Yangtze River

We splashed out on our first ever cruise, three nights on the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Yichang via the three gorges and the biggest dam in the world.

We had our own room with balcony, three buffet meals a day, and evening shows. It was pretty relaxing after a few weeks of long distance travel and communication challenges. There were 400 onboard, including 50 foreigners. We even met a family of Kiwis from a neighbouring suburb in Wellington. Parents Rowena and Stuart were visting son Hamish and partner Claudia who are teaching in Fu Zhou. It was nice to hang out with some friendly Westerners after a few weeks of being pretty isolated without any Chinese skills.

The three gorges were spectacular, even though they have lost some of their grandeur with the dam raising the river level by 80m. The dam is the largest in the world, and is an incredible engineering feat. Whole towns had to be relocated to higher ground.

Each of the three gorges are known respectively as the most beautiful, most magnificent, and most dangerous.

We made a couple daytime excursions from the ship. One to an ancient temple, saved from the elevated water levels by concrete stop banks. We took a small boat to visit a tributary called "Goddess Stream" a.k.a little three gorges. These gorges were as high as the main stem of the river, but more impressive as parts of the gorge were only 30m wide.

The last night of the trip we passed through the locks of the dam. It took about three hours to make it through five stages of locks, although we went to bed after the first one.