The Dam Tour

After disembarking from the cruise, we were taken to the Three Gorges Dam for our tour.  Originally, we were planning to pass through the locks, but unfortunately the floods had backed things up (600 ships waiting) and cruise ships were being held above the dam.

I have taken a tour of Hoover Dam in Nevada (USA) where we actually went out on the dam itself and down into the generating station.  This was nothing like that.  We were driven past the locks and taken to a visitor center, where we viewed a model of the dam, and overlooked the entire project.  Then we were shuttled to a viewing platform adjacent to the dam itself before being taken back.  Security here was more than at two of the airports I visited

The dam is huge.  I measured it on Google Earth before I left and it is over a mile long, close to 1.5 miles if you count the locks.  On a couple of the photos below, I did some extra processing to bring some detail out of the haze, and you can get a sense of the scale by looking closely at the close-up of the orange cranes - note the size of the staircases up the legs.

The heat was incredible - at the viewing platform they provided a little play area for the kids to cool off.