Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge

I’d heard Lijiang wasn’t great because it was all touristy and overcrowded but actually I had a very nice time there.  Apart from all the tourists and the overcrowding.

The bus from Dali arrives in Lijiang but the old part of the town is a little way out.  I was staying in the Panba hostel in Lijiang old town, which no taxi driver knew how to get to.  In the end I managed to evoke the sympathies of some kind of delivery man who drove me and my backpack round the narrow winding roads in his some kind of delivery motorbike truck.  Always the adventure.

I spent the first afternoon strolling around and taking pictures of the pretty streets and little canals of the old town…

I walked up a hill which had good views over the crowded roofs of the old town...

...and of the famous Jade Snow Mountain that presides over the surrounding area.

Back at the hostel I booked myself on the next early morning bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge and spent the rest of the evening trying to decide what to take and wondering who I could find to trek with me.  As my new China travel luck would have it, everyone else in my 8-bed dorm (bar one poor Belgian guy) was getting the early morning bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge.

So off we set around 7am, arriving at the start of the Gorge about 9.30am.  The bus driver gave us some tickets and then just sort of drove off, so we wandered around a bit asking locals where to start the trek, took a few wrong turnings and eventually ended up on the right path,the unmarked entrance to which was conveniently situated behind this old shack.

The weather was beautiful, the company was great and the Gorge was amazing.

We took it very leisurely, though after the first couple of hours of steep uphill climb it wasn’t too hard a trek.  There were 3 people working in Ningbo (Leo, Helen and Whitney), a couple of other students studying up in Beijing (Elisa and Richard) and a lone traveller (David).  Happily, we were all fans of the group photo.

There weren’t a lot of people out and about in the Gorge. We didn’t meet any other trekkers (until the guesthouse) and there were only a few Chinese ladies out trying to sell us sustenance for extortionate prices.  Our favourite was the lady just before the infamous ‘28 bends’ stretch (a long, steep climb with not one but 28 bends) who assured as that there was no one for hours who would sell us water (a lie) and harassed our break-time advertising her wares with frequent shouts of ‘Water!  Coca cola!  Marijuana!’

Only in China.

We spent most of the day ambling up and down the trails and arrived at our destination, a guesthouse called Halfway House late in the afternoon.  Halfway house had a sun terrace and the views were breathtaking.

It got quite cold at night though so we stayed inside mostly, eating traditional Naxi (the Lijiang minority ethnic group) food and sharing hostelling stories.  The bathroom was pretty novel: it consisted of a row of stalls sharing a common drain (standard Chinese practice) with open windows looking out into the Gorge.  Here's a view from the toilet:

Pretty as a picture.

The next day we continued on our trek, passing a couple of waterfalls.  Horses were crossing at waterfall no.1.

It wasn’t a very long walk at all to the ‘end’ of the trek, Tina’s Guesthouse, where we booked seats on the afternoon bus back to Lijiang.  Tina’s is the point at which you can walk all the way down to the river itself, and the infamous Tiger Leaping Rock…

It was a steep scramble down and a fairly exhausting climb back up but a beautiful trail. 
Tiger Leaping Gorge is so named because of a story in which a tiger, chased by a hunter, supposedly escaped by leaping across the gorge via a large rock.

Here are David and I claiming Tiger Leaping Rock.

And of course, the inevitable group photo.

By the time we were all back up we still had an hour or so to kill so a few of us walked on, just by road this time, to find Walnut Garden, where the vegetation was rumoured to be particularly (and suspiciously) green.

On the way back we hitched a ride in the back of the truck of some kind of farmer.  From the smell I’m going for pig.  Here we are trucking.

Another couple of hours on the bus and we were back in Lijiang.  Everyone was exhausted so we chose not to hit the wild and varied Chinese ‘bars’; instead, a few of us went to an initially tempting but ultimately ear-splitting concert of traditional Naxi music.

The next day I wandered around the town some more, took lots of pictures, left my camera on a bench, didn’t realise for a while, came back to find it gone, ran round in panicky circles looking distressed, asked everyone I could if they had seen a camera and was miraculously handed it by a lady cleaning the streets who had it tucked away in her dress.  I very nearly cried from happiness.  Some travelling experiences are best left unrepeated.

In the afternoon I went for a little solo bike ride to another old town called Shuhe.  I was stalked by a couple of Chinese cyclists, naturally, but managed to evade them by cycling more and more slowly until I eventually stopped and stared meanly at them until they went away.

Shuhe was very pleasant but the highlight was probably a pastry from a French bakery.  Without a doubt, Yunnan has the best bakeries in China.  What an excellent province.

Here’s a view from the road.

And sadly that was it for Lijiang and the stunning Tiger Leaping Gorge.  I think the Gorge might well have edged out Yangshuo as my favourite place in China.

In the evening I took my first sleeper bus (surprisingly pleasant experience, though I have since had far worse encounters with such buses!) back down to Kunming…