I am the first person on deck this morning. It is 5:30 am and the dawn is rosy pink.

Suddenly, a crew member brushes past me. He races down Deck 3, the exercise deck, along the green outdoor carpet, towards the stern. I walk a little faster to discover what's so pressing at 5:30 am.

I turn the corner above the stern and witness the crewman raising the red flag of the People's Republic on the flagpole on the great Yangzi River. The river is green, the flag is red, the sky is pink, the boat is white, the gorge of the Yangzi crowds in the ship on both sides, towering above in steep folded mountains covered in green bushes and small trees. As soon as the flag is up, the crewman takes off.

It is a moving moment for me. The immense sacrifices made by the Chinese people to drive out the colonial powers, defeat the warlords, vanquish the Japanese fascist army, defeat the Nationalists led by US-supported Chiang Kai Shek, unite the far-flung territories in a renewed Chinese republic, and then wipe out feudalism and build a strong and modern state is an awesome acchievement. I wonder if the young crew member appreciates just what great things the previous two generations have done under that flag.

The next people on deck are the joggers. They can be numbered on the fingers of one hand and they only last 2 or 3 laps (one turn of Deck 3 = 250 metres.) Jogging is not a popular sport in China.

After the joggers, the photographers appear on deck. The Chinese have small digital cameras, just like the foreign guests.

This morning at 6:20, we are scheduled to pass through the Wu Gorge, the second of the three famous Yangzi River gorges, now a national park. Siobhan is up on Deck 5, the sun deck, where Tony, the bilingual ship guide is giving a running commentary on a very loud loudspeaker in Chinese and English of the various points of interest in this gorge. It is sunny and every mist-shrouded peak and every cave has a name. The folds of the mountains take on human forms in the Chinese imagination. There are legends of the past and historical relics, such as the cave-suspended coffins of an ancient people, called the Ba, as well as brick walls protecting the entrances of caves against the Japanese wartime aerial bombardment of military and civilian targets. It reminds me of the Niagara Gorge, and the cruise up the Saguenay in Quebec, as well as the landlocked fjord of Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. Only taller.

Siobhan is hearing and photographing all of this upstairs on the sundeck. I prefer Deck 3 where one can walk and take in the sights of the gorge in peace.

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We boarded the Princess Jeannie of the Regal China Cruise Line at Yichang on Friday night at the New Century Port, after making our way from Wuhan to Yichang's East Railway Station. It is clear, after a few minutes, that this is not the railway station described in the Lonely Planet guidebook. There is no market, no bank, no nothing for about a kilometre in any direction. So we have either disembarked at the wrong railway station or else the station described in the "Lonely Planet: China" and everything nearby has been razed for this brand new station.

Anyway, we have a distance to go to get to the New Century Port. And it will be by cab. As usual, despite the fact that I had the address of the New Century Port in Chinese characters, Chinese pinyin (the phonic equivalent of the Chinese symbols in letters of the English aphabet), and English, three drivers refuse the very good fare we represent. They either don't know where it is (often the case) or can't read the small print because they don't have reading glasses (also often the case) or can't read period (one possible scenario.)

Anyway, a young driver, named Billy (in English), finally accepts the fare which we have bargained down from 100 yuan to 80 for a 60 kilometre ride. I feel we are ripped off by local standards. However, what can one do, under the circumstances?

Like every cab in China, he is protected by a wrap-around screen, something the taxi union of Hamilton has not yet been successful in winning but is an important safety issue for its members. Billy takes off at a good clip and pays 5 yuan to get on the 4-lane, divided toll road in the direction of the Three Gorges Park. About ten minutes later, he leaves the toll road for a local highway, which he says is a shortcut. He slows down as he passes a police station and then speeds up again through winding roads. After another twenty minutes, we are crossing a big bridge over the Yangzi River, where the sides of the cliffs are almost sheer. As we cross the bridge, we spy a restaurant, painted red, complete with Chinese lanterns, hanging out over the abyss on struts anchored in the mountain wall. Obviously one can access the restaurant by way of a red plank walkway also hanging out over the chasm. We resolve to eat supper there.

