The Holiday Three Gorges Ghost Town

Today we had a look at Fengdu, the "ghost town, now I won't delve into why it is called the "ghost town" in this post but there are nice little temples up there on the hill and the "King of Hell" has his domain. The original Fengdu itself though is the real ghost town as it has been demolished and moved across the river. How the locals feel about having to move, I am not quite sure but our guide assures us that the younger people are for the most part happy and the older people generally a wee bit peeved. This might indeed be true and I can imagine that the younger people like the nicer newer flats, while the older people feel a trifle aggrieved at having to move from there ancestoral homes.
On arriving back on the boat, I heard the same guy who negotiated the vendor down from 50 RMB to 30 RMB for his six pack of Tsingtao yesterday, discussing what we had to pay for and not pay for on the boat and why he wouldn't buy a cup of the much better illy coffee at the bar and there he was again, about ten minutes later standing behind me telling someone how back home he buys up land and then builds properties and sells them. Now, I realise that it might appear to have very little to do with Fengdu. Nevertheless, it is the little things like this that can get you out of that the rather narrow mindset that a cruise might put you in and put you back in touch with a wider reality; the poor and very poor line the route from the boat up to the temple and back again, trying to eek out a living, just before getting back on the boat we are confronted with the poorest of them, sometimes disfigured, sometimes blind and sometimes both, they stretch out their hands looking for a few pennies and you look at them and you look at the property speculator from California and you realise that the "trickle down" theory that accompanies the policy forged between the IMF and the World Bank known as the "Washington Consensus" is just as much pie in the sky as Deng Xiaoping's Chinese road to socialism.
The picture shows a statue of one of the ghosts that line the way to the temples. This is a sort of Chinese Bacchus and I thought it most appropriate that it be chosen by a wee debauched Scotsman to celebrate his newly acquired 'pi jiu du'.