28/10 - Enter the Tiger

Wow! I mean WOW!!!

 

This place is just off the scale.

 

Today, we were treated to a five hour trek along Sean's secret trails. The trek was nominally to visit a waterfall in the upper reaches of the gorge, but given the epic surroundings, it was always going to be more about the journey than the destination.

 

Si Phong had been laid low with food poisoning, so it was just me and Sheenie following Sean that morning. Being a man with some meat to him, Sheenie was the Jabba the Hut to Sean's Yoda. He therefore did a manly job in keeping pace up some steep and rugged mountain paths. The flipside of course is that Sheenie sweats for ten men (make that 20 if the men are asian) and it wasn't long before steam could be seen rising from his black polo. At one point I heard Sean muttering to himself in the local dialect "Man, if this white boy sweats anymore, the villagers will have salty drinking water".

 

Tiger Leaping Gorge was a great antidote to some of the equally stunning, but sanitised spots that we have been to recently. There wasn't a camera toting tourist in sight (well, apart from us) and the paths were rough, bordering on dangerous in places. We only met a few people that day, and they were all villagers tending their crops. Sean has a few ideas to improve the local facilities for trekers, but you could tell that he didn't wish to make things too easy, lest the coaches, tannoys and paved walkways appear and turn the gorge in to another theme park.

 

Unfortunately, the gorge as it is faces an uncertain future. According to Sean, plans are afoot to dam the gorge, which will have a profound effect on the local economy and of course the gorge itself.

27/10 - The road to Tiger Leaping Gorge

We spent a couple of nights in the delightful tourist trap that is Lijiang (will try and blog about this later), but our main reason for being in Yunnan province was to visit the legendary Tiger Leaping Gorge.

 

Depending on how you like to measure your gorges, Tiger Leaping Gorge is the world's deepest, at 2km deep and 30 km long. The gorge itself is an absolute bitch to get to as the one road that runs along it has been destroyed by numerous landslides. As a result the tourist buses only dare to venture to the edge of the gorge, where the masses take their obligatory photo's and then promptly bugger off back to their hotels in Lijiang and Shangri-La.

 

But not us, oh no. We had intentions of getting deep in to the gorge in order to breathe its fresh air and walk its hidden trails! This would have been impossible were it not for the help of a village leader named Sean, who we'd contacted many months before from the UK.

 

He arranged for a driver to pick us up from Lijiang and do the two hour drive to the start of the gorge. Here, we were picked up by his daughter, Lucy, who revealed to us that we had another 5 cars to catch. Somewhat puzzled by this, we transferred in to hers and cracked on. The reasons soon became apparent - we were the human batons in a landslide relay! Each car would go along the gorge road until it hit a point where where it could go no further. This was usually due to severe rock fall, or even worse, where the road itself had fallen in to the gorge. At this point, we'd unload and carry our luggage to another car waiting at the other side of the blockage and continue until the next impasse, where another changeover would take place. How clever!

 

Unfortunately I had come down with man-flu the day before and was near the point of death. I was therefore absolutely overjoyed to find myself carrying 35 kilo's of luggage (trunk on the shoulder, backpacks on front and back) across a collapsed road with a sheer drop two feet to my right! 

 

We arrived at Sean's guesthouse at noon where we met our host and guide for the first time. There's a distinct Yoda like vibe around this little Tibetan guy, which is exactly what one looks for in a mountain guide in one of China's most legendary treking spots. We spent the afternoon walking down to the river, but Sean promises us a much more substantial trek to the higher reaches of the gorge tomorrow...

25/10 - A bad 2 days

We've been on a winning streak since hitting China, but after a splendid few days in Jiuzhaigou, our luck finally broke when we hit Huang Long national park.

 

Huang Long lies 100km away from the much larger Jiuzhaigou, and came highly recommended by the guidebook for its unique mineral pools and waterfalls. In reality, the park itself was nothing much to write about and was a mission to get to, being 3500m up on the other side of a 4500m mountain range. On the drive to Huanglong, the taxi driver filled us with tales of doom, leaving us with a feeling of dread as we arrived at our destination. There was some truth in his words, the high altitude, compounded by the onset of bad weather made for an uncomfortable night's sleep in a cold and dirty hotel at the top.

 

Worse was to come on the following day's flights to Chengdu and then Lijiang. We were woken at 6.30 by our taxi driver. Unknown to us, it had started to snow overnight and he urged us to pack and go within 10 minutes before the mountain pass became inaccessible. The journey was slow and treacherous, and the taxi skidded more than once of the icy mountain roads. Fortunately we'd allowed lots of time for our 10 o'clock flight, so despite the cautious crawl to the airport, we were there with time to spare and tipped our driver generously.

