Yangtze River

The most famous river cruise in China

The Yangtze is one of the great rivers of the world, a nearly 3,000-mile-long watery highway of commerce, history, legend, and poetry that begins high in the Tibetan plateau, flows into the China Sea at Shanghai, and between the two neatly bisects one of the world's great nations.

The great river of the Middle Kingdom is once open again to cruising, despite the completion in 2003 of the massive Three Gorges Dam—that great, big, stupid wall of concrete which almost every engineer and ecologist (outside of China) confirms will cause far more problems than it solves (the Chinese really just built it to prove they could).

The backwash from the dam has flooded up the Three Gorges, obliterating the ancient towns and pagodas which were long before evacuated and making the dramatic Three Gorges rather less lofty.

I should warn you that a cruise down the Yangtze is not everybody's cup of green tea. The wild rapids of yore were long ago dynamited into submission, leaving you to float for three days down a placid river through a series of enormous canyons lined by the ruins of towns and villages forcibly abandoned in the face of the flood.

However, most river cruises do nip up a tributary river so you can see the more dramatic natural scenery of the "Three lesser Gorges."

Some people view a Yangtze cruise as more something to be able to say you have done rather than something actually to do, one of those required travel experiences like the Changing of the Guard in London.

Still, for the three days or so of a typical Yangtze cruise there's precious little to do aside from snap pictures of a few cliff-hugging pagodas, so it can provide some much needed decompression time in the midst of an odyssey through China.