Morning - boarding and the Gezhouba lock
The "two dams and one gorge" route is the standard Yichang boat trip: you board below Gezhouba, pass through its lock, run up the Xiling Gorge, and finish at the approach to the Three Gorges Dam before returning. It is about eight hours in total and it is the best single day available in Hubei for seeing what the river actually looks like.
Locking through Gezhouba is worth waking up for: the chamber fills from below, you rise about 20 metres, and the gates open onto the next reach. It takes about 40 minutes and it is the same mechanism - simpler, smaller - that the big five-stage lock upstream uses on a far larger scale.
The Xiling Gorge
Xiling is the easternmost and longest of the Three Gorges, about 76 kilometres, and it is the one that keeps its cliffs after the 2003 impoundment raised the water by more than 100 metres. The walls rise 600 to 800 metres from the surface in places. You pass the Sanyou Cave on the north bank, where the poet Bai Juyi and his brother and Yuan Zhen all inscribed verses in 819; the Ming and Qing carvings on the cliffs above the water line; and the narrows where the river, before the dam, ran at five metres a second through a channel a hundred metres wide. The modern channel is wider, calmer and much less dramatic, and any honest guide will say that the dam took something out of the gorge as well as putting something in.
Lunch
On board. The boat serves a buffet; it is ordinary and included.
Afternoon
The boat comes up to the face of the Three Gorges Dam from downstream, which is the angle you cannot get from the land viewpoints: the whole 2,335-metre wall from below, with the spillway and the powerhouse at its foot, and the ship lock rising up the left bank in five steps. Then back downstream through Gezhouba, arriving in Yichang in the late afternoon.
Evening
Dinner in Yichang.
Meals
Lunch (on board), Dinner
Accommodation
Yichang, riverside.
