The bad news about the Three Gorges is that they seem to be mostly submerged already. The good news is that they still make for a great boat ride. The two days I spent on the boat between Chongqing and Yichang were among the best on my trip so far. Forgive the long narrative, but there's much to tell.

I bought my boat ticket from a little storefront travel agency in Chongqing. The only person in the office who spoke any English spoke precious little of it, so the process was slow and rather uninformative about what waited in store for me. I returned to the agency at 5:00 pm to meet my guide, who would take me to the boat. She led me down to the riverside, which stretches out in a long, rocky beach towards the seasonally low waters of the river. Waiting at the water's edge was a long line of boats. Some were gleaming new ships that would have looked at home cruising the Potomac River for the dining pleasure of Washington fat cats. Others looked like grizzled veterans who had known the Three Gorges since they were wee little gorges. We, of course, headed for one of those.

My third class cabin included six bunks, two chairs and a TV. I shared the room with five Chinese who spoke no English, and although it should have been clear from early on that I spoke no Chinese, throughout the trip they occasionally tried to ask or possibly tell me things. I don't know. They were speaking Chinese.

After an hour or two of wondering if I was the only Westerner on the boat, I met an American named Joe, through whom I was gradually introduced to the other six Westerners on board: a pair of Dutch siblings named Peter and Ivanne, a pair of German businessmen named Peter and Frank and an Aussie couple whose names I never got because they tended to stick to themselves. Joe, Dutch Peter, Ivanne and I all bonded quickly and spent most of the rest of the trip hanging out on a back deck of the boat, watching the scenery disappear into the haze behind the boat, joined occasionally by the Germans.

The scenery itself was beautiful, although rarely spectacular. I imagine that there are boat trips through West Virginia that look very similar, although the mountains along the Yangzi are much more exotic than the Appalachians, boasting oddly-shaped peaks, cleft by narrow tributaries and pierced by caves. Isolated cottages and the occasional village clung to the mountainsides, surrounded by terraces covered in a yellow-flowering crop that German Peter identified as rapeseed. Some of these settlements linger below the future waterline. This is the most powerful aspect of making the trip before the completion of the dam: you are witnessing the last years of these settlements before they are swallowed by the river. Elsewhere, large cities and towering suspension bridges are sprouting up along the river like Wal-Marts and Starbucks. These riverside towns are being vigorously erected high on the hillside, waiting for the river to come to them. They are the future of this stretch of the Yangzi.

When the dam is finished, the water will rise to 175 meters. The gauges built along the river indicate that the river is currently at 145 meters. 145 meters above what is not clear, but the locks at the dam lowered us 65 meters before releasing us into the lower Yangzi, which leads me to believe that the Gorges are now much shallower than they were just a few years past.

The scenic highlight of the trip was a side trip into the "lesser Three Gorges," which are substantially narrower canyons formed by a tributary of the river. Having passed through the first of the Three Gorges in pre-dawn darkness, we shuffled off our boat and onto smaller craft to delve into these canyons. We motored up an emerald-green river perhaps 30-40 feet wide beneath soaring cliffs. They reminded me strongly of Zion National Park in Utah. Here and there, traces of the river's rise appeared: a wooden walkway, which I'm told once clung to the cliff face high above the water, sloped down and disappeared into the river.

After returning from this expedition, we entered the last two Gorges. We Westerners watched from the back deck. The Chinese lingered for the most part in their rooms, sleeping, watching TV or playing cards. At one point, they stampeded out to gawk en masse at two particularly famous rock formations before retreating to their rooms again, emerging later only for dinner and karaoke. Ah, the mysterious Chinese mind! It worked out well for us, though: we had the back deck to ourselves. It was the company of these five travelers