Even in the quiet of the gorges, we were rarely alone. About a billion tons of cargo travel the Yangtze each year, making it one of the world's busiest waterways. A parade of barges slipped by, carrying hills of coal, a reminder of the country's huge power demands.
The Three Gorges Dam is aimed at helping satisfy that appetite for energy. When finished, it will generate 20 times as much electricity as the Hoover Dam, offsetting some of the need for smelly, polluting coal. Chinese authorities also hope it will help control deadly floods on the world's third-longest river.
After lunch, we boarded a bus to view the concrete behemoth. The dam is typically described in superlatives: It's one of the biggest public-works projects in history, longer than the Brooklyn Bridge and higher than the Washington Monument.
But when we reached it, we must have looked a little underwhelmed.
"Maybe it's a little different from your mind?" fretted our Chinese guide, Stephen.
If the dam's appearance wasn't as dramatic as we'd expected, its impact is huge. As our guides explained, the government is relocating 1.3 million people from towns submerged by the rising waters.
Clusters of sterile white apartment buildings are rising along the Yangtze for the displaced. Traditional market towns have vanished. At one point, we glided by a graceful, old wooden temple at the river's edge.
"In 2009, that will be under water," the guide said.
It was difficult to get a sense of the human cost of such dislocation. Our Chinese guides shrugged it off, saying that only the elderly objected. They insisted that younger residents were happy to be part of China's boom and welcomed their bigger, government-built apartments, with plumbing and access to supermarkets.
Deirdre Chetham, author of Before the Deluge: The Disappearing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges, said many young people in the cities and large towns did indeed welcome the move. Though the old towns had architecturally interesting old quarters, they also were filled with crowded, Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings from the 1950s and '60s.
But for rural families, the move was more traumatic. "They lost the land they had tilled for generations," Chetham said. "Large numbers of people were moved as far as 1,200 miles away."
Our guides' sanguine attitude was perhaps not surprising; they were all Communist Party "team members." They also cheerfully dismissed environmental concerns about the river, assuring us that endangered fish and birds were bouncing back.
Yet, even the guides had to acknowledge the yawning gaps between government propaganda and the vibrant, Western-obsessed country we were observing.
One day, a guide pointed to satellite dishes sprouting from a few farmers' houses. The government didn't allow them in urban areas, she explained, since residents might "learn the reality about the Chinese people" from English-language TV.
The East King offered a glimpse of the increasingly capitalist China.
The four-story ship could carry 192 passengers, all in outside cabins with large windows, TVs, comfortable beds, and decent-size bathrooms. Its spa offered foot rubs and "aromatic rose massages," and the bar served Australian wines. Onboard activities included a dumpling-cooking class and the inevitable karaoke. Crew members were unfailingly polite.
Food was plentiful. A breakfast buffet featured offerings from toast and eggs to Chinese noodles; dinner brought a procession of Chinese dishes, such as steamed buns with ground pork, chicken in lemon sauce, sweet-and-sour fish, and a variety of vegetables (including a spectacular dish of radishes in orange sauce).
There were occasional lapses. At lunch, the chefs did their best imitation of American food, which is how I came to be served a nice chicken cordon bleu - slathered with tartar sauce.
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