DFR Travels: Our Friday on the river.

Up again around 6:30 after a decent sleep.

It was a bit of a late night for us last night with the Crew Costume Show but it was well worth it.

We had our coffee in the bar area where the internet signal is. We were passing through some interesting countryside but I was determined to focus on getting my blog to Craig and then trying some pictures, surprisingly it was OK again.

Breakfast and then the ship docked alongside some barges where we disembarked and boarded the smaller boat and started our 1 1/2 hour sail up a gorge and then we disembarked that boat and boarded Sampans and proceeded up a still smaller gorge for about 15 minutes.

As remote as it is to us, these rivers have been home to the Ba people for thousands of years. They were dislocated from their ancient villages lower down in the valley when the Yangtze dam was started in 1993 and completed in 2009. The government paid for their new homes and their relocation expenses. All together over 1,300,000 people we relocated. Their standard of living increased greatly upon moving.

It was a very pleasant four hours and we got a chance to mix and mingle with a group of Americans and a Canadian traveling with the group. All seem to be veteran travellers and pleasant and interesting people. However I have absolutely no regrets about us being a group of two!

Lunch was again relaxing, then we sailed through the last of the gorges and docked at a new town of Wushuan, many people went off on walking tours for a couple of hours. Fellette and I have been looking forward to this free afternoon for about 10 days. Fellette read and I charged four batteries: the iPad, my camera, the keyboard and mine!

The rest of the day was again low key and quiet as we cruised up the river. Our total cruise distance is 600 from kilometres from Yichang to Chongqing in four days. [The later is what we call Chunking with a population of over 30,000,000, roughly the population of Canada.]