Day 313 - You would need a gargantuan tiger to cross that gorge

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With both of us not feeling our usual selves probably the last thing we needed to do today was trek in the rain for 7 hours - so that is exactly what we did. After a two hour drive to a town at the foot of the mouth of the Tiger Leaping Gorge we started on our way up, and with Hamlet guiding us through the Yunnanese flora as we went it made for an interesting 30 minutes to start off with. As we steadily got steeper and higher the rain got heavier. One part was imaginatively called ’28 Bends’ and was, obviously, a very steep zig-zag up the mountain. And to tell you the truth the hardest part of it all was the road you could see below us going in the same direction. This and the telephone/electricity pylons following us did not make you feel you were trekking in the middle of nowhere, quite the opposite - the Sussex countryside can be more away from it all.

The view however, when the cloud cleared for a glimpse of some of the 13 peaks of Snow Mountain, was well worth it. The Halfway guest house, an almost-vertical 1200m above the Yangtze, is a popular place. All the other guesthouses just seem to get the overflow whenever Halfway is full. This is where Michael Palin (who will crop up a number of times these next coming weeks due to us taking a pretty similar route as him) stayed when he was filming the BBC documentary “Himalaya”. His main comment about the place is the claim they make of the ‘Number One Toilet in all Heaven and Earth’. This is actually a communal squat toilet, but with an amazing view (when you can actually see it through the clouds and rain). Our view: the toilets were definitely not up to much and you would not really savour the moment, rather do your business and get the hell out of there.

After some fried rice and some time chatting over a couple of beers to an Australian couple cycling from Laos to Tibet, we went to our room and the luxury (the sole luxury here) of an electric blanket.

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