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

I have just returned from a three day trek to Tiger Leaping Gorge, an incredible Yangtze River gorge near the river's origin. It's one of the deepest gorges in the world, about 10 miles long and almost 13,000 feet from water to mountaintop. It's become a very popular trek with backpackers in western China, and I thought I was going to have to give it a miss since even I'm not foolhardy enough to set off on a 3 day treacherous mountain trek alone. Fortunately, I met up with Mario, a guy from San Francisco, while I was in Dali last week. Since he was in the same boat (solo traveler afraid to break an ankle alone on a remote mountain), we joined forces.

Day 1
At 9:00 am, after a civilized breakfast at Ali Baba's Restaurant overlooking Mao Square, we set out on the bus for the three hour drive to Qiaotou. Now, how would you think that would be pronounced? We were calling it Kyoto, Kewtoo, Quoytoe, and a million other iterations, but really it's like "Choetoe". It's a miracle we actually made it to the right town. However it's pronounced, Qiaotou is an armpit of a town located in a supermodel of a setting. It's a dusty wide-spot-in-the-road that features an appalling number of 1960-1975 era buildings with the awful blue or teal colored glass windows that are so inexplicably popular here in China. To add insult to injury, the whole area is basically under construction, as the Chinese LOVE building roads, and Tiger Leaping Gorge is presenting an extra special blasting and roadbuilding challenge for them.

Fortunately we were taking the "high road", meaning, in effect, "high goat path", from which we could not see the eyesore of a road-in-progress down below. We traversed Qiaotou in 15 minutes, having seen the market and the sorry hotels on offer, and having walked through a couple basketball games, a soccer field and across a small fallow terrace to a tractor road. Thankfully the Lonely Planet had detailed directions for finding the trail or we'd still be wandering around cursing the dust.

As I am woefully out of shape and Mario likes to walk slowly and take a million photos, we decided to approach this trekking business in a very leisurely manner and take three days in which to walk it. This meant a relatively easy Day 1, with just 2 hours of hiking (mostly uphill) before kicking back and relaxing with a beer in the Naxi Family Guest House in Nuoyu, a tiny terraced farming village high in the mountains. The houses are very sturdy up in the mountains of Yunnan province. While most houses in the rural lowlands are built of mud bricks with tile roofs, the village houses look like they could survive the apocalypse, as they are built almost entirely of big flat stones held together with some sort of mortar. Even the barns and outbuildings are built this way -- I imagine they have some serious weather to withstand up there. The local residents were all busy working in the fields and ferrying stuff up and down the steep mountain by horse with baskets attached. All were friendly and cheerfully used their single word of English -- "bye bye".

The Naxi Family guesthouse was a typical village house made of stone with a large courtyard. Guests were kept in two of the buildings around the perimeter -- in one, guests slept above, horses and chickens below. One huge wall was devoted to drying corn, which the girls of the house ran through a machine to break the kernels off. Since there was no corn on the menu, I assume the corn was destined for the animals.

And although the guesthouse and the village were great, the views are why you really do the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek. At the Day 1 stage you can't yet see the actual gorge, but the view from the guesthouse is stunning nonetheless -- steeply terraced gardens with an incredible backdrop of enormous snow-covered mountains -- the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains.

That's it for Day 1 -- it may be a few days before I have time to post days 2 and 3 as I'm heading up toward the holy mountain of Emei Shan tomorrow by a consecutive combination of all-day bus and all-night train. This is a big country!




Click here for a site showing pictures of Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 2:22 AM