It has been a few days of just moving quickly through some really nice Tibetan-Chinese towns. The bus moved through some magnificent mountain passes and scenery was absolutely beautiful. However, the bus rides were not very fun. 7-8 hours of bus rides on the average everyday, with a bus full of smoking and spitting Chinese is not an enjoyable journey. Some kept talking to me despite my crappy Putonghua and I really had difficulty understanding their Sichuan hua, which is something like a mix of Mandarin and Cantonese. Anyway, after a few days of waking at 6am to catch the bus was quite enough for me so I was glad when I reach Qiaotou, the start of the trail to the Tiger Leaping Gorge.
I stayed one night at the Gorged Tiger Cafe which was run by Margo, an Australian lady. The Australian and American ladies that were travelling with me seem to think she was crazy but I thought she was really nice. Also, she gave us accurate advice on the conditions of the track and advice on what to take and wear for the track.
We took the upper road and found very few travellers, maybe because it wasn't the peak season. Six of us started out together and we planned to reach the Walnut Garden about 8 hours walk away. I really liked the trail as the view was gorgeous. Along the trail there were magnificent mountain backdrops, waterfalls and sharp drops down from the cliff. What didn't help was my el-cheapo shoe that seem to have no traction at all when we were walking through wet areas. The gorge trail was one place I didn't want to slip because one slip and quite likely my dad could collect on my travel insurance. Slipping wouldn't be fun. As we walk along, the ladies kind of rested for too long and by nightfall only Neal, a british traveller and I reached the Walnut Garden.
Also, Neal made some adventurous decision that kept getting us lost. First was deciding to go back to the trail from the road at 7:15pm when we were 30 minutes away from the guesthouse we were planning to go. So we had to track in the dark for a while because the path wasn't very clear in the dark. On the next day, we track down to the river and we decided to come up through the landslide. We quickly found that we could get lost even in short bushes. Walking through thorns were not very fun, we found out soon enough but managed to find the trail back after half an hour. Of course, we were never in any real danger because we could see the river below and the roads not too far ahead of us. It was tiring, getting off the trail, but it was fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment