Day 12 Yangtze River -- Three Gorges

Early this morning, we transferred to a sight-seeing boat for a cruise on the Danning River, a tributary to the Yangtze.  This cruise took us through scenic Qutang George where the walls were close and almost vertical.  We went under the new Dragon Bridge, which had replaced the historic Dragon Bridge as the water behind the Three Gorges Dam rose and inundated the old bridge.  Wildlife and birdlife has been scarce everywhere we have been, but in this gorge, there were some birds flying overhead; we saw goats near the river climbing on the cliffs (I inferred from my observations that these were feral goats rather than mountain goats as the guide kept calling them); and we also saw Rhesus Monkeys.

The gorge was scenic with rock outcrops showing highly tilted layers of limestone with cave openings (we told that some of the caves had been used as burial places).  I noticed a faults in the rock layers, some of which indicated major movement in the geologic past, but most were just tilted.  The vegetation substantially covered the mountains with trees and shrubs in contrast to the treeless mountains that we had seen in other places.  The water in the Danning River was a greenish color, but it was not silted to a light chocolate as the Yangtze was.  The air in the gorge was much less hazy than in the Yangtze valley.

After returning from the three-hour scenic ride, we returned to our boat and continued down the Yangtze.  Here the mountains were mostly bare of trees and had farming plots on terraces and on the sides of the mountains.  There were several crops in the small plots; all I could recognize was corn.  The slopes were steep but not vertical as in the gorge, and houses were abundant.  There were several mining operations visible on the mountainsides -- noticeable by the talis slopes below the mines.  The afternoon and early evening were spent watching the scenery go by.

All three meals were on the boat, and during the day, we only interacted with our own "boat people."

At 9:00 p.m., our boat approached the locks at the Three Gorges Dam.  We watched as the boat eased into the lock after waiting for other boats to enter and leave.  There were five boats in the lock with us.  It took about an hour for the lock to clear of traffic and for our group of boats to enter the lock.  At that point, we stopped watching as closely and returned to our room.  But from our window, we could see the side of the lock, so even though we could not feel the motion, we could see the boat lower in the lock as the water drained out.  This lock lowered us about 60 meters and we went through two more locks to descend to the river level below the dam.  This took much of the night.

Pictures:  Scenes along the three gorges of the Yangtze River, Lock at Three Gorges Dam