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Published: September 13th 2011
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Monday 5 Sep
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I arranged to leave most of my belongings at the hostel while I went for a 2 day trip to ‘Tiger Leaping Gorge’ – reputed to be one of the deepest (or the deepest) gorges on Earth. This is about 2.5 hours by bus up in the mountains from Lijiang. We got there about 10:30AM, and started walking. My goal was about 4 to 6 hours of walking the first day to get to a nice guesthouse for the night. After a nice start through lovely fields of corn and sunflowers, and walking with some Chinese and German people, the track started heading uphill, and it started getting pretty hard work. It might have been the altitude but I wasn’t doing very well. It was also pretty warm. After maybe 2 hours of walking, and having gone up hill for a while, I arrived at the start of the ’28 bends’ which is supposed to be the hardest part. That was about an hour of real hard work for me.
Fortunately there were a few local people along the way with stalls selling cold drinks and some fruit, so I was able to get some bananas –
I had stupidly neglected to bring any food, and would have died without the bananas.
Another interesting bit was that locals had set up stalls at some of the best photo spots, and demanded a few Yuan if you wanted to take a photo there. It didn’t really matter because those spots were hardly any better than hundreds of others.
Finally I got to the top of the ’28 bends’ and from there it was an easy downhill trek to the first lodge ‘Tea Horse Lodge’. I had a late lunch there with 2 Germans, Alex and Julian. I thought I had had enough walking for the day, but wanted to get a bit further along the trail, so the 3 of us continued on. This part of the track was very easy, and the views changed from very good to simply stupendous. (Better weather also helped.) Fantastic scenery. We were on one side of the gorge which is gentle enough to allow farming and a few villages. The other side of the gorge was extremely steep with no habitation, and the mountains just seemed to go up and up for ever. The highest mountain, which we could only
glimpse a few times just seemed to be impossibly high and steep, as if some superior being was playing a joke on us mortals. This was a fantastic walk. Could hardly be better.
90 minutes after leaving the Tea Horse we arrived at ‘Halfway Guest House’, where I checked into a private room with shower for 120RMB. This lodge had a lovely balcony overlooking the gorge and by 7PM 2 large groups had settled in to drink and eat. One group was a large Korean group, and the other one was the usual collection of travellers and backpackers speaking English. They were a great bunch of people, and we had a great time eating and drinking.
Tuesday 6
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I got up a bit late, and found that the staff had a long queue of breakfast orders in front of me, so I had to wait a while to get some nutrition. Once out on the track after 9AM, the walk was easy and lovely, with the same lovely views as before. I crossed a few nice waterfalls, and after 30 mins started descending to the roadway, to a guesthouse called “Tina’s”. My poor old knees don’t really
enjoy such steep downhill paths, and it was a relief to get to the guesthouse. After a reviving drink, I dropped off my daypack, and then started walking from the guesthouse down to the river at the bottom of the gorge. About halfway down, the track got very steep and hairy, with a ladder at one point, and paths along very steep cliffs, with ropes to hold onto. Again it was a relief to get to the bottom. The main destination here is the ‘Tiger Leaping Stone’. The legend goes that a tiger was being pursued by a band of hunters in the gorge, and escaped by leaping across the river from this rock. The river was very turbulent – I wonder whether whitewater rafters would be able to go down it?
After looking around for half an hour I started the climb back out of the gorge – very hard and rather hot work – I took plenty of breaks.
Caught the 4PM bus back to Lijiang – that was a very slow journey due to some rough roads and innumerable trucks ascending the hills at about 5KMH. We must have passed a hundred of them.
Time
to note some differences between China and Thailand:
- Drivers constantly blow horns in China, sometimes for 30 seconds in one go! Thai drivers may be pretty chaotic, but at least they rarely blow their horns
- Restaurants in Thailand nearly always provide condiments, napkins, toothpicks, etc at every table. In China they provide nothing – you have to ask for the soy sauce etc.
- Buy a couple of items in a 7-11 shop in Thailand (which are everywhere) and you’ll be given several bags to carry your purchases. In China they don’t have 7-11s (that I’ve seen) – if you buy something in a similar shop you have to ask for a bag, and then you can a flimsy little thing barely big enough to carry your purchase. (Of course this is a positive for China’s environment, but it can be inconvenient at times.)
- Of course, English is much more widely spoken in Thailand, and there are tons more foreigners around, even in pretty remote spots.
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