Shibaozai

Shibaozai is a large wooden temple/pagoda built into the side of a natural cliff. It is very impressive, and, unless something is done, will be largely underwater when the Three Gorges Dam is completed. We saw an artist's rendition of a proposed (but not yet approved) project to build a dike around its base. There is already a new town built on higher ground near the temple, which the residents seem to have partly moved into.

You can't get to the temple until after you walk through a 200 meter long gauntlet of souvenir and snack vendors. Imagine a jetway at a big airport, one of those tunnels that connects from the terminal to the plane, but packed with people calling "Hello! Water!" "Hello! T-shirt!" at you all along its length and you'll get the idea. They were actually generally nice and laid-back compared to some we ran into at Da Zu.

This is the gate at the entrance to the actual temple, with Cielo and Vernon for scale.

Here is a view from Shibaozai back at our cruise ship. That line of blue tent stalls is part of vendors' alley.

Granddad gets a shot of the river as Vernon and Cielo watch from behind.

Alison and Cielo and some Buddhas. Cielo more or less climbed every stair to the (almost) top of the pagoda. This is where she learned if Mama holds one hand and Daddy holds the other, she can lean back at a 45 degree angle and reverse-rappel up any flight of stairs.

Here's another one of our panorama shots, hand-stitched together. This is from (almost) the top of Shibaozai. The picture of the guy below is the leftmost part of the panorama (scroll right to see the rest). Most of the roads you see in this picture will be underwater when the dam is complete.

A nice gazebo-like area within the area at the top of the pagoda. Even though the pagoda is very small at the top, since there's a cliff there, once you get to the third-from-the-top level, you can step off into a large area that contains temple buildings.

And here's the final three levels on the pagoda. You can see them in this shot, but the kids from a special Chinese language immersion school in Washington, D.C., who were on the cruise with us, were sticking their heads out of all the windows every time I looked.