The Great Wall

With only a few days left in his trip Rob wanted to get to Beijing but Tavi and I had time for an intermediate stop. We went to Yichang in Hubei Province, the major city nearest the Three Gorges Dam. Having shown a video in E83 for many semesters about the motivation for, construction of and social issues surrounding this thing, it was a must-see for me. That other Great Wall, crawling with tourists, isn't so much. I added the characters for "professor" and "engineering" to my business card with the idea that we might be able to convince someone to hook us up with an engineer there for the day. Unfortunately security was such that it just wasn't going to happen. We did get some great views of the structure, the locks, and the not-so-transparent air.
For you E83 alumni who might read this: the water is now at about 135m (final height is 175 or 185m, I forget). They are using about half of the lock levels to move boats over that height. During some semesters we had in-depth conversations about the ship elevator that would take a decent sized craft up or down in one stage. It's definitely there, but it's unclear if it's completed yet. It seems like they have some but not all of the hydroelectric turbines going. And indeed, a couple million people have been moved. Unfortunately we didn't go to any upstream communities, so we didn't gain insight on that. It would have been great to talk to people who had been relocated, but people with even a bit of English are few and far between in this area, so that would have been pretty difficult.