The magnificent Tiger Leaping Gorge

March 7, 2009: I'm not generally that much into laudatory posts, but there is no room for cynicism in talking about Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Some people were cynical that it would soon be filled up like the Three Gorges, but as far as i can tell that's a non-story. That dam project was shelved in 2007 after successful environmentalist lobbying - now that's a story, successful non-governmental lobbying in China - but there's (breathtaking, towering, spectacular, magnificent, incredible) mountain scenery to describe. And so, with those used and abused adjectives out of the way (can they be kept at bay for the whole post?)....I rocked up very early to the bus station.

"No bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge today."

"What do you mean no bus?"

"There's no Tiger Leaping Gorge bus, ok?"

"Is there a bus that goes to Tiger Leaping Gorge?"

"Yes."

"Quick, what bus?!"

"You can take the Shangri-la bus and get off at Qiaotou and then take a taxi."

This didn't sound promising. "I thought Shangri-la was a fictitious place...."

"It's not fictitious. The bus leaves in 4 minutes. Do you want the ticket or not?"

Qiaotou, it turned out, is a town at the very entrance to Tiger Leaping Gorge. The reason i had to find this out for myself was the bus station ticket saleswoman, as Lijiang locals are apt to, had never been there and probably wasn't the slightest bit interested in ever going. So unless you're taking the special tourist bus (i.e. the one called "Tiger Leaping Gorge Bus") they don't know anything about it. Qiaotou was perfect. No taxi needed, just a 1km walk and i was on the trail - the Old Tea Horse Road to Tibet.

The only disadvantage of going through Qiaotou is the troll-under-a-bridge-like presence of an evil old Australian witch. I was in the ticket office (it's a national park) and just about to set off when this hideous creature approached me with a look of utmost alarm and broadsided me: "Are you alone? Oh no, you'd better come with me, it's very dangerous..." and then after a pause, "I live here." As she said this, her wild-eyed expression suggested a psychopathic state one might expect from someone who tries to scare people for a living. I replied that i'd be right thanks, and she walked off, turning back a few times to indicate that she expected me to be following her. I glanced over and saw a giant beanpole of a German, very blond and looking about 18 years and 2 weeks old, waiting with his backpack next to her shop with a look of extreme unease on his face. He stared right at me with a look that seemed to be begging for advice but for some reason i just laughed. He'd obviously been terrorised into signing up for a couple of days by this hag's side and it wasn't my place to go save him.

Then, as i set off, she heckled me from across the street! "You'll get lost!" and then, "Don't be so arrogant!" I don't know why i didn't lacerate her in reply, i think i was just too stunned or maybe i was considering the poor German child, who would doubtless become yet more confused if his expensive "guide" were publicly labelled a witch. But fuck you old hag, i thought, this is one of the last great scenic areas left for people to enjoy exploring for themselves, and with common sense it's perfectly safe - you only need to look up the abundant maps, photos and travel stories to know that.

One kilometre down the road, an arrow marked the beginning of the trail, and up it went. After about 45 minutes of steady climbing, the trail rounded a sharp corner...


I had been looking forward to exploring it on my own but i was wary of my weak body having got out of hospital less than 24 hours earlier, so when a car drove up and a fat Israeli and her Chinese guide jumped out, i agreed to walk with them. This worked for me because by going at a fat girl's pace i would make sure i didn't over-exert myself, and it certainly worked for them because both of their English was shoddy and they were struggling to communicate. As it happened, the guide, from Lijiang, had never been to Tiger Leaping Gorge before, and he didn't admit this until after he had taken us up the wrong path. We were set straight a few hundred metres up the road when we came upon a large gathering of local families building a house, and our stupid tourist waves were met with frantic pointing back down where we'd come from. At that point i decided to follow instead the large red arrows painted on rocks at every possible wrong turn.

In between gasps of air, and when not laughing at the cows or making observations such "whoa, a satellite dish," this Israeli girl decided the time was right to impress on me just how great Israel was. Israel even has Australians who have chosen to move there, she said, including her boyfriend. He dumped her but he chose to stay in Israel, she said, seemingly with patriotic pride.

I assured her that when i eventually hit the Middle East, Israel would certainly be on the list.

"No!" she said. "The other countries - it's very dangerous. There is nothing there."

"Which ones do you mean?"

"All of them. There is nothing there."

"Which ones have you been to?"

"None of them. Trust me, there is nothing there. You should only go to Israel."

I'm guessing she might have been some kind of hardcore illegal-settler type of Israeli. The kind that supports the idea that Palestine should be wiped off the map. Oh wait, it already has been. Anyway, indisputably the kind that guys like this...


...who live in a village cut into the mountainside that would look, from the opposite side, a lot like this...


...make their living off....But no siree, there was no 100RMB for the pair today, just true grit from the sweaty Israeli. What's more, as we pushed on, the trail got even steeper and i found out she was trying to walk the entire trail in one day (i had two days), and thus couldn't stop, even for the scenery.


When we reached a "add oil station" - a small house selling surgically-chosen backpacker products like Snickers bars and marijuana. I purchased a bag of the latter, just in case it worked, and sat down for a rest and they went on. They wouldn't have made it by nightfall.

The owner of the "add oil station" was heavily promoting their honey tea, which was not exactly in keeping with the backpacker-product menu, the honey coming straight from the beehive with chunks of wax and bee legs and shit covering the surface like the Yellow River in darkest Shanxi/Shaanxi. It looked so terrible i even saw fit to check if there was yak butter in it. This was, after all, the arse end of the Himalayas on a road to Tibet.

