Yangtze River Cruise

When we arrived back in Chengdu, we were met at the airport by a driver and his very large and very comfortable bus. That was a good thing, because we had a five-hour bus ride through the countryside to Chongqing, known in the Cantonese language as Chungking, just like the canned noodles. Chongqing was the temporary capital of China during the Second World War, as the Japanese had occupied Nanjing, the previous capital of the Republic of China.


Our bus ride took us through some beautiful agricultural scenery. Rice is the main crop grown in southern China, but we also saw wheat, corn, taro, lotus and other crops. Farming in China is very different than what we are used to in the U.S. During the Mao years and the Cultural Revolution which followed, farms were large collectives, with conscripted laborers providing the work. Farm production suffered and the country had a hard time supplying enough food for its citizens. Farm laborers were finally allowed to cultivate small individual plots to supplement their family’s food supply, and it became apparent that the production from these small plots was significantly better than the collectives, themselves. Following the collapse of the Cultural Revolution, the collective system was scrapped and farmers were given small plots of land on which to grow crops for sale. Crops could be sold to the government at a fixed price, or the farmers could choose to sell on the open market. Food production soared, even though individual farms are very small by our standards.

Production is not very mechanized; we saw a few small tractors, actually more like large rototillers, and also saw many water buffalo used to plow the fields. Rice seed is sprouted in trays, and then transplanted by hand to flooded fields. When the rice is ready for harvest, it is also done by hand.

Upon arrival in Chongqing, we had dinner in a local restaurant, and then transferred to our cruise ship, the Victoria Queen, for our three-day cruise down the Yangtze River. The ship carries about 200 passengers and 110 crew members. It is pretty much a miniature version of other cruise ships we have been on, with a large dining room, a bar, a showroom, a beauty salon, etc. Our room was on the top deck, and we had a private balcony. Most of the passengers were overseas tourists from the U.S., Europe and Australia. Most were travelling in groups, but a few had booked their travel independently. As we prepared to depart Chongqing that evening, the buildings fronting the Yangtze River were lit up by a colorful light show.

We sailed through the night and the next morning after breakfast, we sat in on lectures about the Yangtze River and the Three Gorges area we would be passing through in the next two days. There was also a lecture by the ship’s doctor on acupuncture. Our friend Andy volunteered to participate in the demonstration and treatment for a sore shoulder. It was very interesting, and Andy said it helped his shoulder, at least for a little while. The lecture and demonstration resulted in Tom deciding to try acupuncture to get relief from sciatica which he periodically experiences in his right hip and leg. So, he made an appointment with the doctor, who is both an acupuncturist and an internist. Tom had two acupuncture treatments over the next two days, and, TA-DA, the sciatica has not bothered him since. If it comes back, he says he’ll try acupuncture again.

Later that day, the ship docked near the city of Fengdu which has been relocated to escape inundation as the river rises from the completion of the downstream Three Gorges Dam. We had a shore excursion to visit a nearby farming village which had also been relocated to higher ground. We visited the home of a local family who run a small store and tea house in their home, as well as raising pigs in their basement. It appears that they lead a very comfortable life in their new village. On the way back to our ship, we stopped for a visit to a local market with stalls and shops selling all sorts of meats and vegetables, including live chickens and ducks. Once back on board, we continued our sail down the river and after dinner the crew put on a show to demonstrate the various regional costumes of China.

The next morning we sailed through the first of the fabled Three Gorges. The canyons of rock rise hundreds of feet on either side of the river which varies from 300 meters to less than 100 meters wide. The scenery is spectacular and the various types of other river traffic are fascinating. We passed an area where a number of coffins have been found, set in caves high on the cliffs, probably placed there by an ancient tribe. Later in the day, we docked at the town of Wushan and transferred to smaller sightseeing boats for a trip up the Daning River to the Lesser Three Gorges. After traveling through the gorges to a very narrow section of river, we transferred again, this time to motorized sampans, to travel even further through the gorges. Finally, at a spot wide enough to turn around, we proceeded back down the river to our ship.

That evening, we traversed the ship locks at the Three Gorges Dam.
Going through the five locks took most of the night, and the next morning we woke up docked at the base of the Three Gorges Dam. After breakfast, we took a bus for a tour of the dam site. The dam measures 600 feet high and is about 1¼ miles long. Its hydroelectric capacity is equivalent to 18 nuclear power plants. It was constructed to provide hydroelectric power to western China, to improve navigation on the river which already transports 70% of the entire country’s shipping and to provide flood control to an area where flooding had claimed more than 1 million lives in the past 100 years.
Dam construction cost approximately $75 billion dollars, and more than 1.5 million people were moved from areas which will be inundated when the river behind the dam is at full capacity. The dam is essentially finished, but the complete hydroelectric generating power system has not been fully installed, and a ship elevator, which is supposed to lift and lower ships in less than an hour instead of the lock system which takes up to five hours, apparently doesn’t work, and the engineers aren’t sure how to fix it, or so we were told.

The water level in the upstream reservoir varies with the season, and when we passed through, it was about 150 meters above sea level. Last winter it reached 171 meters, and the maximum level is at 175 meters above sea level. The dam itself is at 185 meters above sea level.

We were docked for the night, and in the morning we went through the single lock at the Gezhou Dam, just downstream from the Three Gorges Dam. The Gezhou Dam was built as a test before the Three Gorges Dam was built. After traveling another 30 kilometers or so, we reached the city of Yichang, a city of about 4 million, where we disembarked. When we originally boarded our ship, our luggage had preceded us, and we assumed it had been carried in luggage carts or something like that. As we disembarked, we found it to be entirely different than we had believed. Laborers, known as “stick soldiers”, came aboard the ship, placed up to four large suitcases in rope slings attached to long sticks, hoisted the sticks to their shoulders and proceeded to carry the luggage out of the ship, across a long dock and up the stairs to the top of the river bank. It was a shocking and amazing sight!

We were met by a bus which loaded us and our luggage, then headed out for another five-hour journey to the city of Wuhan, another city of 4 million people, where we transferred to a flight to Hong Kong, our last stop in China.