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Published: November 11th 2010
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It's funny how one person coming onto a tour bus with a nasty flu can affect the 26 other people. Slowly over the days people started coming down with the lurgy - sore throat, high fever, nasty cough... We were all just waiting to catch it. Our guide Ding told us to go to the Chemist to stock up on cold and flu medicine as we were going to be on the cruise for the next couple of days. It was quite funny seeing groups of foreigners walking to the chemist (who by the way did not speak ANY English) and try to mime their symptoms. It was hilarious. We got by though and came away with an assortment of things to try and keep the flu away. We got to the airport around half eleven, ready for our 1.30 flight. Then the fun began. Apparently in China the airline system is a game of chance. Your flight could be cancelled at very little notice... luckily this didn't happen to us but we were delayed - our plane didn't take off until after 5 o'clock. While it wasn't much fun waiting around the airport in Xian during this time, it also
presented with a few minor problems - we still had about a four hour drive to get to the river boat! Plans were soon changed and we had dinner as soon as we landed and cleared the airport. Then it was on the bus at 8.30 for our drive. Most of us tried to sleep but it was a bit hard to get a good sleep in. We finally arrived at the boat at around 1.30 am (our scheduled time to be on the boat was about 8.30pm), checked in and headed straight to bed. I was starting to get the symptoms of the lurgy and dosed myself up as much as possible.
We were rudely awakened by the wake up call at 6.30am - apparently soothing music with some birds chirping. I would say that quite a few of us would have cheerfully strangled those birds (or the person giving us the wake up call) if we could get hold of them. Anyway we struggled awake, had breakfast and were ready for our 8.00am shore excursion - The 3 Gorges Dam site. It is an amazing feat of engineering and apparently it has helped with controlling flooding in
the area and is the largest hydro electricity project in the world. We had a look at the dam wall and the 5 steps shiplock that we would be going through that afternoon. Words can't describe the enormity of the project and that it is still a work in progress - they are actually building a type of express shipping elevator that will make the 100m change in water level a much quick journey although ships will have to pay to use this one. We settled in for the next couple of hours as the 6 river boats went into each lock and were boosted up 5 different levels. Later that evening we had the captains dinner.
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