Tiger Leaping Gorge Trek

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8/29 - 8/31

Many travelers, as well as the lonely planet, felt strongly that taking two full days to trek through the Tiger Leaping Gorge was well worth our time. A 2hr bus ride from Lijiang brought us to the start of the gorge, where we soon realized we brought entirely too much crap, despite our best efforts to pack light. Jaime and I have both been spoiled by having backpacks with wheels on them, and to be perfectly honest, we have yet to really carry our bags on our backs at all. We foolishly loaded up our day packs with several changes of clothes, our current books (Jaime's 800 page book soon found it's way into my bag), and even ipod speakers for the hike. The 16km trek proved to be a considerable challenge, especially the uphill ascent to 2900m above sea level. The hot weather and thin air (and heavy packs) all took their tolls, but the scenery and many breaks made the experience quite worthwhile. Fortunately, we made an Israeli friend in Lijiang, Hagit, who decided to join us for the trek and we spent the 3 days together.

The Gorge overlooks the Yangtze River, which is (beware that I sometimes invent my facts) the longest river in China, stretching from the Himalayas all the way to Shanghai on the east coast. We were lucky to get two warm (Jaime did get quite "Hot") clear sunny days, especially considering it was rainy season. The views were spectacular, and made for some of the best scenery and photography we have yet to see. We hiked for 6 hours our first day and stayed at the Halfway house to rest. The house was simple and comfortable, and it was a pleasure to wake up to gorgeous mountain views.

Day two was a bit more challenging, after a three hour morning hike, we decided to take the long road, and hike our way down to the bottom of the gorge, to get a close up view of the waters we had been overlooking from 700ft at the upper part of the gorge. Between mid day heat, and general exhaustion, the last 2 hours of the hike proved to be the most difficult uphill challenge. Requiring several rest stops, we all felt bouts of light-headiness . The path felt a little unsafe at times, but after slowly making our way back up the trail, we finally got to our second guest house high in the mountains and feasted heartily. We met a bunch of travellers from all over the world so each night was spent enjoying laughs over beers.

All in all we thought the gorge was a very worthwhile challenge, and the mountain scenes were just stunning. Getting back to Lijiang was a bit tricky, (again, the language barrier proved to make things difficult) but we got back in just a few hours, and began preparing for our overland trip to Tibet the following day.

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Photos

The gorge
some of the best scenery we have seen anywhere

At the Halfway House
Some handwashing of my stinky Tee...