May 30 Three Gorges Dam
Today was our day to see the Three Gorges Dam and all of the associated paraphernalia. We’re leaving the flat coastal plain now and getting into hilly country. We docked in a city called Yi Chang, which is a nice modern mid-sized city of 4 million. There’s one section downtown with a ton of apartments all the same. Apparently, they needed a convenient living space for the dam workers, so they built apartments for 100,000 to hold them. Not a big deal here; there were 1.3 million people displaced by flooding of the Three Gorges, so they spent roughly $10 billion building new towns and cities for them to live in.
The tour was in the afternoon because that’s when we got to Yi Chang, and it was raining a bit, so the visibility kind of sucked. Having said that, it’s definitely a tour worth making. It’s the largest hydroelectric facility in the world, with 32 7-megawatt turbines installed so far. The locks are pretty awesome; each lock is nearly 1000 feet long and holds three large ships. There are two flights of five locks side-by-side, so it can hold up to 30 ships at a time. In other words, the whole Canadian Navy could get in there at one go…. When you leave the parking lot to go to the main viewing area, it’s about a 500’ vertical climb. Rather than deal with all the heart attacks and aneurysms, they simply put in a series of escalators (outside!) to take you to the top. Signs warn you not to use the escalator during lightning storms!
This is our fourth bus driver so far, and we have come to understand that the first ones weren’t homicidal maniacs; that’s just the way they drive here. We thought we were used to third-world driving, but these guys are a completely different food group. Most intersections have no traffic control whatsoever; you just bluff your way through while trying to run down smaller vehicles. The occasional traffic light is treated with the amused contempt it deserves. Crosswalks are just a mechanism to concentrate pedestrians so that they can be run over in groups rather than having to go up on the sidewalk to get them one by one. We finally broke out of the city and onto a four-lane divided highway, and Deb and I breathed a sigh of relief. Then a transport truck came around the corner, driving the wrong way in our lane. Our driver merely shook his finger at him, not even bothering to honk his horn; apparently, the government’s effort to reduce left-turn t-bones by putting up barriers simply means that the truckers have to drive on the wrong side of the road for a kilometre or two to get to their turns…. The highway then entered an area of extremely rugged limestone karst, and we entered a series of beautiful tunnels, the longest of which was 3.6 kilometres. Quite an engineering feat!
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There are miles of these tunnels through the mountains.
Chillin’ at the Gorge.
Our guide for the day was a knowledgeable and funny young lady who did a very good job, but like so many folks here, she subjected us to Death By Statistics. Seems to be part of the culture. The good news: if there’s a test at the end of this, we’re ready for it, having been briefed on everything from the total cubic metres of pondage to the bidding process for the turbines (the French won the contract, that should end badly).
An overview shot of the lower half of the locks.
One of the middle locks with three freighters in it at once.
We’re going through the locks at night, which REALLY sucks, but the lock operators decide when we go through, and that’s the time we were assigned. I still got to see it, but no photos.