Tiger Leaping Gorge
Tony accompanied a student trip to Lijiang in 2005 and brought home photos of the rugged hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge. The 16-kilometer gorge is one of the deepest in the world – 3,900 meters from the water to the mountaintops. I had been excited to follow in Tony’s footsteps.
On the day of our hike, Cath and I rose early, ate a hearty breakfast, and laced up our hiking boots. The three-hour drive found us more often than not sucking diesel fumes behind a tour bus, but we tried not to get discouraged. We knew that soon we would be breathing fresh air along the banks of the Yangzte River.
Eventually, we parked, paid an admission fee and started walking on a paved path. Hmmm… where was the trail? With feigned enthusiasm, we asked Li Qiong if the whole route was paved. In fact, it was. At regular intervals, workers even played a shrieky pre-recorded warning to stay close to the mountain wall and away from the edge. We saw one such worker toss a big piece of plastic in the river to join the swirling mass of trash caught in a whirlpool.
The end of the path took us down a flight of stairs to a viewing point near the water, overlooking the sculpture of a leaping tiger. This leg of the Yangzte, called Jinsha Jiang, was impressive with its crashing roiling current smashing into the boulders and splashing up on unsuspecting tourists (such as me, who took a big drenching while composing a photo of Cath). It wasn’t the hike we had hoped for, but we had to laugh. It was so quintessentially China.
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