Tiger Leaping Gorge and back to Lijiang
Trip Start
Sep 01, 2007
1
37
58
Trip End
Oct 22, 2007
Lijiang,
China
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
After sitting looking at the fantastic views while we ate a delicious breakfast of coffee, fruit with muesli and yoghurt and banana and honey pancake we set off on our morning walk.
We are part of a fortunate group of people who are lucky enough to have seen Tiger Leaping Gorge as nature intended it to be. Sadly this is another of the areas of great beauty that the Chinese have decided to turn into a Hydro Electric Power station and area. Work has not started in earnest yet but we are told that there has already been some exploratory blasting and work done and the water level will be raised by at least 75 metres by the year 2020. That may seem a long way away but to achieve that there will need to be a lot of work in the years running up to 2020 so, if you want to see and experience Tiger Leaping Gorge, go now. Even with the trauma we went through on the walk it is still somewhere we would definitely recommend visiting.
This walk was again all downhill but this time on a very winding dirt road/track (is this another 28 bends we were not aware of? :-) so much easier for me to see and much less stressful for everyone. Still feeling the effects of yesterday's walk I decided to use our hiking poles. As had happened on the Great Wall walk, this gave me a new sense of confidence so went striding off and, every now and again, Annie having to tell me to slow down as there were still plenty of obstacles to navigate :-)
We got down to the main road with perfect timing to wave (shout) down a passing mini-bus and squeezed in with 4 other travellers from the UK and Australia.
That, along with the trip back to Lijiang in Gary's car was all pretty uneventful but still afforded us some of the most wonderful views of the "Gorgeous Gorge" (Annie's description :-) and the Yangtze River. We checked back into our pretty courtyard Zen Gardens Hotel and spent the afternoon relaxing. This is definitely a great place to stay when visiting Lijiang, see www.zengardenhotel.com.
As we are no longer able to go to Lugu Lake (unless we wanted to extend the 6 hour drive to a 10 hour diversion route) we plan to spend the next couple of days visiting local small villages and parks, sounds wonderfully tranquil!
