Man and nature in the middle kingdom

We spent the last four days traveling up the Yangtze River from city of Yichange to the inland gateway to western China, Chongqing. The trip was taken on a fun, but somewhat worse for wear, river cruiser known as the Victoria Catherine. The VC is park of a six boat fleet that travels up or down the mighty Yangtze system every few days for eigh months of tthe year. The crew of more than a hundred lives on the ship and gets an afternoon off every week while the ship is swapping passangers at one oend of the four day trip. The were very cheerful, some spoke wonderful English and our waiter turned out to double as a magician, Genghis Kahn line dancer (don't ask) and drummer in the talent show band. That, and his bottomless coke and beer glasses earned him a good tip from all of us (20 RMB a person or about $3 for his three days of work).

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The point of leaving the big name cities and all those Ming temples the for the equivealent of a St. Louis to Minneapolis upstream run is all about the world famous Three Gorges. Or more correctly what used to be these 3 incredibily steep cuts with rapids at the bottom of 1,000 foot cliffs that thwarted river traffic for 4,000 years and annual floods that wasted thousands of square miles of farm land in much of Chinese heartland. The same named dam project that put all of this on the front cover of many a Natinonal Geographic magazine for several decades rendered the rapids to the place of history and replaced what remained of white water with a lake and a lot of people who had to be moved to higher ground, 1.3 million officially and perhaps 2.0 million in reality.

The dam was dreamed of by western engineers for a century, talked about Mao and finally done beginning in the 1990s when money and sheer hutzpah to do surfaced in China.  The bill was $45 billion with half the money to make people happy and half to build the largest concrete thing on the planet.  Lots of electricity now flows and the water is up about 300 feet from where is would flow in now flood months.

Anyway, we were on the river and soon heading up the five gigantic locks and through the the 3 Gorges themselves. I have never been in a ship lock before. The concept is deceptively simple. You float in, close the back door, flood the chamber with water from above, rise to the level of the lock in front of you and then open the front door and sail forward.  Still, when you see the massive3 doors, the huge pipes, the side moorings six feet high and then watch eight very large ships magically life up to the mountains on either side of you...well, its pretty neat. I guess if you rang the locks up and down four times a day you could get bored in a few days.

Well, we are flying back now and I'll have to finish the last week of the trip from New Haven.