Back To The Cruise

So, when I last posted about the cruise we were going from Chongqing to Fengdu, after that we cruised on down the Yangtze to a place called Shennong Stream. You take a large ferry to a small stream where you board small boats and are taken through some beautiful country. You also see the hanging coffins. They are these caves in the side of the cliff where coffins were found. They are like 2000 years old and they have no idea how the managed to get the bodies into the caves. This part of the trip was a lot of fun.

You Gotta Love The Hair!

A Few Pics Since Our Return

Chongqing to the Ghost City

The first leg of the trip was from Chongqing to the Ghost City of Fengdu ( I think that how you spell it). It was great. I was not really in to the whole ghost city thing. Kinda creeps me out, but the architecture was beautiful. You have to take a ski lift thing up to the ghost city!

yangtze river cruise pictures

Several people were interested in pictures of the cruise. I will try to post them in order so if you are thinking of doing the cruise you will know what to expect. The pictures on this post are of the ship and the room we had ( VERY TINY,LOL). If you notice the shower is connected to the sink! You turned a knob to change the water from coming from the sink to the shower head. You basically showered in the same place you washed your hands and brushed you teeth, heck, it was even the same place you used the bathroom! The toilet is just a few inches the the left out of the camera view.

Yangtze River Cruise

We decided to do the river cruise instead of the standard Beijing. Mostly because we were going to be in Wuhan and that is where the river cruise ends. We are so glad we did.
We flew from Dallas to LA and then from LA to Guangzhou. From Guangzhou we flew on to Chongqing where the cruise started. We arrived in Chongqing around 10:00am and was met by a guide. we could not board the cruise till 6:00pm so we thought we would tour the city for a couple of hours. Now for the honest part. Not sure if it was all of the travel time, the fact that I HATED our tour guide or culture shock, but I HATED Chongqing. It was rainy when we arrived and the city was very overcast and very dirty. all I could think about was thank God we were taking Kai from this horrible place. After a couple of visits to some tourist trap, high pressure sales type places we finally told our guide that we would skip dinner and board the cruise a little early. She was not very happy. She took us to the area where our boat was docked. We were greeted by men begging to help with our bags. I was horrified and told Sean to not let our bags out of our site. a good guide would have told them to leave us alone, but not our Chongqing guide. She allowed them to baggier us and follow us all the way to the boat where the staff of the cruise finally helped us with our bags. I was almost in tears and was so sad that I had this horrible feeling about my daughters birth country.
The nest 4 days were WONDERFUL! We loved the cruise. We met some great people and would not trade that experience for anything. The boat itself was supposed to be a 5 star. I would say it was more like a very nice 3+. It was very clean with very small but adequate rooms. But most of all the scenery was wonderful. The food was pretty good and the staff was always so helpful. I would recommend this cruise for anyone. Just know it is not a plush Caribbean style cruise. It is a very clean Yangtze river cruise with amazing views and wonderful people.
I will add more on this later, but by the time I left China I had fallen in love with my daughters birth country and was so very sad to leave. It is hard to explain, but I will always have such a love for the Chinese people and that beautiful country!
If any of you getting ready to travel have any questions please feel free to leave a commit or email me. I will post pictures when I can get them down loaded.

A few more random pics....

It has been a week since I posted last and I wanted to show you a few more pics from our trip. The first is of a steamed chicken head that our guide in China LOVED! The rest are just random pics of Kai on our trip. The one of her hitting the other cutie is our friend L. She is half the size of Kai and I think Kai was being a bit of a bully,lol!

And.... a few more pics.....

Ok, the first is of our bordello like sweet at the Victory hotel in Guangzhou. We had paid for a suite but were upgraded to this 80's Vegas style suite. It was so funny. I totally expected a disco ball to come down out of the ceiling! The room was complete with 2 full baths, a whirl pool tub, computer, bidet, and bar!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The second pic is so you can see how curly Kai's hair is in the back. It is soooooo cute!

Shannon

A few pics to get us started

Here are a few random pics of Miss Kai! As you can see she is a very BIG girl. She was turned one on Sept 4th and weighs 25lbs and is in the 95% for height!Her hands and feet are huge! She has very light hair and it is kind of curly! All of the Chinese thought she was a "foreign girl". We were asked by the Chinese people if she was Chinese so much we joked that we were going to have a T-shirt made that says " Yes, I am Chinese". Enjoy the pics. I will post more later.

Shannon

We are home!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As many of you know we were not able to access our blog in China. A little creepy but we seemed to make it. We just emailed our family and I will post updates and photos later. The trip was WONDERFUL and Kai is absolutely perfect! As soon as I get all of the pictures down loaded I will post pictures.


Shannon