6-Day Yangtze Cruise: Yichang to Chongqing Upstream

Your guide meets you at Yichang East station or at Yichang airport and drives you to the hotel on the river. Yichang has about four million people in the prefecture, sits at the point where the Yangtze leaves the mountains, and has been the transhipment point for everything going in or out of the gorge for two thousand years. It was also, in 1940, the reason the Japanese took it: below Yichang the river opens out and the defences were gone.

There is usually time in the evening for a walk on the riverside promenade and dinner: the local red-oil noodles, the river fish, and the radish dumplings that Yichang eats fried. If the group is arriving late, the guide briefs the next day over dinner and confirms the dam reservation, which has to be made with passport details in advance.

Meals
Dinner

Accommodation
Yichang, riverside.

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.

Afternoon - boarding
You board at the Yichang passenger terminal in the late afternoon or evening. Cabins are assigned on arrival, luggage goes to the cabin, and there is a safety briefing and a welcome dinner. Your guide travels with you as far as the gangway, hands you over to the cruise staff, and stays in touch by telephone for the length of the sailing - they do not accompany the vessel itself, which is standard on the Yangtze.

The dam passage
Most upstream sailings pass the dam in the evening or overnight, either through the five-stage lock - about three and a half hours, five chambers, a 113-metre change in level - or through the ship lift, which takes about 40 minutes. Whichever it is, go up on deck. Going through the lock at night, with the chamber walls rising around you and the gates closing overhead, is the most physical way to understand what the dam does.

What the cabins are like
The vessels on this run are in the 100- to 300-passenger range, five decks, all cabins outside with either a window or a balcony, and the difference between the categories is size and balcony rather than service. Meals are buffet or set-menu in the dining room, and the shore excursions at the gorge stops are included in the fare. It is not a luxury product and it is not marketed as one; it is comfortable, and the scenery is the reason you are there.

Meals
Dinner on board

Accommodation
On board, cabin with private facilities.

Morning - the Shennong Stream
The Shennong Stream comes down from the mountains on the north bank near Badong and runs about 60 kilometres to the Yangtze. The excursion is by open wooden boat - the pea-pod boats the local boatmen still use - up a gorge narrow enough that at the top the walls are close overhead and the light comes down green. The stretch near the mouth is wider now that the reservoir has backed up; the upper reaches are as they were. There is singing from the banks, and there are the hauling tracks cut into the cliff from before the engines.

The Wu Gorge
Wu is the middle gorge, about 45 kilometres, and it is the one everybody agrees is the most beautiful: continuous walls, peaks that come up over 900 metres, and the cloud that hangs in the side valleys and gives the gorge its weather. The Twelve Peaks of Wushan are on the north bank, and the most photographed of them - the Goddess Peak, a slender rock column on the ridge - is the one the vessel will announce. Du Fu wrote about this water, and so did about a thousand other people; the guide on board will have the good ones.

Afternoon
Sailing, with the gorge opening and closing. There is usually a second shore stop - Wushan's small museum, or the new town built above the flood line after the reservoir - and the vessel passes into the Qutang Gorge at the western end by late afternoon.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner on board

Accommodation
On board.

Morning - the Qutang Gorge
Qutang is eight kilometres long, the shortest of the three, and the narrowest: the river runs between walls that in places are barely a hundred metres apart and rise well over a thousand. It is also the one the dam changed least, because the cliffs are too high to be drowned. The entrance is the Kuimen gate, the rock portal that appears on the back of the old ten-yuan note, and passing it in the early morning with the light still low is the best hour of the whole sailing.

The White Emperor City
Above the western entrance, on a peninsula at Fengjie, stands Baidicheng - the White Emperor City - named for a Han usurper who declared himself the White Emperor here in the first century. The site has been fortified since at least the Han, and the buildings on it now are Qing and later, moved up above the reservoir line when the water came. It is famous for two things: Liu Bei, the founder of Shu Han, died here in 223 after his defeat at Yiling; and Li Bai left from here downstream in 759 and wrote the poem about setting off in the morning through the cloud-coloured gorges with the monkeys calling on both banks - the one every Chinese schoolchild learns.

The site is reached by a long covered escalator from the landing stage, which is itself an artefact of the reservoir: the old stair is 60 metres under water.

Afternoon
Back on board for the last stretch. Most vessels run an afternoon excursion to a tributary or a shore village and hold a farewell dinner that evening.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner on board

Accommodation
On board.

Morning - disembarkation
The vessel ties up at Chongqing in the morning, usually before nine, and you are off after breakfast. Your Hubei guide, or a Chongqing colleague if you have booked the onward leg with us, meets you at the gangway.

Chongqing, briefly
Chongqing is not Hubei, but if you have the day: it is a city of about 32 million in the municipality, built on rock above the confluence of the Yangtze and the Jialing, with a climate that produces fog for most of the winter and a skyline that photographs better than any other in China. The worthwhile half-day is the old town at Hongyadong, the Three Gorges Museum, the Great Hall of the People on Renmin Square, and E'ling Park for the view over the two rivers. The food is the real reason: Chongqing hotpot, in which the oil is the point and the numbing Sichuan pepper is not negotiable - though a mild pot can be arranged.

Lunch and onward
Lunch, then the transfer to Chongqing Jiangbei airport or Chongqing North railway station. High-speed trains run to Chengdu in about an hour and a half, to Xi'an in about five, and to Beijing in about eight.

Meals
Breakfast (on board), Lunch

Accommodation
Not included