The taxi continues down a hill to a steel gate with a guardhouse. Tourist buses are disgorging cruise ship passengers to the cruise ships below. We show our cruise voucher to the guard. As usual, even though we indicate where our relevant info is located in Chinese, he can't help us. This is frustrating, but normal, here.

As usual, we insist two times and then three times that he indicate where our ship is. Of course, in the pit of our stomachs, we are in dread of the fact that the taxi has brought us to the wrong place and that, consequently, we are going literally to miss the boat. Finally, the guard consults with two or three other men standing around. Sure enough, our ship is here. We just can't see it because it is tied up on the other side of a second cruise ship.

We are admitted. We start down the long, long flights of stone steps to the dock, my suitcase on wheels clunking inexorably down from one step to the next. We cross through the first cruise ship and up a gangplank to ours. Hurray! We are welcomed at the reception desk by Safiya who speaks pretty good English and shows us to our cabin.

This is much better than we expected. The booking agent (China Highlights) at first balked at selling us passage on the Princess Jeannie because it maintained that the ship was not suitable for westerners, only Chinese. The Lonely Planet guidebook insisted that the Chinese cruise ships were perfectly adequate. And this one certainly is!

Our standard cabin is on Deck 4 right at the very front. It is 6 feet wide and fifteen feet long with two bunks that fold into sofas, a night stand, overhead cupboards for storing clothes and alcohol, a TV, air conditioning, a big picture window that opens wide, a blackout curtain and two sets of drapes, a fridge, a phone, an intercom, two narrow but tall closets, an ensuite bathroom with shower and German commode, an entrance hallway, lots of clothes hooks, and hangers, lots of lights, half- length mirror, lots of linen and towels, and storage area for luggage, Not too shabby! Siobhan and I are very satisfied.

But we are still hungry because we haven't eaten since breakfast and no meals will be served until we set sail tomorrow morning. So we get two shore passes from Safiya and walk up the steps and the hill back to the cliff-hanging restaurant.

Unfortunately, it is already after dark and so we cannot get a photo of the precariously-perched restaurant. Below in the chasm, there is a pedestrian rope and plank bridge crossing the gorge, something like the one in Vancouver.

The restaurant is built into a huge cave in the Mountain that, according to the plaque which is in Chinese and Chinglish (wildly wrong English grammar and vocabulary), was familiar to travellers and poets since ancient times. The restaurant is only the latest use of the space over the ages.

It is a clearly upscale venue, with prices we mostly cannot afford. And the suspended terrace is reserved for a family gathering. Siobhan manages to find three dishes we can afford and we are soon stuffed. We continually find it amazing that we have never waited more than 5 or 10 minutes to be served in China, unlike 20 to 40 minutes back home.

I think I have discovered the secret. In restaurant kitchens here, there is always a huge cauldron of water boiling, into which the ingredients of various dishes are lowered as the orders come in. There are also some staples, such as rice and noodles, constantly being cooked, while tea is steeping, and soups simmering. So, everything can be served in minutes.

On the way back down to the Princess Jeannie, we pause to buy some beer and snacks for the trip. The signs and cruise information indicated that it was forbidden to bring alcohol aboard. But we saw the Chinese passengers laden down like mules with cartons of beer and wine. When in Rome...

I get to study the 5 star Victoria Line cruise ship berthed next to ours. To my mind, it does not really look like a ship at all, but rather a glass and steel office building or modern hotel, lifted off its foundation and dropped onto a deck. It is not long and low like the Princess J, but more boxy. It has more decks of cabins, each with its own private veranda with two chrome chairs on which to sit, but only one partly wraparound deck on top. The cabins are much larger than ours with really big beds, with sliding glass doors, and wall-mounted thin TV screens. It also has a posh dining hall with a grand staircase and two elevators.

