Tiger Leaping Gorge

This, dear reader, was one absolute highlight of the trip so far... 

The Tiger Leaping Gorge is the second deepest gorge in the world, second only to one in Tibet. It is also an epic mountain trek in Yunnan, apparently not for the faint of heart and with fantastic vistas. This is all I knew before heading there.

The mountains around the gorge

The plan was to head in the evening to the start of the 16 km trail and stay there one night at Jane's Guesthouse, hit the trail as early as possible with a smaller bag containing only the essential for one night, until the Halfway Guesthouse, where we would spend the night. The idea was to break the trek into two days, to avoid the high temperatures predicted by the weather forecast after noon. The next day we would then walk to the Tiger Leaping Stone and then take a bus back to Jane's Guesthouse to pick up our larger bags and get another bus to Shangri La. The plan was followed with success, but it was way more epic than anyone could foresee.

After the night at Jane's Guesthouse we started the trekking. First through farms and fields and then finally we started to walk up the mountain. In front of us stood the majestic Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, 5600m and the Haba Mountain, 5400m, the ones we could see in the horizon from Lijiang, and we were definitely walking towards it. It has very steep faces and pointy peaks, with a light grey bare top with snow in some parts.

Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the morning

On our way to the gorge we passed by a small village

The mountains still from far away

After a few hundred of metres up we finally realised the geography of the gorge... There was a river, Jinsha River, with brown coloured fast water flowing between the mountain we were on, Haba Mountain, and the mighty Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which plunged almost vertically from its 5600 peak all the way to the river.

The gorge

Jinsha River

Finally we reached the Halfway Guesthouse after an exhausting 5 hours walk up the mountain, in which the worst part were the infamous '28 bends', a section of the path that goes up very steeply in a zig-zag, 28 turns. It was harsh... Same type of harshness as in the most difficult parts of Huangshan one month before. During the walk I had some enlightening conversations with my Chinese friend about aspects of the Chinese culture that I either hadn't grasped so far or only partially understood. Family, marriage, language and general mindset. This will deserve a post on its own! The farther into the Gorge we talked the more spectacular the mountain looked! 

The wall of mountains on the other side of the river

Eerie shades on the mountain during the afternoon

Snow on the top of the mountain (down where we were it was around 30 degrees C)

The Halfway Guesthouse was a beautiful wooden building with a courtyard and a couple of balconies facing the gorge. Both sides of the river were steep and high, which means that from our side we could see the other side as an almost vertical wall, thousands of metres high, right in front of us. Almost everyone doing the trek stops here for the night, so the place was full of travellers, some of them we've seen and met before in Kunming and Lijiang (a very recurrent fenomenon in Yunnan). We all had a communal dinner and drank beer in one of the balconies, with that out-of-this-world view. The group inflated again.

Our view from the Halfway Guesthouse

One of the buildings of the guesthouse

The balcony where we had dinner

Next day we walked all the way until the Tiger Leaping Stone viewpoint. It was an extenuating walk down from the high point where we were all the way down to the river, where a massive rock stood. Then we had to go up again. A 45 minutes agonising climbing of stone-carved stairs and ladders. At the end everyone was completely exhausted. After a shower and a meal in the Guesthouse on this side of the trek we got a bus back to Jane's Guesthouse. Apparently during the night there was a landslide that partially destroyed the road. We were taken until the landslide, where there were already machines cleaning it, then we had to cross it by foot and on the other side we had the bus that would take us first to Jane's Guesthouse, where we picked up our bags, and then to Shangri La.

A wooden bridge next to the Tiger Leaping Stone

Tiger Leaping Stone, next to the rapids

Passing the landslide

That night in the gorge I had a dream where the gigantic mountain-wall in front of us, that almost reached the sky, mixed with the walls at the guesthouse in Macau, which almost reached the ceiling. I realised that in the gorge I had a weird feeling of almost being indoors, given the wall-like structures all around, and in the same way I felt that I was almost outdoors in the guesthouse in Macau, also because of the walls. Strange feeling that I will never forget.