The Liu Xiaobo Project

Monday

But by then I was up, sitting at my desk/dresser, wondering whether we had, in fact, gotten underway. In a movie-scene detail, a Chapstick there before me fell over and rolled to one side: yep. Definitely on our way, sailing upstream; almost 400 miles to go.

We all were amazed at the lavish breakfast buffet onboard (and every meal that followed). It and our departure were too early to have the Tai Chi class onboard. The morning’s shore excursion was brief by the extreme standards we’d set in Beijing: a bus ride across a soaring bridge and up a mountain, with a couple of stops, showcasing the Three Gorges project. The fog we were told is the norm for area persisted. A large scale model of the project in a visitor center brought the huge project to graspable dimensions. A dam at this site was proposed as far back as the 1930s, by Sun Yat-sen, due to the fact that the river bed here is granite rather than sand- or limestone.

But more interesting by far was the afternoon, when our riverboat passed through the five-stage locks themselves. These are the largest inland waterway lock system in the world (as opposed, say, to the Panama Canal, which is saltwater, for oceangoing vessels). And they are indeed huge; we were one of four vessels that went through them together, two riverboats and two large cargo barges. Everything about the process—I sat mesmerized through two locks—was amazing, but always the gigantic scale, the gates, the walls above us. The first (second, actually; I’d been in my cabin during the first) I watched sitting with a very nice English couple even I might call elderly. They and two Australian couples, all traveling independently, were for all intents but meals, at which we still were segregated into our assigned tables, grouped with our tour so that the ship could sort shore groups into one Chinese- and one English-speaking one.

The green water rises quickly once the gates are closed. Sitting there at the prow, right at the railing, the sheer scale of the construction, the overwhelming pressure of the water the giant next gates in front of you hold back, are intimidating. And then, finally, they begin to swing open: first a tiny crack of sky and water between the immense gates, then wider and wider like a stage curtain parting.

The second stage I watched, I watched from the topmost deck almost alone. There I stood mainly on one side, where I realized that the prolonged metal screeching came from the massive metal “boll-ards,” as the English gentleman had informed me earlier, to which the boats are lashed, rising up slots in the great concrete walls—surely hydraulically—as the water and the boats rise.

That evening was the captain’s welcome reception in the ship’s lounge, so again as spruced-up as possible. There was a lovely buffet (capable of leading me astray from the fact that dinner was yet to be served) and a local apple “champagne” I liked, though some thought it overly sweet.