OK, I figured since I've been in China almost 3 weeks now that I'm allowed to abbreviate the Tiger Leaping Gorge to TLG! And again, since the place was just so spectacular, I've decided to share several pictures with you thus more than one email. I've never been to the Grand Canyon but I'm guessing this is a close rival. For this excursion, they drove a group of people from various hostels to the gorge but only 3 of us were doing just a day trip. All the others were hiking the gorge and staying overnight for either 2 or 3 nights. Luckily the two other people who were only doing the day trip were this nice young Chinese couple who spoke pretty good English, so we all 3 hiked the gorge together. It was very steep and somewhat treacherous at points so I really wouldn't have wanted to do it by myself and they said they were glad I was with them as well. It's fairly high elevation and I think the man was having altitude sickness because he kept getting headaches and having to stop a lot along the way. Going down was not too bad but of course the hike back up was a killer. I was hoping for one of those mules to come along and carry me up! > > Once again the giant Buddha gave me great weather... but actually a bit too warm for my tastes. The temperature actually got up to around 70 and with the sun beating down after hiking a few hours, I had stripped off the various layers and was down to a t-shirt! When we left Lijiang in the morning it was 36 degrees! > > The bus ride there was quite the experience. Narrow roads winding up the mountains with no guard rail... Yikes! Actually, it was sad but we saw an accident when we were coming back down the mountain where a minivan ran into a truck and several people were hurt along side of the road. I kept thinking to myself, I'm putting my life in the hands of this crazy Chinese bus driver, what am I thinking!! LOL. > > While I'm really tired right now (I hiked for about 5 hours straight) it's a good tired. Felt very rewarding especially when we got back to the top! I'll crash soon since I need to get up early to catch the bus to Shangri-La. Enjoy the beautiful scenery! > > Jeff > > PS: I forgot to mention that the Tiger Leaping Gorge name came from a story of a tiger being chased by some poachers and he got away by leaping across the river by using a large stone in the middle. That's the stone we hiked down to.
The Wandering Italian 