I can't possibly do the Three Gorges river cruise justice in a single post; I'll wait until I can post some pictures and discuss it then. Instead, I'll skip ahead from Songpan (our horse trek) straight to Shanghai and Hong Kong, where my sister met up with us and replenished our supplies.
Our first night in Shanghai coincided with the start of the Chinese National Day and the golden week holiday. The entire downtown part of SH was closed to vehicle traffic and 8-lane roads were so thick with people that you could hardly move! The city was fun and lively and there was excellent cheap food everywhere, including Muslim home-made Cliff Bars, flat breads, chow mein, pot-stickers, pastries galore (Lisa knows what I'm talking about... because we were always searching for another pastry for Justine), etc. One day we took the train out to Suzhou, which is reknowned for its fabulous ancient gardens. We got there relatively late in the day and only saw one garden (called The Master of Nets Garden, after some polititian who lived there and liked to fish), but it was absolutely stunning. We also had an excellent Uhigur dinner in Suzhou (the Uhigur people are the Chinese minority people who live in the remote northwest and are of Turkish descent). The same day, we saw the Jade Buddha Temple in SH, which houses two gigantic Buddha statues carved from single pieces of jade. Another day, the three of us went to Old Shanghai and the Yuyuan gardens, which were even more spectacular than the Master of Nets! There's a 9-zig-zag bridge over a pond leading up to Yuyuan, in the middle of which is a famous old teahouse where we drank some excellent tea.
Hong Kong was mostly dissappointing to me, as the sights were few and far between, but the company was excellent as we met up with our long lost cousin, the law teacher I-Ping, and her hilarious husband, a British chemist/sociologist/teacher named Simon. We did cruise around the Kowloon shopping districts, and the HK Island shopping district, and the financial center shopping districts, plus some side-street shopping for Justine and Lisa. And oh... we also did some shopping. Besides that, we took a cruise around Kowloon bay in a sampan (a traditional fishing boat) and went down to the beach communities on the south side of HK. Finally, on our last night there, we helped Simon develop a jet-powered egg-floation device, which promptly caught fire and didn't quite work as planned. But we did get to watch Dr. Who (word up, Terry B.) with them and we pitched in by blowing out 4 eggs for the experiment. I can only hope that his class had more success with the project than we did! ;)
And now here we are, in Kathmandu, Nepal. We've been here for 2 days now, and the weather is just perfect... sunny and 77 F. Kathmandu is an excellent place and the food, people and sights have not dissappointed. Today (15.Oct) we hiked to the temple/stupa complex of Swayambhunath, also known as the Monkey Temple because so many monkeys hang out there, and yesterday we walked around Durbar Sq., where they have a three-story high temple carved from a single piece tree (a "There's Something about Mary" joke goes here, if you know the movie). In a few days, we'll be going to a river-rafting trip, then we'll start treking in the Annapurna mountain range in western Nepal. We'll keep you updated!
-Mike.
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