I continued to take it easy as the road continued to climb, and eventually on one of my many scenery/rest stops, a pair of Dutchmen, or rather, a Dutchman and a Belgian, caught me up and they turned out to be great blokes. Great blokes with great names: Dijs ("Dice") and Brik ("Brik"). Classic. Brik couldn't speak English, but he managed to express that he was a manual labourer, and manual labourers in Belgium get 1 year of long-service leave, paid, in Euros, for every two years they work. That's why he was there. Dijs is a mountaineer who climbs the Alps every summer, and i was fascinated to listen to his mountaineering tales as we trekked along about 1000 metres above the Yangtze torrent below.


The Tea Horse Guest House is about halfway along the gorge, and is home to sensational handmade pizzas, dogs that won't shut up, and, on this occasion at least, exalted company: one of the elite of China bloggers just happened to be there with a bunch of his students from Beijing on a uni expedition. What's more, he did me the honour of opening forth the fountain of knowledge for most of the evening, for the low low price of just one cigarette - contraband for him, being on uni camp - which he was promptly caught smoking by another teacher. Click the above link to his blog if ever you care to be educated about China and Chinese history.


The second day in the Gorge was just one of those brilliant days that makes life worth living and death inconsequential. Early start with the sun sending streaks of light over the giant craggy peaks opposite, followed by Yunnan coffee (not as good as Lao but still pretty good), a giant hash brown from the Tea Horse's kitchen, and a joint rolled by Dijs's expert Dutch hand. He even used two big papers to make it one of those awesome cone-shaped joints of Amsterdam. I was expecting the weed to be something similar to our Gansu ditch weed that tauntingly grew everywhere but offered no effect whatsoever. But strangely enough and to my delight, it worked.

Then Dijs pulled out the munchies: weed cookies. Strong ones. So just as the effect of the joint started to wane, the cookies kicked in!

We set off, the trail now almost flat, winding along the side of the mountain, more than a kilometre above the river, and with a 4-kilometre high wall of rock topped with Mordor peaks facing on the other side. In my absolute wonder i could barely keep my eyes on the path and several times i stonedly misstepped. Had i been unlucky and it happened in the wrong place, i would quite assuredly have been smashed to death on the mountain.

Though i somehow hadn't realised at the time, the steep, stony trail we were walking is known as the "Old Tea Horse Road", and is an ancient tea caravan route along which trade still passes on horse/muleback/pack donkeys. We, nay I, as the Dutchmen were smart enough to phase away from the edge to make room, was almost run over the edge by a couple of small caravans of mules loaded with building materials: the path has regular passing places but it's usually much narrower that a loaded pack animal, whose loads often stick out horizontally. At one point we strayed from the path and ended up down in a tiny village where a new wooden house was under construction. Dijs wanted to take photos and the workers, perched on thin beams 2 or 3 storeys up, were a little frosty about this idea until Dijs explained that his father was a carpenter and it made him happy to see people still building by hand. (Chinese people really need to get over this "we are backward" hangup.)

We passed several waterfalls, the last of which required fording over slippery rocks with a vertical drop a few hundred metres straight down around 40cm to the right. This photo didn't capture it, but it did capture the attempt to capture it (Dijs is in the background).


Dijs was on hand to explain the finer details of what we were looking at - "There, between those two sharp peaks, that's a glacier"--"See this? It's a natural bonsai. The rock has stunted its growth. It's probably a few hundred years old."--"Look at those two peaks there, they look like they're next to each other, right? There's a whole valley in between them."

And also, "Look at those dots on the wall of rock there. They're goats."


At various points i found it great fun to imagine caravans of traders and all the hiding places that banditos would've had to ambush them from. (The panorama below, and the other panoramas, are worth clicking on to see big because the file has already loaded).


Alas, no banditos these days, just backpackers, and very few were Chinese. Plenty of Chinese tourists down below on the big road at the bottom near the river. But they just drive in, have a look around from down below, and drive out again. It's crazy that they don't care to see their own country's magnificence (does that count as a repeated adjective?), though it's obviously good for the ecology of the place and for that dumb type of traveller who, like me, is always seeking the 'untouched' destination to go and touch.

When we got to the aforementioned road we wandered down to a guesthouse restaurant in front of the view shown at the top of this post, where weed pancakes were the local specialty.

The drive back from Tiger Leaping Gorge to Lijiang was most notable for the minibus driver getting pulled off the road at a police checkpoint for driving without plates. The cop exuded an Australian-style cop meanness, and what looked to be a surprisingly formal and strict enforcement method. Given the driver wasn't allowed to go on, my feeling is that at least part of the money he will pay will be legitimate fines. He said the general unwritten rule was that when you buy a new car you get 30 days to hoon around recklessly without plates, although officially it is 7 days. If this whole incident is a sign that China, or at least parts of China, are now clamping down on cars without plates then that's a damn good thing. But everyone in the van felt sorry for him; and i was in turn feeling sorry for the pleasant couple sitting next to me from Essex, England, just because of their accents.

The driver wasn't even allowed to drive away - he had to organise alternative transport for all his 8 passengers. We eventually were transferred to another minivan about an hour later, and once back in Lijiang i stayed the night in that ever-present cheap accommodation option, the internet bar. The whirlwind had to go on: early the next morning i was on the road to Sichuan Province.


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Photos, including more megapanoramas.