrial factories run on coal and in rural china
people cook and heat with either coal or wood.
This smog had been bad in Beijing and
Wusan, the two large cities we had visited so far, and it had even been apparent
when we were far from any large cities in the heart of the Three
Gorges. However, nothing we had seen even approached the density of
the smog in Chongqing. With my Head and Chest inflammation, I had a
very hard time breathing the entire day we were in or near the city.
When we disembarked the Victoria II for the
last time around 10:00 am I noticed that in Chongqing we only had to climb
a few steps to the bus as they did not have to build the Dikes as high
because the spring floods so far up stream on the Yangtze did not rise as
far as they did further down stream.
I learned, while crossing the Yangtze River on
a bridge, that General Claire Lee Chennault had based his command of
the famous "FLYING TIGERS" at Chongqing
during World War II, from where they were able to patrol the entire
"Burma Road". They were based on an island in the middle of the
Yangtze River which we passed over but could not photograph because it was too smoggy to
photograph).
We boarded the bus and began a drive around
tour of some of Chongqing (it would take days to see all of it) with stops at the National Art Museum and for lunch before heading to the
Airport for our afternoon flight to XIAN.