28th April – Wushan to Yichang

Today we drive approximately 230 km to Yichang to visit the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.  Quite a few of the cities we have visited have a statue of a horse standing on 1 leg & as we leave Wushan we see another one.  We notice an interesting umbrella set up on the motor bikes, good for the sun & rain, but I imagine not too good in the wind.  We drive through beautiful countryside with tea terraces and a mountain backdrop.

Before we are allowed into the area we have to buy a permit which takes about half an hour as the local officers had to ask their senior officials for permission to allow us to enter.  The drivers had to show their passport, Chinese drivers licence & the cars temporary Chinese licence plate. Once again we become the attraction and we are asked to have our photo taken with a couple of lovely looking young ladies.

When we arrive at the dam we have lunch in the car park which has grassed parking bays laid out amongst trees & gardens, it’s lovely.  First we catch a series of escalators up to a viewing platform overlooking the 5 locks that allow the boats access from the river to the gorges area and vice versa. It takes 3-4 hours to pass through the locks and each boat has a weight limit of 10,000 tonnes.

  

We walk further around to see the boat lift, which has a boat weight limit of 3,000 tonnes but only takes 40 minutes for a boat to pass from the river level to the gorges level and vice versa.

Last we visit the memorial park which gives us a good view of the dam wall and where the water is expelled after passing through the turbines to create electricity.  The grounds are maintained by hand, we only saw 1 man using a whipper snipper and not a lawn mower to cut the grass.

Some interesting dam facts:

• worlds largest dam
• started in 1994 and finished in 2003
• 1.24 million people who used to live along the gorges were relocated so the area could be flooded
• 13 cities, 140 towns & 1,350 villages were either flooded or partially flooded
• largest hydro electric scheme in the world creating 93,500 twh in 2016
• creates 8 times the amount of power as the Hoover dam
• this dam creates 14% of China’s power output – there are still a lot of coal power stations

We drive to our hotel back in Yichang which takes us an hour to negotiate our way through the busy traffic of this large city.

While we sit in traffic cars going the opposite direction slow down or stop to take photos of us. A Porsche Cayenne approaching Shamrock, who was stationary, taking a photo ran into the passengers side front panel, putting a dent above the bumper bar & scraping the paint work. Neither cars stop & fortunately the damage to Shamrock is only minor.