The Princess J is one of three ships commissioned by the former Soviet Union and built in (East?) Germany in the late 1980's. However, after the collapse of the communist state, the Russian government could not make the payments on the ships. The boats were bought by the daughter of Chinese president, Deng Tsao Ping, in 1993 and put into service on the Yangzi. (You may ask how the President's daughter managed to scrape together the necessary mezumah to buy three cruise ships. I decided diplomatically not to do so.) For many years, these ships were the pinnacle of luxury for cruising the Three Gorges. Only recently did Western interests put really luxurious cruise ships on the Three Gorges run.

To tell you the truth, I am pretty pleased with my $280, five-day, 4-night cruise with 13 meals and three paid-for, and guided land excursions, as opposed to the luxury cruises starting at about $450 and going to upwards of $800. On top of all of the above, the new cruise ships pass by the Princess J so fast it seems that we are standing still. So the 5 star passengers get a shorter cruise.

Yesterday's excursion was to the great Yangzi River Dam. About one million people have visited the dam per year in the last two years since it was completed in 2009. Today, as usual, the parking lot is filled up with tourist buses packed with Chinese and foreign tourists.

This is the world's largest dam. The Chinese have dreamed of taming the Yangzi for over a century because the Yangzi used to be called "China's sorrow". It used to flood periodically, killing a million people at a go. Now the dam controls the water level up and down this, the third longest river in the world. The dam produces the equivalent of the electrical power of fourteen nuclear power stations and even more coal-fired power stations. It is clean energy that is sent through high-voltage power lines in every direction for 1000 kilometres, as far away as where we started, down at the mouth of the river near Shanghai.

The guide explains several aspects of the building of the dam. To begin, the Chinese employed 100,000 workers for ten years in building a smaller dam down at Yichang, mainly to develop the expertise to tackle the big one here. After they finished the dam at Yichang, they dismissed 70,000 workers and moved the remaining 30,000 up to the new construction site here where they built for them housing to last 10 years. They built a coffer dam on the west side of the river. Then they asked the army to come in and dynamite eight mountains out of the way in order to build a set of four (?) locks, which are the largest in the world, to account for the 70 metre difference in height of the water level above and below the dam.

While the 30,000 construction workers were working away at the locks, 1.3 million people had to be relocated from ancient communities along the river that were going to be submerged. So the government relocated every one of these people to higher ground. This mind-boggling task involved dismantling the existing cities and towns along the way, and reusing salvagable building materials, including doors, windows, bricks and blocks and building whole new cities above the high water mark. In some places, it meant dismantling historic sites, including city walls, glacis, and pagoda towers, labelling each piece and reassembling them above the new water line. The new cities, interetingly, often have some mechanized way of lifting people from the water line to the city above, such as a funicular or a dragon-shaped escalator.

For the farmers, the government paid for the top soil of their farms along the river to be scraped up and carted way up the sides of the hills, where terraces were built, and the top soil deposited there. Not everybody got to have terraced land, however. Those, who didn't, got compensation in cash.

"How did the people who were relocated feel about the move?" one of our fellow travellers asked a tour guide.

The tour guide responded that old people were unhappy with the change because they lost the homes they were used to, their neighbours, and their old towns. However, young people were thrilled. She, for example, used to live in a house with three generations of her family in 800 square feet. Their new apartment is 1600 square feet. They had to buy it (as a discounted price, thanks to the government.) But it will be paid off next year. Best part: for the first time ever, the family has indoor plumbing. There are also vastly more employment opportunities for young people because the new cities have schools, hospitals, tourism, and other industries.

People were also put to work to clamber over the rocks and cut down every tree and shrub - by hand - right up to the high water mark, along the complete length of the upper Yangzi, because those items would become hindrances to navigation. In addition, a lot of work was necessary to prepare the upper reaches of the Yangzi for year-round navigation. Helicopters flew over the mountains dropping cyprus seeds on the sides to take root and prevent erosion.

