What followed was a lot of long, boring traveling in which I proceeded to (very unfortunately) run out of reading material and had to come up with an itinerary for my trip to Japan instead (oh darn). I took an 18-hour sleeper train to Kunming and then another 8- or 9-hour bus to Lijiang. I got in just in time to go to sleep and woke up early the next morning to take another 3-hour bus ride to Tiger Leaping Gorge.
Despite the length of time spent in transit, I knew the second I arrived at Tiger Leaping Gorge that it was the right decision. The weather was perfect. It was warm and sunny and the sky was actually blue (instead of the muted brown-blue of a fair day in Chengdu). Also, as soon as I arrived, I was immediately accosted by a café owner offering me people to hike with so that I wouldn’t be alone. Thus it was that I met Evan and Liz, a couple of Canadians taking a break from the real world to globetrot.
Allow me to take a moment to introduce the Tiger Leaping Gorge. It is apparently named so because there’s some legend that tigers used to leap across the gorge by means of one of the large rocks in the river. The river, by the way, is the Yangtze, China’s longest. Also, due to a large dam being built, the entire gorge is going to be underwater within a few years. I know that this will simplify river transport immensely, but I can’t help feeling it’s a waste to destroy such a beautiful place. So then, on with the hike!
The mountains are populated, but quite sparsely at that. They call them villages, but really that just consists of a few houses within easy walking distance of each other pock-marking the hillside. The houses are tucked in the mountain along with other signs of domesticity – terraced rice paddies, a couple chickens flapping their wings about, maybe a dog or two. The Tiger Leaping Gorge also happens to be the first place in China where I have not been forced to walk on a paved path. The path was simply dirt, the kind found in many parks in America. I would even say it was adamantly dirty, just to make up for all the concrete and asphalt elsewhere. My legs were constantly covered with a thick film of brown dirt and my feet, despite being covered by socks and sneakers, were similarly dirty. I would do it again in a second, though!
We spent two days hiking the gorge, and the first day was quite probably the most difficult hike of my life. However, it was totally worth it. There was this beast of a path called “28 bends,” for just the reason that it winds back and forth in a constant ascent. For most of the way, one of the locals was following me around on a mule, trying to convince me to pay him to ride the mule instead of doing it on my own. I even explained to him (let alone in Chinese) that I wanted to do it on my own, but he persisted. At some point, he gave up and went to socialize with one of the other horsemen.
But oh – this was just the break I needed from the endless metropolis that is Chengdu. The air smelled clean and fresh; there was no scent of grit for two whole days. There was no city noise polluting the air either. No cars, no smell of exhaust, no constant fear for my life when crossing the street (instead, I got to fear for my life trying not to fall off the cliff). And night! Oh! The night sky was amazing! We were so far away from civilization and humanity that there was almost no light pollution. The mountains were dark – and I mean really dark, not that pretend dark you get in cities where street lights are still shining on everything. The sky, in comparison, was lit up with an indescribable amount of stars. It was one of the most beautiful night skies I have seen in my life, and certainly one of the fullest. There were so many stars! In an art museum once, I saw a painting that used diamond dust as a medium. The tablet glistened and sparkled. Though I hesitate to wax poetic, the sky looked as though it had been scattered with diamond dust ground to varying sizes. It winked and blinked and twinkled and sparkled and shone.
On top of all these wonderful things, the bed I slept on the first night (though to say the lodgings were merely rustic would be optimistic) was the best bed I had encountered in China. The beds here are all very hard – not that I’m accustomed to super-soft beds, but you don’t want to sit down too heavily on these beds because you risk breaking something (and I don’t mean the bed). But this bed – oh, it was delicious. I wanted to stay forever just so I could experience that amazing bed again.
Another highlight of the hike (I’m including a picture) was the crazy goat we ran into. Imagine this scene: on all sides, you are surrounded by mountains. You have a path to walk on, but stray too far off the path, one awkward, overly large step, and you will tumble down, down, down quite a precipitous slope. So steep is it, in fact, that trees grow out of the cliff-side sideways instead of upright. Which means that the bulk of the tree is hanging over, well, nothing. Now along comes a hungry goat who sees some nice, munchy leaves on the outer reaches (I suppose “upper reaches” would be inappropriate in this case) of one of these horizontal trees. So, of course, the most reasonable thing for the goat to do is walk out on the sideways branch of the sideways tree, only a tree trunk away from a fatal fall and eternal oblivion. Since this is all very nice and logical, this is of course that the goat in question did. And it just so happened that we were there to document the event. You’ll be happy to know that to my knowledge, the goat took no tumble, but happily munched away until his appetite was sated.
The long and short of it is that the gorge was – heh heh heh – gorge-ous. Truth be told, I made that pun unintentionally several times throughout the hike. I couldn’t figure out why Evan and Liz were laughing at me so often (except for the obvious hilarity experienced by my typical enthusiasm) until Liz explained it later. My best puns are never on purpose!
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