Return from the mouth of the tiger

I'm back blogging after a brief hiatus. Three days ago, I started the trek through Tiger Leaping Gorge. At the hostel in Lijiang, a group of four formed to go to Qiaotou, the starting town for most gorge treks. Two Chinese people, an Englishman, and me. As we boarded the bus for Qiaotou, we met up with five more people. Two Germans, a Dutch couple, and a Thai girl. This was going to be a group of nine. I actually found this quite funny since nine is the number in the ring fellowship. Yes, very nerdy reference to LOTR, I know. Got to Qiaotou and got accosted by a couple of people trying to see if we wanted to drive to the middle leaping stone. There weren't aggressive like the rest of the people around China trying to sell their services. Right after, the others were looking for a luggage storage. (I didn't need it because I knew I was heading back to Lijiang.)

They stowed their bags at Margo's Cafe, aka crazy-middle aged Australian woman living in the middle of nowhere China for eleven years. Crazy is actually not the right word; maybe more like quirky and eccentric. She was wearing low cut shorts for a woman who was maybe not in the best shape (Her gut was showing). I had a chicken wrap which was okay. The others had fried rice, which the Chinese duo said was actually really, really good.

After getting lost for a bit in town trying to find the starting point of the route. We were on our way. There were a couple locals following us up with horses to see if we wanted to rent them in case any of us got tired. No one was that tired to pay for horses, but they were annoying none the less. It was almost mocking, "Look here I am riding a horse, just having a leisurely stroll through the mountains." Vultures, I say, vultures.

It started raining right when we got to a rest stop so we were lucky. So was the woman in charge as she got a lot of business from our group buying water and fruits from her. There was no end to the rain for twenty minutes and all of a sudden sunshine. The weather was very fickle in Yunnan the time I have been here. Right after the rest stop was the twenty-eight bends. It really should be called on hundred bends since it felt like we already went through dozens of bends before the stop.

Our target was Halfway Guesthouse. We past by the Tea Horse Guesthouse first and it took another hour before we got to our destination. The scenery after Tea Horse Guesthouse is absolutely amazing. The trail is right against the cliff and you can see the Jade Dragon mountains on the right (~6000m) and the Haba mountains looking left and up (~5500m). We past a few waterfalls and got to our destination a little after 7pm. In total, we walked about seven hours on the first day.\

The view from the Guesthouse at dusk is spectacular. My dorm room was facing right against the Jade Dragon mountains. It really made me feel how small I am as a man against the majesty of nature. At night we saw some fireflies and the Englishman taught us a fun card game called Shithead. No winners, only one loser.

Woke up at around 9am and had breakfast. The group started out again after 10am and there was again beautiful scenery on the trail. Luckily, at that time my legs were not nearly as tired as I thought they would be. Lots of up and down but we made it to Tina's and had lunch at noon. I had fried rice, first of many I would have in the next day. Then we had to pay 20rmb just to get down to the gorge. This was in addition to the 50RMB entrance fee (I cheated this by saying I was a student; half-price!).

As we got to the middle leaping stone down in the gorge, the others decided to brave the rocks to get to it. Let me describe the path. The middle leaping stone is in the river and there are some stones that you can jump on to get to the middle leaping stone. The river was breaking against the middle stone pretty hard. The water churning was very hard against the stone. Against the stone path, there were smaller breaks but nothing too dangerous. I originally didn't want to do it because I had already slipped a lot the past two days and I didn't want to slip on the rocks and get hurt. However, so many people were doing it and without incident so I did it. The stone had a good vantage point. The river was flowing fast and strong against the rocks because of all the rain.

After we got up, we stayed at Woody's. They had ensuite bathrooms. Really good! After another night playing Shithead, our party split-up and I went back to Lijiang. It was really an awesome trek and would highly recommend it. Now to get some silk scarves in Lijiang!