Tied in with the construction of the dam, moreover, is the building of tourist infrastructure, big time: hotels, new tour boats, restoration of historic sites, magnificent new bridges, railway stations, and highways (not the best way to do it, in my opinion.)

When the dam was finished, the housing for the 30,000 construction workers and the coffer dam were demolished and the workers were dismissed. During this period, these workers did not get married or have children. The guide said they made a great sacrifice for the nation.

At the dam observation site, we observe the locks which take about 4 hours to pass through. On the positive side, there are no lock charges for shipping, unless your vessel weighs less than 3000 tons, in which case, you can pay for it to be lifted over the locks for a fee. Navigation is much better on the upper reaches of the Yangzi now. Whereas, previous to the completion of the dam, the average depth of the upper river was 2 metres and there were rapids, white water and shoals, now the average depth is 70 metres and the width of the upper river has increased dramatically.

I am probably omitting many aspects of the comprehensive remoulding of the face of the earth here. But at a price tag of 25 billion yuan ($4b Cdn.), it was a bargain. It is the largest dam in the world, bigger than the Hooever Dam in the US and the Volga Dam in Russia. So, it is a politial statement, as well. I imagine that this project is the largest single construction project undertaken by the Chinese nation since the Great Wall. That earlier project, which cost 500 tons of silver ($704,000,000 Cdn in today's dollars) almost bankrupted the empire. The general who designed it was sacked. This present project seems to be a money-maker.

What are the drawbacks, you may ask? Well, the dam has aready altered the weather of this region. This part of China is sub-tropical, in the monsoon belt. Previous to the completion of the dam there were 146 foggy days a year. Now, that number has increased to 180. There is a drought in the northeatern part of the country and increased desertification. Is there a connection? 90% of all the archeological sites along the river were not saved. Dozens of villages, small towns and cities were obliterated. No fish ladders were provided for fish to get past the dam. As a result, some species are endangered. A whole lot more boat and car traffic has been attracted to the region with consequent environmental degredation. The new cities are impressive from an engineering point of view but are not the imaginative architectural structures the Chinese have designed in Shanghai (i.e., they are boring). Finally, nobody knows what will happen if a really big earthquake hits the dam. I would not like to be present to find out, thank you very much.

Let's finish with the dam observation site. Beside the observation points where you can take the obligatory photos of yourself and your fellow travellers in front of the world's largest dam, there are the usual souvenir shops, fountains, and gardens. There is also something resembling a giant dumpling on which there is a frieze which has no apparent meaning to me. It is entitled "Promoting peace between heaven and earth." There are heroic human figures and figures of Chinese mythological characters. No socialist realism here. There is also a statue of an huge open book with a title in English that also made no sense to us.

By the way, you have to go through a security check to visit the dam site.

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Before breakfast, Siobhan relates to me what Tony, the tour guide, had said about the Wu Gorge. She also shows me the images she has captured on the digital camera. It turns out that some of the peaks I had observed in the rosy dawn from Deck 3 were 1000 metres above sea level.

Breakfast is served. Actually, it is second breakfast. The 280 guests on board are served in two half-hour shifts. As one of the several perks that English-speking guests receive on board, we are put on the second shift, which means we can loiter at table over coffee and tea for 15 or 20 minutes after the meal is finished.

We are seated with two tour groups of New Zealanders. First, there is a buffet with beverages (warm milk, ersatz orange juice, tea), steamed rolls, porridge, rice dishes, sweet buns, pastries, at which everybody loads up their plates. Little do we realize that the buffet is just for appetizers. After we sit down with full plates, along come the servers with plate after plate of toast, fried eggs, boiled eggs, boiled cabbage, potatos, rice, pickled veggies, pieces of cake. The table is groaning under the weight of all this food. Nobody can finish all they have taken and some, including me, leave foods that look appetizing but don't turn out to be so. By the way, the Chinese food you eat in North America bears no resemblance whatsoever to real Chinese cuisine. We all feel bad about the waste but later we learn that the exess is simply deposited into big plastic bins and given to farmers along the way to feed the pigs.

