Day 12 - Shennong and Qutang & Wuxia Gorge

Day 2 on the boat included getting onto a smaller ferry to visit some of the Lesser Gorges. They were, of course, beautiful and the sky was a bit more conductive towards pictures that day. We passed some kind of acrobat show where there people doing stunts on a rope suspended over the gorge from the cliffs on either side. It was cool to see, but why? They were within viewing range for about a total of 3 minutes.
After the ferry, we got onto fishing boats which local boatmen would paddle and pull upstream for us. They used to do this to go fishing and now its become somewhat of a tourist adventure to sit in their boat and watch them do it. Also, they used to do it nude.
It looked REALLY tiring. The boatmen were visibly exhausted after the journey upstream, so much so that the trip downstream seemed to take longer. Those guys were in excellent shape, they had not a gram of fat visible on their bodies and had legs that were incredibly well-defined. I was jealous. It did look like a good time though, I think that if I lived in the area, I'd do the whole boat-pulling on weekends for fun and exercise. One guy lost a shoe and kept going anyways, and another lit a cigarette as soon as we finished the trip upstream. Our guide, Susan, said that they did this about once a day in the summer when there are lots of tourists around. She sang us a couple of local songs on our trip. I thought she had an amazing voice, and the songs she sang were beautiful. So beautiful that Etienne decided to buy a music VCD that she just happened to have on her (it was one of many things she tried to sell us while we were on the boat with her). She assured us several times that it was her singing on the disc, but don't be fooled folks! The VCD contains ultra-kitsch overproduced music videos that don't sound nearly as good as Susan's sweet, sweet voice. Why are VCDs still a viable format in China? It's a media format that should have gone the way of BETAMAX a long time ago, but I digress.
In the afternoon, we passed the second and third gorges. The second one (Wuxia) was kinda lame, in the all-this-spectacular-scenery-is-starting-to-look-the-same kind of way, but I did have the best seat on the boat for viewing. The 3rd gorge, Qutang, I actually found to be really amazing, it's a series of very tall and sheer cliffs around our relatively narrow passage. It's so nice that its on the 10 Yuan bill.
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