Yunnan and the Tiger Leaping Gorge

After a short stint back in the office teaching, I jumped on the road again. This time it was the beauty of Yunnan province with a Geckos tour through the region. I was super excited about this one as everyone in the office had told me exactly how beautiful the province was and I was not disappointed.

After an extremely late flight into the hotel, I met our tour guide “Richard” (Chinese name Chan). Waking up refreshed the next day, I wandered out into a surprisingly clean city that was a lot more picturesque than I expected. I headed into the Western Hills (Xishan) for the day, excited to escape the smog and city life. Found a small pavillion on top of the hill overlooking the city. Lingxu Pavillion is the highest structure on Xishan and offers amazing views of Kunming and surrounds.

Then I wandered down through the Dragon Gate, a group of grottoes carved on the side of the hill by a Taoist Monk between 1781 and 1835.

Dali

That evening the tour group met each other for the first time and after a short meeting we headed to the train station for my first experience on an overnight train in China. Much better than I expected, and even better when we arrived at Dali early the next morning. Dali was to become one of my all-time favourite places. It was just so amazingly beautiful that neither the words nor the pictures here could ever do it justice. You will all just have to go and visit it to see it yourselves, not least for the cheap silver jewellery.

The first morning was spent wandering around the Old Town, capital of Nanzhou in the 8th and 9th century. The Old Town had amazing architecture, as you can see from the pictures above. Many of the people here are from one of China’s 55 official ethnic minorities, the Bai people, who once controlled part of China, Burma and northern Thailand. After that, we went on a scenic bike ride around part of the Old Town and down to Erhai Lake. It was a pleasant ride, although the temperatures were low to mid 30’s.

The day finished with an amazing dinner full of crazy food such as cockroaches and tree roots (the latter tasted just like popcorn). A picture of the “medicine” can be seen below.

The second day was spent sightseeing in the areas around Dali with a few friends from the tour group. In the morning, we took a cable car ride up into Cangshan Mountain. The cable car took us up to Zhonghe Temple, not particularly amazing in itself, but amazing in terms of the views of Dali Old Town. Also amazing were the gravestones scattered throughout the mountain.

In the afternoon, Barry and I went for a pleasant boat ride into Erhai Lake. I saw what was most probably the most impressive temple that I have seen yet, and spent a lovely hour or so walking round one of the fishing villages on the other side of the lake. Unfortunately, my camera batteries died during the excursion, so I don’t have too many photos.

Lijiang

After Dali, we jumped on a bus headed for Lijiang. Lijiang reminded me a lot of Amsterdam, with canals everywhere and beautiful architecture. But what Lijiang does best is shopping… lots of cheap souvenirs and just general shopping if you know how to and want to bargain. Basically, the entire time in Lijiang was spent shopping and eating. A nice relaxing day really.

Many things amaze me about China but the transport is definately one of the most shocking. Check out the transport that people were using… yes using. I particularly like the truck with no bonnet!

Another thing that amazed us was the menu at the local restaurant. Would you like your chicken wild or stewed with your Chinese caterpillar fungus?

We spent the evening at a cultural event in Lijiang, the highlight of which was definately the elder of the group as seen below. The dominant minority group in Lijiang is the Naxi. Historically, the Naxi were a matriarchal society. Children belonged to the women, inheritances followed the female line, and female elders settled differences. The Naxi Orchestra, famous throughout China and some parts of the Western World accompanied a series of dances and an illustration of writing the traditional Naxi language (a lot similar to Egyptian heiroglyphics than traditional Chinese). The dances portrayed a series of events relating to ancient culture.

 The photo of me below is with the elder of the Lijiang Band, who made the entire evening.

Tiger Leaping Gorge

From Lijiang, we headed out to Tiger Leaping Gorge on a public bus filled with the inevitable smoke and bodily fluid smell. Have I ever mentioned how spitting and peeing can be and are done when needed, regardless of location?

Anyway, we arrived at the “Tiger Leaping Gorge” and fought several thousand high-heeled wearing Chinese tourists down to the bottom to take photos of the famous tiger who apparently leapt across the gorge. Now the tiger that we saw was all stone but apparently, it leapt over the gorge and was forever immortalised on the other side. After taking the obligatory photos of the tiger and the gorge (as you see below, the river is not that impressive), we took lunch and headed off for the trek further along the river.

About 10 minutes later, we hit the first of two landslides. Sorry Mum for not telling you about this earlier… but either way… it was safe regardless of what it looks like in the photos below. We climbed over the first landslide, walked a little, then climbed over the second landslide. I must admit I was a little scared when I looked down to my right but our fantastic local guide plus all the locals trying to clean up made it feel pretty safe.

We sweated it out for the next few hours, walking alongside some amazing views in some pretty scorching heat. I’m pleased to say that no skin was hurt or burned in this adventure, and that’s an accomplishment for me, at the very least. We arrived at Tina’s guesthouse sometime in the afternoon or early evening and refreshed with a cold beer, a game of mahjongg and a comforting rest before beginning again the next day.

Early the next morning myself and two others plus our tour guide and our local guide set off down the path to the Middle Gorge whilst the others relaxed in the guest house. After a challenging descent, which none of us was looking forward to climb afterwards, we realised that we had made the right decision to go. The Middle Gorge route, not being a tourist route, led us directly out onto the river with only a red line “stopping” us from jumping into the rapids. This was probably the most amazing sight for the whole tour and definately worth doing.

After climbing back up and heading for banana pancakes to refresh the system, the group headed back to the start. This time we took the high trail, allowing for better photos. Whilst my eyes were much more satisfied on this route, my legs were definitely feeling the pain of the extra two hours of climbing that we had done in the morning. The constant ringing of the bell on the trekking horse two of the girls had hired due to a bad reaction to Chinese food and the insecurity of being able to make it the whole way was not making my legs feel any better. We made it, however, after lots of “are we there yet?” calls. Worth the sight…

We then started on a nice downhill descent to our second guesthouse where we once again sampled the local pancakes and a considerable amount of the local beer and headed off to an extremely good night’s sleep.

The next day was spent winding our way back down to the middle path, crossing over the landslides again and taking our local bus back to Lijiang for the party to celebrate the end of the trip.

The next day we headed back to Kunming and after saying our goodbyes, I headed off to bed. The next day, whilst everyone else was packing up and leaving I went to visit the Stone Forest, a short trip out of Kunming. The place was pretty amazing despite the obvious Chinese tourist influence and I was lucky to find an ex Yunnian person who spoke fluent English and used to be a tour guide at the forest. I took a trip round with her before heading back to the hotel and back to Wuhan ready to start teaching again.