The Three Gorges

Recently, my wife, Mari, and I went on a tour of China. One of our adventures was to sail down the Yangtze River as the river was coming up. This required superb boatsmanship, as exhibited by moi in the picture. The hat, well, it came with the ticket of admission! The Chinese have built a huge hydro-electric dam across the Yangtze River. It is called the Three Gorges Dam because it is just below a spot where the river passes through three gorges. The new dam, to be completed in 2009, will generate three times as much electricity as the biggest such dam in the US, the Grand Coulee Dam. The Three Gorges Dam is 1.3 miles long and over 100 meters tall. So they are raising the level of the water behind the dam by around 100 meters, with the final 20 still left to be done in 2009. Over 1.4 million persons had to be relocated to new homes to make way for the rising waters.

This picture is of us boating where there used to be white water rapids--now it is a very deep channel down the gorge. :-) The beauty of these minor tributary gorges is wonderful. The new water level lets you appreciate them from a new, higher angle.

So, you get to combine some marvelling at the engineering, logistical genius and a lot of hard work that went into the building of the new dam, with appreciating a lot of nature's beauty in the greater and lesser gorges.