Day One on the Boat

  Fengdu, Chongqing, China
Sunday, July 20, 2008

As promised, the day started with an early wakeup call at 5:30 in the morning in preparation to get off and tour the famous ghost town of Fengdu. She had told us that we would leave at 7 and get back to the boat at 10. We found out that this actually meant that we would leave at six thirty for Fengdu and the boat would be leaving at 9:45. It's a good thing we stuck close to people we recognized from our boat.
According to legend, two famous Taoist priests during the Han dynasty (contemporaries of the Roman empire) practiced religious doctrines on Pingdu Mountain, which is situated in Fengdu. These two priests, named Yin Changsheng and Wang Fangping, became gods. Later on, people began to combine their names to form "Yin Wang", which means "God of the Netherworld". Therefore, by association, Pingdu Mountain became known as the Nether world. Of course, we could not understand what was being said by our tour guide, but even if we had not had a guide book to help us along the way, we would have been able to guess that this was some imaginative version of hell. It was complete with ghoulish statues, beasts, and people being tortured in grotesque artwork. It looked like "Dante's Inferno meets Taoism". By the way, I don't remember when I had last climbed so many stairs. That was one good thing about the early hour - it was not yet hottest part of the day.
Fortunately, that was the only thing planned for the day and we were back on the boat by 9:30 in the morning. We came back to our beds and promptly slept the rest of the day. It was much needed. With the exception of waking up to get some fast noodles (aka: Romen noodles) from the store on the boat and a shower around six, there is literally nothing else that we did that day. A great lazy Sunday afternoon sailing down the Yangtze; what could be better?

Sunset over the Yangtze