Tiger Leaping Gorge
Trip Start
Jul 21, 2008
1
14
23
Trip End
Ongoing
Qiaotou,
China
Monday, September 15, 2008
Within an hour of being there, Jane came up to us asking for money for the room.... thats when we realised that between us we have about £6 which is meant to last us 3 days!! Of course there is no cash machine in this village, so we were in a bit of bother! jane said that she will feed us for free which was nice, but we still needed more money to pay for accomodation, food and drink for 3 days! We found a £20 note (english money) in our bag, which we asked Jane if she would exchange for Yuan. She cheecked how much it was worth in her money, and exchanged it for us!! So we went from being very poor, to very rich in chinese terms!
At about 6pm, Jane came and told us that dinner was ready, and it was going to be a big feast with all the family sitting around the table (we instantly had flashbacks of the mongolian wedding food....salty tea, goats everything etc). But it was a great spread of food ranging from fish, pork and chicken meat, to noodles, rice and spices, it was delicious. Even though the rest of Janes family couldn't speak english, we still felt very comfortble and welcomed by them.
Janes guesthouse was like a tree house!
The dad kept filling Helens bowl with various foods. After filling our tummies with a lot of food, we say our thank you`s, only to have Jane tell us that the second course will be ready in about an hour! So at 9pm we are invited back to the table for every fruit under the sun, nuts of all types, and mooncakes! These things are filled with sweet fillings, or others have various seeds and nuts stuffed in them, they were really good. We went to bed at about 10pm, ready for our hike the next day, but the rest of the family carried on with games and stuff until gone past 1am!At 11am, we leave our backpacks in a locker at janes, and start our hike of the tiger leaping gorge with a small bag containing a change of pants and socks, and a toothbrush!. The start of the trail is nice and relatively easy, slowly letting us warm our little legs into action. We walk through tiny villages of about 6 or 7 houses, with local old men sitting and watching the world go by. After 2 hours of walking through relatively easy hills, we get to our first stop, a hostel where we were to get some lunch,and rest our legs. There were many other hikers here, but wedidn't see a single one of them when we were walking the first part. After lunch,we set off for the next 3 hours on the most difficult part of the trail, known as the 28 bends. It's so steep you have to keep zig zagging back and forth. There were many locals at the bottom part of the bends with horses, which they were willing to hire to you for a small fee, but we declined (well Merlin did......Helen wasn't very happy about that!).
Making our way down from the top of the gorge
This part was really difficult, and it's the only part of the trail that you kept seeing the same people time and time again, as we all kept stopping and starting at different times. Once we reached the top, about an hour later, the view was amazing, and worth every bead of sweat to get up there. We were at 2800ft.The next part of the trail was nice and flat, and shaded. The worst part was that the sun was shining and it was very hot, so the trees and shade were a god send!. We reach the next hostel at 4.30pm only to find the showers were shabby, and rooms relatively expensive. We sat down with an Australian and 2 Germans who, along with us, decided to carry on for the next 2 hours to the next hostel. Our feet and legs were absolutley dead, but the extra 2 hours were worth it, as we had arrived at half way hostel, a beautiful, massive log cabin/chalet type of building, with amazing showers, and it also boasted to have the best view from the toilet...... which it did! The view from our bedroom window was just this massive wall of mountain covered in clouds at the top.... we didn't want to leave. That night we ordered and ate more food than we had done in a few months, we must have burnt off a lot of energy! (well that was merlins excuse)
the next morning we set off at 10am with the Austarlian and Germans to the final stop.This part of the trail was amazing, not only was it downhill :) but it also had many waterfalls that fell onto the pathway, and you had to cross. The paths themselves on this part were very, very narrow, with a nice little drop on the other side! We arrived at the end of the path 2 hours later, and instantly had some lunch.
Our pudding on moon festival night
We decided to trek about 40 minutes down the road to another hostel called seans guesthouse..... what a mistake! The rooms smelt of cat wee, there was building work going on until 10pm then started at 8am. We were really hungry the next morning but decided to walk 40 minutes back to where we were the day before, and sat in a cafe with amazing views over the river and gorge.With the 2 Germans in tow (they had to pay for our bus fare back to Lijang, as we had, by this point, run out of money!) We picked up our bags from Janes hostel, said our goodbyes to Jane and her family, and made our way back to Lijiang to catch our plane. Once back in Lijinag old town, we were going to show the germans the hostel we stayed in 3 days before hand..... but we got lost straight away, as the taxi had dropped us off in the wrong street! So after walking for 30 minutes of walking around we eventually found the hostel. The 4 of us had dinner that night, then we caught a taxi to a bus station that had a direct bus to the airport. Our flight was at 11.30pm, so we got to the bus station nice and early at 9pm..... the bus didnt leave until9.40pm, when Helen realised she got the time wrong, and we were actually flying at 10.45pm!! So we had 30 minutes to get to the airport and check in before they shut the boarding gate!! The bus journey it self took 35 minutes, we turned up at the check in desk 5 minutes late,but luckly the bus was full of people on the same flight as us, so we were checked in with no problems!!
And so we caught our flight on the 17th to Chengdu..... the home of the pandas!
