A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

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Tiger Leaping Gorge, China

Day 2

The first bit of Day 2 was the hardest. Between the Naxi family Guesthouse and the high point of the trail (2670 meters above sea level, or about 8800 feet) we had to negotiate the "28 Bends", a series of (by my count) 34 switchbacks rising 2500 feet in the first hour. Ouch.

Surprisingly, we saw very few people during our trek. According to one of the local trail guides, about ten people per day begin the trek -- surprisingly few considering how well set-up it is for travellers. The path is ludicrously well marked by all the various guesthouses along the way. Seriously, you'd have to be remarkably unobservant and/or criminally ineptt to lose the trail, since there seemed to be no stretch longer than 10 minutes without an arrow or two or five painted on a handy rock. Mario accidentally took the wrong path once, realized that he hadn't seen an arrow for five minutes, and backtracked. I, of course, never lost the trail, as I have something of a paranoia about it and was vigilant in looking for arrows at any questionable fork in the path.

Though the guest houses aren't particularly close together, there are enough of them to enable hikers to go as fast or slow as they want. There was pretty much a guest house every two hours or so of trekking, each advertising clean rooms, great food, hot showers, and various other enticements written in broken English on rocks. Our original plan was to do the trek in three leisurely days -- the bus ride plus two hours hiking the first day, 4-6 hours to the halfway point on the second day, then 3-4 hours to the village of Walnut Grove, where we would cut off the final leg of the trek in the interest of time.

Once we got going on Day 2, however, we realized we were making decent time. We arrived at the Halfway Guesthouse around 1:00 pm, with plenty of daylight left to both have a leisurely meal on the deck overlooking the gorge and get to Tina's Guesthousee, the next possible destination two hours away. So we set off, mostly steeply downhill, enjoying the dramatic views of rapids way, way down below between the two huge mountain ranges. It's impossible to adequately describe the scenery on this trek, and I suspect that any photos taken with my little automatic camera will not capture the grandeur of the competing mountain ranges, one snowcapped with sheer cliffs, the other forested with terraced villages in green canyons. And that's not even mentioning the river itself, with whitewater winding for miles through impossibly high vertical stone walls.

Unfortunately the effect was largely ruined at Tina's Guesthouse, through no fault of Tina. The road construction crew had set up some huge (and loud) metal contraption not 30 yards from the poor guesthouse and appeared to be in the process of quarrying rock from the cliff face below, complete with constantly operating generators and periodic dynamite blasts. Not the pristine and silent village environment we were looking for, needless to say.

So after a short rest and an icy Coke, we were off again, this time to head down the absolutely deserted yet beautifully paved road to Walnut Grove, our last stop before returning to Qiaotou. We staggered in at 6:00 pm after 9 hours of hiking, and despite my poor aching feet it was well worth it to walk the extra distance. Sean, the guy who originally marked the trail (we know this because of the huge 'SEAN IS YOUR TRAILBLAZER' sign on a rock about halfway through), runs an excellent guesthouse with basic rooms, lovely stone pattio with a view of the village terraces, gorge and mountains, and "The Only Flash Toilet in the Gorge" (sic). This was quite an enticement for me after all the toilet trenches I'd seen. Plus, for a minimal extra price, Sean will make your food "happy", by lacing it with locally grown marijuana. Sadly, I stuck with the local beer.

Day 3

We thought we were totally organized and ahead of the game when we got up on Day 3. We were up by 7:30 am, and had arranged with Sean to catch a ride at 11:00 back to Qiaotou. What could possibly go wrong?

Since we were up early, we decided to tackle a short hike -- down to the bottom of the gorge and back, an optimistically estimated hour and 40 minute round trip. It was approximately 900 vertical feet in elevation drop through terraced wheat, village, and a large section of very steep sticker bushes. Frankly, I didn't think we'd actually make it to the bottom after listening to the hair-rasing tales of the dangerous final third of the trail. I figured we'd walk most of the way down, get to the part where vertigo sets in and goats hesitate, and call it a day.

But Mario was determined, and I couldn't really blame him. After all, we were at Tiger Leaping Gorge, for crying out loud -- it would be ridiculous to never actually make it to gorge level. So after a number of errors and the complete loss and eventual (after scaling a farmer's fence and walking gingerly through a barnyard) rediscovery of the path, we clambered over the final rocks to reach the bottom. A relaxing two and a half minute photo-op later, we headed back up in the interest of making our ride.

And after much heaving, sweating and bitching (on my part -- not on Mario's) we did in fact make it back to Sean's with 20 minutes to spare. Sadly, that was 10 spare moments too few - Sean had not told his staff of our arrangement, and the minibus had come and gone at 10:30.

Now, you'd think we're on a road, right? Surely there must be other buses! But this is, in fact, an honest-to-God Road to Nowhere, with some sections beautifully paved and complete, and others bumpy and rocky. The guesthouse girl suggested another might come along, but in a tone that implied that it might be tomorrow if we were lucky. So we opted to start walking -- an hour down the road would bring us to Tina's and the major construction, and another two hours after that we'd be at the bus park from which we could definitely hitch a ride with some Chinese tourists.

Fortunately it didn't come to that. After just ten minutes of walking I waved down a little Chinese-flagged truck struggling up the hill carrying a load of small rocks, upon which we sat (FYI - sitting on rocks is dusty and they are very pointy on the posterior) and rode to the construction site. We must have been a bizarre sight -- all work ceased as the crew stared, laughted, waved and yelled "hello" as we rumbled past.

At Tina's we had a stroke of luck -- the Japanese coule we met the first night of the trek had just called a "taxi" -- actually a pickup truck, but we weren't complaining. We piled in, got out at Qiaotou (less of an eyesore in the sunshine, I must admit0 and flagged down a bus heading toward Lijiang. All in all it was a fabulous trip. The only thing I regret is that the sun didn't really come out until our last day, so I ended up taking half a role of photos out the window of various bouncing vehicles. I'll be lucky if I get one decent photo from that -- I never learn.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 9:43 PM