The Yangtze River Part II
Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still. Chinese Proverb
We woke up on the first day of our Yangtze River cruise to the sound of soft instrumental music and an announcement of the day’s activity, along with a directive to get down to the dining room for the scheduled breakfast. The optional tour that day was to the Tribe of the Three Gorges – a local village reenactment. Looking out our window, we determined the architecture of the rebuilt town was fun enough to see from the ship and decided to skip the tour to allow us more time to relax and regroup.
Having the lounge to ourselves, we drank local teas and caught up on WiFi while being entertained by the ships lounge music. At one point that morning, I looked out the window and asked myself, “Am I really in the middle of China drinking traditional tea while listening to a Chinese cover of The Rhinestone Cowboy?” Janna must have had a similar experience when she rolled her eyes at me and said, “OMG, this is a Justin Bieber song being sung by someone with a Chinese accent.”
That afternoon, our official stop was the Three Gorges Dam project. The massive and controversial dam was recently completed when the final locks for river traffic opened in 2012. The dam’s claim to fame is on one hand engineering based as it is one of the largest dams in the world and the largest hydroelectric producer in Asia – producing as much as 2% of the nation’s electricity. But on the other hand it also has had a dramatic social and environmental cost for China including a final price tag somewhere between $27 and and $88 billion dollars.
In its simplest form, any dam requires the natural flow of a river to stop and the water behind it to rise. In the case of the Three Gorges Dam, this displaced more than 1 million people. Guides along the river address this issue very carefully. They credit the dam with three things: a source of sustainable and clean energy for the growing cities of the nation; protection from floods (as China has battled flooding of its great rivers for thousands of years); and finally, industrial progress which enables opportunities for local families to grow and adapt in a modern world.
You can see the dam’s impact as you travel along the river. The ship winds along idyllic gorges with steep edges and lush trees which are suddenly interrupted by multiple dozens of large concrete apartment buildings assembled in groups on the hillside. The huge imposing cities that appear, seemingly out of nowhere, are surprising and often unsettling in their austerity. These cities were built to relocate families and provide industry and commerce for local populations.
One of the guides along a later tour, explained with pride to me about how she was part of a local minority tribe with ancestral ties to the land for thousands of years. She acknowledged that with the dam her home was flooded but she was excited to move to a new home with her family. She seemed more excited about the fact that now her brother had the opportunity to move to a big city. Being a woman, and the daughter, she was required to stay home and support her parents, and now keeps her people’s ways alive through her stories told to tourists.
Our tour of the dam that day led us 20 minutes through the town to yet another oddly stationed security check. Our bus, along with the hundreds of other people and buses bringing people to this popular Golden Week tourist spot, let us out and into a crowded security building for a quick check and then out we went through the same doors to get back on the buses for what seemed to me like a drive through the same streets to get to the visitor’s center. After the visitor’s center, we went to see the view from the top of the dam. This is the hill where escalators awaited to convey us to the top for our view.
For those of us who could view the dam later that evening by way of the locks – this was perhaps the most impressive of all. Sitting on a ship on the deck of the Presidential Suite (thanks to an invite from our new German friends) we could see the ship rise through the massive locks as the colossal doors opened into a series of 4 locks all housed within the same dam. That was mesmerizing. For all its controversy, it is hard to argue the engineering grandeur of the Three Gorges Dam.
