March 22-24 Yangtze River - Continued
Trip Start
Mar 15, 2007
1
6
11
Trip End
Mar 31, 2007
Cruising up the Yangtze, China
Thursday, May 17, 2007
The next place we went was to the relocation sector of a city - I am not sure of the name of the City - but I placed the tack in the map in Wanxian, a city along the river. Flooded out farmers were relocated here, to apartments. 1.2 million people had to be relocated because of the rising river. Here we did not see the "aliveness!" we saw in Shanghai; it was drab, the people tended to be drab, tired looking, less interested in life, less confident. The people of Shanghai exuded confidence, optimism - the people here looked beaten. That is perhaps an overstatement, but I was struck with the sharp contrast between the two cities. Of course the government insists that the people are happy.
I continued to take literally hundreds of photos along the river. I loved watching the countryside go by, the yellow fields, the boats beached down from the houses, the sampans going by. Everyone looked up at us and waved back with friendly smiles. Life might be hard for many people living along the river: hard climbs up and down from river to house, hard work in the fields, hard work paddling the sampans from their place to the nearest shops - but there were many smiles along the river. Unlike in the relocation part of the city, these people seemed happy.