Unlike the Chinese, the New Zealanders are pretty cool to Siobhan and I at first. It takes a while to figure out why. The reason is that they have been touring as a group for over a week at this point and they have developed a group identity that excludes others. After a few meals together, however, a few drinks, and a talent show at which Ross does a very good imitation of a Maori war dance and we do a passable performance of "Land of the Silver Birch", we are pretty much acccepted.

There is a lot to do on board: visit the bridge deck, learn ma jong, eat, participate in ti chi, get a massage from a Chinese therapist, eat, dance, sing karaoke, eat, walk the exercise deck, read, watch TV, eat, play cards, gamble, and smoke cigarettes (if you're Chinese), take thousands of digital pictures of the dazzling senery, eat. I think you get the picture...

Other highlights: I exasperate our female tour guide on the trip to the Lesser Three Gorges. She asks how we think people, 2200 hundred years ago, managed to get big coffins into caves 900 metres up the sides of sheer cliffs. I suggest helicopters. Correct answer: nobody knows for sure. They might have lowered them from the top or raised them by pulleys from the bottom or they may have built plank walkways along the cliffs. They might even have built the coffins inside the caves.

Then she asks how the coffins have managed to stay intact for two millenia. It's elementary, I suggest. This is how they did it: they got a big plastic bag and shoved the coffin into it. Then they used a big twist tie to seal up the end of the bag.

"But this was 2000 years ago!, she splutters. "People then did not have - " she stops herself when she realizes I am just joking.

Correct answer: they used a very hard, hardwood and suspended them to make sure that water drained from under the coffin, never touching the coffin itself.

Interesting notes: Sometimes the coffins have more than one person in them. In one coffin, for example, is the skeleton of a fifteen year old boy. Next to him are the remains of a sixteen-year-old girl with a hole in her skull.

Some of lower suspended coffins were pushed out of the caves and destroyed during the Cutlural Revolution? Why? Because, the guide said, Chinese people at that time wanted to sweep out the old in the hope that something new and better would come along. Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be the case.

For the tour of Ghost City, Siobhan and I went down to Reception at the appointed time only to find out that the tour time had been changed without anyone notifying us. So Tony kept the whole ship waiting an hour while he personaly led us on a whirlwind tour himself.

More hills, more climbing, more hot and sticky weather. A long, long way to the top at a breakneck pace.

Ghost City, if you are a believer, is where your soul goes on Judgment Day. Those who don't make the cut for heaven are destined to remain in Ghost City to be tortured for an infinity. I would personally not like being a prisoner in this Chinese version of Hell. The temple statuary makes it graphically clear that for the sins of alcoholism, lechery, avarice, sodomy, etc, you will suffer various tortures including being impaled on sharp stakes, burnt by flames, cut into pieces, crushed under wagon wheels and many other unpleasant trials.

Personally, I suggest atheism.

Well, now it's the last night for us on board. The New Zealanders have departed by bus to Chongqing (formerly Chungking), where we will disembark tomorrow. Siobhan fell asleep reading Dumas', "The Man In The Iron Mask" and, through the cabin window, I am watching the never-ending stream of river traffic pass by: cruise ships, freighters, bulk carriers, container ships, speed boats, police boats, hydrofoils, barges, sampans.

You could take a hydrofoil and do the gorges in 11 hours flat. But if you ask for my recommendation, I would suggest taking a slow boat through China.

ps The photo we used for this blog entry is NOT from the Yangzi River. It is of another river in China, supplied by the website's lbrary. When we overcome the problem of uploading the many photos we have taken, we will replace the photo in question.