We awoke to 5 star luxury which started with a good breakfast. Most of the people on the ship are on guided tours of China - we were in the misfits group which consisted of 6 Germans and 2 Australians. We were lucky - this table probably had the lowest average age of the whole ship. The first day on the cruise was a bit slow - some interesting lectures on the gorges and the dam project and a quick primer in mandarin. The afternoon was a tour excursion to the ghost temples. The temples were at the top of the hill which meant many of the cruise participants had to struggle up the dock steps (of which there were a lot because it was built for the future river height which is 60ft higher than today.), then onto golf carts and a chair lift to get to the temples. It has put me off cruises for life. The temple itself is the place where all Chinese souls go to when they die and was a mixture of Buddhism and Taoism. There were lots of strange statues guarding the place - the only problem was it was pouring with rain and low mist so the views were non-existent. After this it was back on the ship for a shower and dinner - at least the food is good.Next day we awoke to the alarm at 6:15 as we have a busy day. We went through the Qutang gorge at 7:00. We went on deck to watch it - spectacular but over quite quickly. Just time for breakfast before we switch to a smaller boat to see the lesser three gorges - which are in a tributary of the Yangtse. These used to be very difficult to get up but with the rise in water level it is easier to see them. These gorges were much more impressive than the main ones as they were narrower, very steep and the vegetation around them was quite lush. After the little gorges, it was lunch and on to the Wu Gorge - this was more classical in terms of the scenery that I had expected. A series of hills rolling into the gorge with lots of mist everywhere.As we went down the gorge, we were amazed with the scale of the work involved in the dam - it isn't just the dam it is the movement of people and replacing houses, roads and bridges. We saw many new bridges (both complete and under construction) as well as new towns. We arrived at the dam site after dinner. Whilst you couldn't see the dam, I had a good view as we went into the ship lock. Given that my previous experience of locks was in a narrow boat on the grand union canal, this was impressive - on a very different scale. There were 6 ships of our size (our boats was 60,000 tons) in the lock at the same time. As it took 3-4 hours to go through them, we went to bed with the sounds of engines and boats banging against the lock walls.