White Emperor City and the Shennong River

All that happens today will be tempered by an event that occurs at roughly 9AM. Camera death.

The shutter button on my Nikon D60, after photographing family, Alaska, Europe, Central America, NASCAR, countless Harleydays, guitars, and the like, quit. Error message, done, died, finished. While I believe that it can be repaired, I doubt that it will be on this trip. My first stop in Shanghai will be either Nikon Repair or a Nikon dealer. (Subject of its own account soon.)

After White Emperor City, I can understand what Meagan meant when she said that after a while the temples run together. The temple was incredible and a bit of a climb. There is a surprise but that is no different than the cathedrals of France which were built on the highest point of land. My camera did live long enough to photograph the Qutang Gorge. This gorge has been on the back of the 10RMB or Yuan note forever. Disclaimer: The gorge looks quite a bit different since they raised the water level by 150 meters.

Qutang Gorge

The steps up to and down from the temple are marked by the chair men and the vendors. For a price, the chair men will carry you up or down. Backbreaking work at its finest. The vendors are insistent. Hello! Come look! still means what it meant on the first day. We want your money. However, here some of the vendors were as young as four or five years old, not unlike the young vendors of Nogales, Mexico.

Gate to White Emperor City

Roof in White Emperor City

Water feature

Wall rubbing

iPod picture. Sorry.

Round doorway and pagoda like roofs.

Our guide.

More water.

Even more water.

Dragon 

Once we had climbed down and re-boarded the boat, we sailed through the Qutang Gorge. It is 8KM in length and it was probably a lot tighter before the Three Gorges Dam. It had to be a tough choice whether to build it and control flooding while producing 1.3 Gigawatts of power, and flooding farmland and displacing over 1,000,000 people.

The second gorge was the Wu Gorge and at 45KM, had lots of features like Goddess Peak. (Those pictures will be on Facebook forcing you to look at that page as well.) It begins at the Rainbow Bridge, an odd name for a bridge of one color, and featured daunting cliffs and tree growth in places that seemed impossible. Every so often a pagoda could be seen, and there is no telling how much is submerged.

We left the boat that afternoon to travel up the Shennong River. The big boat cannot navigate its waters despite the raising of the level. 

The Shennong River has been diminished by the new water level. Yes, we saw the hanging coffins, yes, we saw the caves, and yes, we saw all four of its gorges but with the water 150 meters higher than it ever was, we did not get pulled along in the old-fashioned way. Instead our boatmen paddled their asses off to give us a forty minute boat ride. Before the water level was raised, they worked in the nude, and pulled the boats upriver by ropes while scrambling over rocks and through rapids. They worked that way because working in wet clothes tore up their skin.

Shennong River Gorge

Modern day boat men.