Yangzte River Cruise (China)

We flew Air China from Shanghai to Yichang on April 30, 2006. We have now started to get lazy as we are nearing the ends of our travels and decided we didn’t want to travel by train for 27 hours! Yichang was the starting point for our cruise and we got there a day early to go and tour the Three Gorges Dam, which is about 40 kms away. Yichang itself was the hardest of our travels so far. Not too many people speak English and the Mandarin phrase book we purchased did not serve us too well as it apparently contains “Beijing” Chinese which the South Western Chinese do not understand! Oh well, we got by and it makes for some interesting stories.

Three Gorges Dam was amazing. Unfortunately, we had to book on a Chinese tour to go see it, so we have no idea what our guide was telling us. We were able to purchase an English book on the Dam and muddled our way through. There was one Chinese girl on our bus who took it as her mission to keep track of Wade and I and she would let us know as best she could what was going on and when we had to be back to our bus. It was pretty cute and very nice of her to worry about us. We had lots of giggles from everyone on the bus as we were the only Westerners on it. We think they were laughing with us and not at us….but who knows.

The Dam is currently in Phase 3 of its construction and will be complete by 2009. The whole project will have taken 17 years by the time it is complete. The Dam is 1,700 meters long and 185 meters high. When complete the Dam will result in 27 million m3 of poured concrete and will create a lake reservoir behind it of 600 km in length holding 39.3 billion m3 of water. This makes Three Gorges Dam the largest Dam in the world. The Dam consists of the main dam, an overflow dam, two hydropower stations and two sets of locks for ship navigation. Here is a picture of the main dam, the lake behind it has not yet reached its maximum height of 175 meters.


This picture is for our construction man, Jack Lahti. Can you see all the cranes in the background Jack? This picture is also a look behind the main dam at the partially formed lake. When complete, the hydropower station within the Dam will consist of two facilities generating 84.7 billion KWH of power each year (that’s the equivalent to about 18 nuclear power plants), which will be enough to light up over half of China! However, the purpose of the dam is not for providing power to the country, but rather is for controlling floods of the Yangzte River. The Dam boasts an ability to protect tens of millions of people along the middle and lower areas of the river, which are subject to massive flooding causing displacement to peoples and tremendous property damage. The goal is to prevent once-in-100 year floods from a previous once-in-10 year flood statistic prior to the construction of the Dam.


Although the Dam is providing a lot of benefits to the Chinese, it is not without controversy. Construction of the Dam is resulting in the resettlement of 1.13 million residents around the lake reservoir. 17,200 km2 of land will be buried by water, which will include the submerging of countless ancient artifacts at over 8,000 sites that line the banks of the Yangzte. Archaeologists are working furiously to save as many of these artifacts as possible, however, it will be impossible to preserve everything by 2009. Worse yet, many experts believe the Dam will disastrously mess with the flow of the river and may prevent it from being able to properly oxygenate itself. This means that the tons of sewage that are dumped untreated into the Yangzte may turn it into one of the largest toilets in the world! Nice to think that that will be flowing into the South China Sea.

Although the book we purchased at the Dam obviously did not talk about it, we have read that in 1999, 100 cracks were discovered running up the height of the Dam. Apparently the Chinese engineers said that this was normal with dams of this size and merely repaired them. This would be all good and fine apart from the release of a 20 year government secret that as many as 230,000 people died in the collapse of a dam in the Henan province in 1975! This has made some people pretty nervous given that the nearby city of Yichang has a population of 4 million! The water that this Dam holds would kill them all within an hour if it were to collapse.


Here is a picture of the locks, which are a two route, 5 stage set of locks. Each stage is about 280 meters long and 34 meters wide. Each stage is progressively higher than its predecessor. It takes about 12 minutes to fill and drain each stage. These locks are the largest in the world, both in scale and technical difficulty. From having previously seen Panama’s locks, we were amazed at the size of these ones.


The next day we started our 3 day Yangzte river cruise upstream from Yichang to Chongqing. Now instead of looking at the locks, we actually got to go through them. As you can see from the picture there were multiple boats along with ours in each stage. The huge doors at the front take about 4 minutes to open and 4 minutes to close once the desired water level has been achieved. Unlike Panama, the boats are not towed through the locks but rather each captain navigates his own boat, trying to ensure he doesn’t bump into the others while getting his boat into position before the water starts to rise.


Here is a picture of the type of boat we were on described as the “Chinese Ferry”. We purposefully did not take the Western boat and it made for a rather difficult 3 days. Hardly any English was spoken on our boat which was a little unnerving when announcements came over the intercom and you could here stampedes of people reacting to what was said. Wade and I would just look at each other and paper, scissors, rock each other for who was going to stick their head out of the cabin and try to figure out what was going on! Meals were a chore and we ended up eating a lot of instant noodles (which after 3 days, times 2 meals we no longer can even stomach the thought of any more noodles), as it was far too difficult to convey to the kitchen staff what we wanted with a mass of hungry vocal Chinese passengers around us. Being practically the only Westerners on the boat we had lots of giggles and people lining up to take their pictures with us.


When we originally signed up for the cruise we pictured a nice massive deck which we would be sitting on, reading a book and drinking some wine while taking in all of the scenery along the Yangzte. That dream was abruptly interrupted after our first and last visit to the “deck” on our 1st class booking. As you can see in the picture the loungers are stools and there is no room to be had. After that we decided sitting in our cabin looking out our window was a more comfortable option. Here is a picture of two friends we made, or at least think we did as they took about 7 different pictures of us. Our “conversation” was interesting given that they could not speak English and we could not speak Chinese.


The scenery along the Yangzte is fantastic as I said before. Enjoy.








We made a few stops along the way to take in some of the attractions along the Yangzte. One of the sidetrips was taking a small boat into the first gorge of the Little Three Gorges. Massive granite cliffs fell into the emerald green water below. I would say the pristine emerald green water, however, it was hardly pristine when the Chinese were continually throwing their water bottles and chocolate bar wrappers overboard when they were finished. A shame really and we were shocked at first. However, when you think about all the raw sewage being dumped into the river, the litter doesn’t seem so bad. Guess it’s all about perspective.


Another one of the stops was at Ghost Town, which is said to be the place of devils. There are multiple sculptures of devils and demons. The names such as “Bridge of Helplessness” and “Palace of the King of Hell” makes you wonder where you are and what type of a cruise you really have signed up for. We were beginning to wonder if we were going to Cape Fear.



All ended well and we reached our destination of Chongqing on May 5, 2006.