Two Dams one Gorge

I booked a tour that offered the opportunity to to see two dams and one gorge, it’s somewhat misleading.

I caught the tourist bus at the Yichang Tourist centre, there were three of us plus the tour guide. He communicated with me via Wechat, which was easy enough. It took about an hour to get to the pier for the return journey. We had about two hours to ourselves , but there was nothing to see and no where to go.

It turns out that we saw our first dam as we crossed the bridge to the pier, this was as close as we were going to get. I was like, “What the Fuck!” The only reason I booked this tour was to see the big Dam.

My nightmares were becoming reality and very quickly. On the boat, if you wanted the top deck then you had to pay, the next deck was cheaper and then the outside deck was free. I was not going to pay nearly twice as much again for the top deck, so I was with the peasants and I don’t use that word loosely. The boat was hoachin’ hundreds of folk.

Sitting half way up the stairs, smoking and then spitting… Fucking disgusting. You just can’t get away from the smoke, and if you do find a corner to stand in some fucker invades your space to take a picture. I don’t know why any of these folk were on this cruise because none of them were actually looking at the view, they were too busy taking pictures of each other or watching videos or playing games and maybe having a cigarette just for the hell of it.

I hated almost every minute of this cruise. I nearly got back off before it left the pier. The only thing I really enjoyed was when it when through the lock on the secund dam which is downstream, just before the city of Yichang.

The boat dropped over 20m and that was impressive. The size of the lock and the engineering that underpins this is incredible, this is what I came to see. This is what I wanted to see at the Three Gorges. I did not want to be with hundreds of people, making to much noise, but not enough to block out the commentary over the ship loud speakers, and don’t forget the second hand smoke everywhere. I could not wait to get off this boat and get as far away from these people as possible.