Tiger Leaping Gorge - a change of plans
Trip Start
Sep 01, 2007
1
36
58
Trip End
Oct 22, 2007
Tiger Leaping Gorge,
China
Monday, October 8, 2007
After a drive of around 2 hours we arrived at our destination town of Qiaotou and the starting point of the hike. Earlier on in our trip I spoke about the lunatic drivers in Tibet. Well, they are everywhere! Usually, when going on day trips in China the roads have been dual carriageways or motorways so there is no need for overtaking into oncoming traffic. Today was different, we were on a narrow road and it was Tibet travelling revisited - continuous hooting, mad overtaking and a general state of chaos. Another curious thing is why so many drivers, from tourist drivers to bus drivers, wear white woollen gloves while driving in such a dusty and polluted environment?
Our driver had never been to Tiger Leaping Gorge so he decided to join us
Tiger Leaping Gorge
. Whenever me meet a new guide they introduce us to our driver as Mr and their surname but we decided that was far too formal for a hike through the gorge so, as his Chinese name is somewhat difficult to pronounce and starts with a G, we decided he would become Gary for our trip. He liked this idea so much that he said he would introduce himself as Gary in the future.We set off on our walk on what started off as a smooth, tarred road but, just as I was thinking how pleasant this sort of walking was, we veered off onto a narrow dirt path and straight into a steep climb, a sign of things to come. We had read about the "28 bends" we would be climbing but were not sure if we had reached them yet, we had not.
After about 2 hours and about 8 kilometres of mainly uphill walking with the most amazing views that we kept stopping to admire or take photos of, we approached our lunch stop at a Naxi guesthouse. At this point Jack told us we would start the 28 bends after a bit more walking after lunch.
We, like all the other trekkers we saw arriving after us, sat down for lunch with great relief and thankful for the rest. Of course the guides all looked as cool as if they had just walked down the road to a restaurant
Tiger Leaping Gorge
! We were treated to a lunch of home-grown vegetables such as pumpkin, broccoli, potatoes and stir fried rice with a bunch of other delicious fresh veggies.Energised again we set off for the next stage, supposedly between 4 and 5 hours of walking. At the start of the 28 bends we stopped to take photos of where we had come from and the raging mighty Yangtze River far below us, quite spectacular! By the time we reached the top of the bends and terrain of pure steepness our legs could tell that they had been working harder than they had in a very long time. It was beautiful but gruelling and we thought our level of fitness left something to be desired but when we met other travellers we found out that they all felt much the same as we did :-)
What goes up must come down and, as we then discovered, the same applied to us on this walk.
For those of you who don't know, I have an eye disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa which, as the name may suggest, is the degeneration of the retina. RP affects different people in different ways; I have about 5 degrees of central vision, some very patchy peripheral vision, pretty useless depth perception and almost non-existent night vision (for more info see
www.brps.org.uk)
Tiger Leaping Gorge
. The reason I tell you this is so you can understand what the next stages of our walk were like.My lack of depth perception was quite apparent as I tried my best not to take a shortcut and go flying down the gorge. Our guide decided that it would be best to keep a firm hold of my hand and guide me as best he could with Annie giving "left a bit/over the stone/down the step" type of instructions from behind which really helped. As I could not see the view while we were walking we made fairly frequent stops to admire the awesome views from different angles and, of course, take a few more photos.
It turned out that we were booked in at the guest house that is almost the furthest one along the hike called the Halfway House Guest House (we still have no idea what it is halfway to... :-) so it became a LONG and gruelling walk.
Once it started getting dark our guide was clasping onto my leading hand and Annie on my trailing hand, not the quickest or most dignified way of hiking through the Tiger Leaping Gorge!
We arrived at our destination after about 18 kilometres of walking with a climb in altitude of over 260 metres (and back down again) almost 9 hours after having started with just an hour stop for lunch
Tiger Leaping Gorge
! It was pitch black, we were all completely soaked, pretty stressed and, by now, somewhat scared that I would go careering off the edge of the path at any moment. Having to cross a few small gushing streams was a feat in itself. As Annie said, "Not a good idea to take a blind guy on a tough mountainous trek in the dark and the wet" but the important thing is that I made it and without injury! As Jack said on a number of occasions, "Nothing is impossible" (sometimes a bit difficult though! :-)Thankfully, through all of this, we also all managed to keep our sense of humour. When we started the day we asked Jack if it was going to rain, he said it would not. I said that if it did we would change the name from Tiger Leaping Gorge to Jack Flying Gorge. Every time we stopped for a viewing we discussed how good a point that was for a Flying Jack. Approaching the guest house I was still telling Jack how bad he was at flying :-)
After a couple of strong discussions we were lucky enough to get a room with a private bathroom. Thank goodness for a lovely hot shower. We had a large beer, pumpkin soup and a vegetable sandwich on local flat bread and felt much better.
We decided that we would have a lie-in in the morning rather than going on to the next viewing point which was at least another three and a half hours walk at a normal pace.
