Yangtze River Cruise
Trip Start
Mar 27, 2010
1
12
14
Trip End
Jun 28, 2010
Where I stayed
Yangtze River boat trip
What I did
And then a 3 day 600 km cruise along the Yangtze River, including the scenic Three Gorges and the Lesser Gorges. For us, real luxery. For Ian, his first cruise. Nice boat with a spacious cabin, good food, excellent service with more staff than guests (116 guests), lots of onboard lectures on such topics as Chinese history and onshore excursions such as Fengdu, the City of Ghosts, and The Three Gorges Dam. China certainly can do huge projects, with positive and negative effects. The Three Gorges Dam is the largest dam and hydro generation project in the world, which took 17 years to build, and has positive results such as clean power generation, flood control, and navigation improvement. The other results are the forced relocation of over 1.3 million people with 1/2 million hectares of farmland flood- ed as well as 13 cities, 40 towns, and hundreds of villages. But many people improved their standard of life with the compensation they received and new apartment. Also there have been significant environmental impacts. So good and bad results. Just another example of the capacity of this country to plan and execute gigantic projects. As with our other experiences we met interesting people and had good conversations, relaxing times for reading and learning about China, and lots of fun.
