Phil's China Viking Yangtze River Cruise - Blog 3 (river cruising .co.uk)

Breakfast at 7am and very good it was too.

At 9am we had our safety briefing before heading off to the Three Gorges Dam.

The brief also included a power point presentation of the ship and the facilities onboard. One important thing to note is, you CANNOT change currency on the ship. This is Chinese law, so make sure you exchange currency before you arrive at the river, either at your hotel in Shanghai or Briging or in the UK.

One useful point is that the ships reception has power adapters to borrow if you forget yours, which is a nice touch.

The journey to the dam is approx 30mins and before we were allowed access, rather bizarely we had to get off the Bonnie Bus and walk through a checkpoint where everyone beeped, then back on the bus and into the main dam site. 

It is hard to get your head around the sheer size of this project, that is until you consider the Chinese have used enough concrete here to build 9 Hoover Dams..!!

We arrive at Sandouping village, the site of the Three Gorges Dam. Here you can send your postcards from the local post office.

As amazing as this project is, the impact it has had on the people who lived along the upper Yangtze has been huge. This project has displaced around 1.5 million people and swallowed almost 2000 towns and villages!

But when you realise the hydroelectric plant will produce approx one-ninth of China's electricity, (this is equivalent to 15 nuclear stations) you can understand a little better why this project was undertaken.

The Yangtze River supports 8% of the worlds population and the recently constructed dam can apparently withstand an earthquake to the magnitude of force 7.

Now its a short 30min journey back to the ship for lunch before we set sail on our journey through the 3 Gorges.

To reach the pier we can either walk down the 200 steps or take the small funicular trams.

We approach the first Gorge at around 4pm and although it is raining, there is something quite romantic about it.

The landscape is quite breathtaking and although the weather today is miserable it doesn't really seem to matter. The Viking crew are throwing a Sailaway party on the observation deck and that is where I am off to, whilst looking forward to going ashore tomorrow to a local village.

There should be some interesting photos to send you then...!!

Viking have a class on how to speak Chinese in 30 minutes - no offence but I will go and take a look around the ship!