The Tiger Leaping Gorge

A long, long time ago, as legend has it, a brave hunter was pursuing a tiger on the slopes of Yùlóngxuě Shān (Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.) As the supernaturally brave and fast man was closing in on his prey, the big cat leaped across a gorge and landed safely on the lower rises of Hābā Xǔeshān (Haba Snow Mountain) Although the legend doesn't go into much detail, one can easily imagine the hunter's wooden shoes screeching on bare rock as he came to a sudden stop on the edge of an almost vertical cliff, barely  avoiding a 2000 meter drop to the raging rapids of Jīnshā Jiāng (Golden Sands River), and the tiger, only 30 meters away but thoroughly safe at last, flashing a toothy grin before self-contentedly walking off to live another day.

Today that chasm is known as Tiger Leaping Gorge, and it is one of the wonders of the natural world. The two peaks it separates are both substantially higher than Mont Blanc, and for long stretches of its 22km length it is kilometers deep but only meters wide. One of the world's most scenic hiking spots, it was one part of China I was especially eager to see, notably because it could soon disappear altogether. Despite being deep inside the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Area, a UNESCO World Heritage site where the Yangtze, Mekong and Salween rivers meet and thus the geographical nexus of East and South-East Asia, the “central” government in Beijing periodically revives a long-standing plan to build a huge hydroelectric dam and flood the entire area. While justly seen as a coal burning hog, China is also the world's biggest producer of hydropower, and home to half of the world's large dams.

After long arguments on whether we'd spend one or two days inside Tiger Leaping Gorge, we decided to do it in one, which required lots of time spent arguing and sitting in mini-busses: starting in Lijiang, we got a ride to the trailhead village of Qiatou, where we dropped our heavy backpacks at Jane's guest house. There, we found a guy that could take us to Sean's guesthouse, at the other end of a nine hour trail, so we could walk back to the beginning and ride the last bus back to Lijiang. The timing seemed a little short from the start, and turned to complete fantasy when our mini-bus got stuck behind an excavator busily cleaning the road of recently fallen rubble. From what we could gather, people had been blowing up parts of the gorge and thus now had to clean up the road. Why they did that I have no idea, but in any case it delayed us so much that we only started hiking around noon.

Now we were never going to make it back to Jane's, so we settled for a roundtrip hike and arranged a fourth minibus to pick us up at five and take us back to the trailhead. We started hiking to bamboo grove, which seemed like a nice destination, along with Baby, Sean's over-enthusiastic yet disarmingly cute dog. We missed a turning almost immediately, but didn't realize it until three hours later, when it became painfully obvious that we were making good time on a road to nowhere, while that famed “Bamboo grove” could only be that lush green oasis just visible higher up and now inaccessible. We doubled back and made our way to Sean's by four-thirty, just in time to have a beer before our ride was due.

In many ways, this day inside Tiger Leaping Gorge is an apt metaphor (or is that metonymy?) for any self-organized trip to China. There will be screw-ups. Massive screw-ups. We ended up spending most of the day in a crowded mini-bus gazing at an arthritic CAT shuffling gravel in a cloud of dust. In a single day, we redefined success four times and still failed. But yet, that too short walk on the jade dragon’s tough scales was utterly magical. Sloping terraced fields merging to massive vertical walls plunging to gurgling rapids on a scale found nowhere else in the world, the site simply has to be seen to be truly experienced. Now whenever I think of the most beautiful sights I have ever had the privilege to behold, Tiger Leaping Gorge easily ranks near the top of the list.