After the captain's welcome party and dinner we reached the 5 locks. Each lock is 280 m long, so we shared one with other boats. It takes about 3 minutes to shut the gates, and 8 minutes to fill with water before the front gates can be opened to allow sailing into the next lock. Somehow the whole process took 3 hours.
And now for some facts requested by Chris:
1. The dam is 185m high, the upstream river at most 175m high above its pre-dam levels. Right now it's 160m but will be lowered to 140 by June to allow a buffer against flooding. One million people died in floods in the 100 years prior to the damming. You can see the highest water level mark in this photo taken from our cabin.
2. There are 32 generators each with a capacity of 700 mw. The generators are Siemens from Germany, GE from the USA, plus some from China (and maybe France).
3. The dam is concrete gravity type. It is 2.3 km long, 115m wide at the base, 40m wide at the top.
4. One million people had to be relocated due to the 175m depth gain of the upper river.
Today's shore excursion was to the Lesser 3 Gorges. We left from the relatively new town of Wushan. First we went 30 km through 2 gorges on the Da Ning River, on a medium sized boat. We then transferred to small sampans for the Ma Du River where the gorge was much narrower.
We are now back on the Century Paragon cruising through the second gorge - Wu gorge. Time to have a dip in the pool, or read my book, before afternoon tea and a scarf tying demo. After dinner is the staff cabaret. It's a hard life :)
Nice photos mum! :-)
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