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I awoke feeling a little better but still not wonderful. I had a little toast for breakfast and some yoghurt. Note that on board there is our party of 18, and a party of 9 Chinese people and 110 staff!!! The boat has essentially 5 decks. The bottom deck through which we enter is the crew area. The first floor has the reception desk and the dining room and in the middle of the large reception area is a small shop as well, per usual! There is a spiral staircase that leads to the second floor where our cabin is and then a further spiral up to the third floor, which is all rooms and also houses the bridge, and then up to the fourth floor where the bar is. Above that is the sun deck (basically the roof). Breakfast consists of the usual buffet style and looks quite good though I haven't really managed to try much.
We left at 08:00am and took a bus to the 3 gorges dam site and this is a truly amazing piece of engineering. We took quite a few photos and were confounded by some incredible statistics. Here are just a few: it has a total storage capacity of 39.3 billion cubic metres! The current water depth at the dam (and for most of the river that we have navigated so far) is 175 metres (yes metres)!! In the winter this is reduced to 145 metres. It's main purpose is flood control but just as a useful extra it has 26 generators generating 18,200 Mw of power. It has two five stage locks for shipping, one set for upstream trafic and one for downstream. There is also a ship lift being built that will be capable of lifting ships less than 3000 tons from one side to the other in around 3 to 4 minutes, compared to the 3.5 hours it takes larger ships to negotiate the locks. The locks can service ships up to 10,000 tons, which essentialy means that ships up to that size can enter the Yangtze at Shanghai and go all the way up the river to Chonqing, a distance 1500 km!
The routine on the cruise is to have a shore excursion each morning, return to the boat for dinner, and then have the remainder of the day to watch the world go by until the happy hour from 5pm 'til 6:30pm, and then dinner at 7pm. We set sail in the middle of our lunch and at 2pm were treated to the sights of the first of the three gorges, the Xiling gorge. Along the river banks there are many, many farm houses and little villages interspersed with the odd factory but there are not many of these as the government has largely relocated them all away from the Yangzte, so we were told. Amazingly, during the creation of the dam entire towns were relocated! I only ate rice and a little chicken for dinner and dad and I were both in bed by around 8pm!
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