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Published: March 12th 2010
'Either we go fast and almost certainly drive over the edge into the gorge, or we go slow and almost certainly big boulder fall and crush us'... not the words you want to hear from your driver as you career down one of the deepest gorges in the world! Unfortunately that was the situation with which I was faced when trying to get out of Tiger Leaping Gorge in China's southwestern Yunnan province.
Tiger Leaping Gorge is spectacular. Hiking the high trail made for a pretty strenuous two day outing and the infamous Tiger Leaping Gorge path is described as being to China what the Inca Trail is to Peru. The ancient trial passes through beautiful remote villages and along steep scenery with stunning 5000 metre snow capped peaks towering up each side of the gorge and the Yangtze River roaring 2000 metres below. Both beautiful and exhilirating, and definately worth the climb around '28 bends' path to reach the highest point.
I initially didn't include Yunnan in my China plans, it being about as far south and west as you can go in China and having no decent transport link to any of the other places I wanted
to visit, it didn't really fit my plans. However, after being told by pretty much every other backpacker I met that it was China's most beautiful province and being in much need of some countryside after three weeks in China's large, busy and smoggy cities, I managed to find a reasonable flight from Chengdu to the little town of Lijiang.
I met a group of people in my hostel in Lijiang and set off on a bus with them the morning after my flight arrived. We made for a thoroughly European group with a French couple, myself, a Dutch lad and a Swiss/English guy. We arrived at the start in the village of Qiaotou a little late as the door of the minibus wouldn't close and we had to drive slowly to start with with one of the women holding the door shut (!!) until we got to a garage who bashed it a couple of times and then it seemed to work again. In Qiaotou we went to Jane's Guest House to get some directions to the start of the walk, and having missed breakfast I grabbed a sandwich - made with Yak meat, which was pretty yummy!
The first day was completely uphill, and I think that by the time we reached our night time destination we were all ready for a shower, tea and bed. The guest house we stayed in supplied all three, along with candles and chickens for added authenticity and it was possibly one of the best nights sleep I have had in years.
Day two took us along a high and exposed pathway for a couple of hours before we dropped down into the gorge, right to the waters edge and to Tiger Leaping Rock where supposedly a tiger lept accross the river, giving the gorge its name. We then had to climb back up from the gorge, which was when we found out that the road we had been relying on to get us back to Qiaotou hadn't yet been built! Now in my time in China I haven't found it overly easy to get from town to town - Chinese people seem to have an uncanny knack of having 'no train, no bus' and thats become quite a repeated phrase in hostels when someone who was meant to have left keeps coming back day after day. Well here,
the situation was 'no anything' and we were just about expecting to spend another night in the gorge when a guy with a landrover agreed to take us as far as he could for 20RMB each. The following hour was (and I appreciate I have said this a lot in this blog...) THE most scary journey of my life. Liquid of some kind was pouring out of this guys brakes as the back of the car swung out over the edge of the gorge, and builders around us were stuffing dynamite into the rocks and blasting as we passed. At one point we swung out and I felt the need to say something - our driver didn't speak a word of English but I started a long rant about how my mother would say 'slow and steady wins the race' 'better get there alive than never get there at all' and when it became clear it wasn't making a fat lot of difference I resorted to 'well what doesn't kill you will only make you stronger'. It got the others in the car laughing at least, and as a rather large boulder missed our vehicle by inches we were at
Not photoshopped...
...although it does look like it!all least giggling about being on the verge of sure death!
Eventually there came a point where we could drive no further and we had to get out and walk. Two hours later, after climbing through rubble and past women with babies strapped to their backs building on the road we reached Qiaotou. We had missed the last bus to Lijiang, but after a great deal of bartering we managed to flag down a lift, arriving back just in time for our hostel owner, Mama Naxi, to make us one of her enourmous family dinners. Near death experiences are find in my opinion if they are followed by meals like that!
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mum
non-member comment
Glad you have listened to me so well over the years! When I read those comments I thought that sounds like my mother speaking.... so blame Nana next time!