Now here we are on to Beijing, our first stop in China. Of course we went to Tiananmin Square (here's Mike and Sandy, along with Lee and Shirley, our friends who traveled with us), and the adjacent Forbidden City, along with the Summer Palace in the suburbs. And of course we went out to climb up on the Great Wall, and see the adjacent Ming Dynasty tombs and "Avenue of the Animals." We also saw a great Chinese acrobatics show, and met a retired Chinese couple in their home, shown here.
A high point of our trip was 4 nights board the Victoria Katarina crusing the Yangtze River. (There are lots of small cruise ships on the river - ours is here docked next to another one.) The Three Gorges area is sort of like the Grand Canyon area, where the river has carved deep canyons through the limestone rock in several areas. In addition to sightseers, there's lots of commercial traffic on the river - like this car carrier - and even some oddities like this man rowing across in what sure looked like an old bath tub. The dam itself is the largest hydroelectric project in the world, as well as creating the largest impoundment lake behind it. The five-stage locks by the dam resemble those in the Panama Canal, except they are designed for smaller, non-ocean going ships.
There were several interesting stops along the river. At one, we visited a zoo that had quite a few Panda bears, like the one shown here. We also visited the Flying Tigers Museum at Chongquing, which was the Chinese capital during WW II. We also went up a tributary in a sampan (here's Mike trying to steer it), and tried to keep out the way of the high-speed hydroplane water taxis active on the river.
Now we've moved on to Xi'An, where the main attraction is the terra-cotta warriors that were discovered buried in a farmer's field. (This is one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites.) Another interesting thing about Xi'An is that it is the only city in China whose ancient city wall remains entirely intact -- the wall completely surrounds a "downtown" area of about 5 square miles.
Our last stop was Shanghai, which neatly eased us back into the 21st century. At the Urban Planning Museum, we saw a scale model of the entire city -- they bill it as the largest city model in the world -- at widest angle on my camera and from two floors above, I still couldn't capture it all. We also got to see a wholesale herbal market, where the proprietors of Chinese medicine shops come to get the raw ingredients they need to make up their offerings. The world's first magnetic levitation train (with a top speed of over 260 miles per hour) was a quite a thrill to ride.
On our last night, we enjoyed a nice dinner high above the Bund along the river.
