Three Gorges Dam

The first day of our cruise we started out bright and early with a tour of the Three Gorges Dam. It is as we were told many times by our guide, the largest hydroelectric facility in the world. The size is menured by the number of turbines of which the 3 gores has 26, and the next largest has only 18. It was a foggy day so as you can see from the photos you can't even see the other side of the dam. It is one mile accross. The dam provides electricity for towns all the way to shanghai, and cotrols the flood plane where 450 million chinese live. Nothing is done here in small mesures, that's for sure. One of the other aspects of the dam is that it has allowed the government to "adjust" the depth of the Yangzi river up stream as well. We saw the effects of this every day of our cruise. In the past the river was quite shallow and
choppy, basically only for the smaller boats. Now it is a wide meandering thing. I don;t know the depth of the origional river but the dam is not finished and they plan on raising the water another 60 meters! All over the river you see signs for 175M which will be the final depth of the river. The Chinese government had to move1.5 million people allong the river. New "towns" are visible everywhere. They look weird suspended high on the banks waiting for the water to rise to it's final resting place.
What we saw most up close and personal was the lock that the Ship had to go through to reach the higher river level. The lock it self was huge and could hold about 8 large ships in each section. There were 5 seperate stages till we reached the top.