 

We were thanking our good fortune in escaping a snow-in but little did we know that this was just the first hurdle in a day of problems! At check in, we discovered that the airline had messed up our tickets. No one at the airport was willing or able to help and we had no choice but to miss our flight to Chengdu. We resigned ourselves to booking ourselves on the next flight, only to find that the counter did not take foreign cards and neither did the ATM at the airport. We were contemplating a 4 hour round trip to the bank at Jiuzhaigou to pick up some cash, but were able to pursuade the police in to letting us book online from their office.

 

To cut a long story short, the rest of the day consisted of waiting around in airport terminals as more flights were delayed due to the bad weather. And when we finally reached Chengdu, we had to also re-purchase tickets for the flight to Lijiang...so £450 on new flights through no fault of our own!

 

It was dark by the time we finally got to Lijiang, 6 hours later than planned, but the warm air and clear star filled skies on the drive in to town, plus the prospect of hooking up with our good friend Sheenie for the 3rd time, hints that we might be on to something better now....

 

 

10/24 - More pics from Jiuzhigou

Here's a few more!

10/24 - Jiuzhaigou

We've spent the past 2 days exploring the valleys of Jiuzhaigou in northwestern Sichuan. This is UNESCO world heritage site spanning two valleys which range from 2000m at base to 4000m at the upper reaches. The water here is crystal clear and very rich in calcium, which lends it a vivid turquois blue color, mixed with more autumn colors of yellow, orange and red.

 

We'd start each day getting a bus to the highest point of each valley, and then hiking our way down to the base. Each valley is comprised of huge terraces, encompassing lakes and sunken fields of trees and grass, which then cascade down through waterfalls to the next level. As you make your way down, you can see the vegetation change between each terrace.

 

Hopefully the pictures will do some justice...it was a pain getting out here and cost an arm and a leg to boot, but its been a magical two days in some of the most jaw dropping scenery that we've ever seen.

21/10 - Chengdu to Jiuzhaigou

We didn't have a great start to the day when overzealous hostel staff woke us at 1 in the morning to collect our room fees, despite the fact that we'd already paid in full the day before. After a fitful night's sleep, partly due to the realisation that we were not alone in the room (our friends, the cockroaches) and the open sewer smell rising from the sink hole, we rose at 6am and headed off to Chengdu airport to catch our flight to Jiuzhaigou. Our bad day continued as the flight was delayed by 3 hours, we then had a lively debate on the other side with some shifty looking taxi drivers, who seemed to want to take us and our wallets for a ride...only it turned out that they were decent chaps in the end, giving us a long and difficult taxi ride at a knockdown price.

 

Of course, none of this matters, because we are in Jiuzhaigou and it promises to be absolutely awesome. You know you're in for a treat when the landing has an entire cabins worth of jaded chinese tourists craning their necks to get the views from the airplane window. Jiuzhaihuanglong airport is set 3000m above sea level between two mountains. The 60km taxi ride in to town was no less dramatic, first looking like we were on some desolate tibetan plateu and then becoming positively alpine in feel as the taxi snaked its way down in to the lush mountain valleys.

 

We'll spend the next two days visiting the scenic area of Jiuzhaigou.

20/10 - Chengdu

Next stop, the province of Sichuan, famed for its spicey food. Our main destination is Jiuzhaigou nature reserve, but we've stopped over in the city of Chengdu for a couple of days.

 

One could easily spend three weeks in Chengdu, using it as a base for visits to Three Gorges, Emei Shan, Songpan, Tibet and Jiuzhaigou. With our limited time, we spent the first day strolling around the delightful hutongs around Jin Li and our hostel and sipping jasmin tea next to the lake in renmin park while the locals practised their (sometimes glass shattering) opera over a tannoy.

 

No visit to Chengdu is complete without a trip to the panda reserve, which we duly oblidged the following day. Panda's are useless sods, being poor at mating, negligent parents, fussy eaters, fat, lazy and slothlike...the list is endless. Their extinction would have been guaranteed were it not for one saving grace that the theory of darwinism could never have accounted for...

 

PANDA'S ARE CUTE!!! I mean REALLY cute!!! Just look at the pics! AWWWWWW!!!

 

And thus the world aids the plight of the panda's while other, less attractive species die out.