Holy Leaping Tigers, Batman!
Maybe it's the Prairie Girl thing. The whole "mountains only get in the way of the view" sensibility, but I have never really been into the big hills. All that time at the Banff Centre, and living in Calgary shuttling back and forth in the Rockies, and I just couldn't really be assed to gear up with the bear repellant and go crawling up around the cliffs.
So instead, I decide to lose my mountain hiking ambivalence by taking on the Tiger Leaping Gorge, in the Himalayas, as my first real trekking attempt. It was all thanks to Chris, who could have done the whole trek in no time I am sure. He very gallantly offered to slow right down to my unfit old lady pace so that we could brave the mountain together.
Fortunately, I had good shoes. And I didn't read the details too closely before setting out...because holy lifting was it high, and the 'trail' was bloody treacherous! I use the term 'trail' very loosely here. There was one, but it was not like the cleared, hand-railed kinds of trails you'd see in Canada, this was rough going.
Once again, the Lonely Planet managed to endear itself to me by blithely mentioning two little waterfalls. Well, there were more than two, and they were blinking huge thundering cataracts with cliffs to the side and a five foot wide swathe of wet loose rock to crawl over to get to the other side. I was pretty damn challenged, I must say.
Tiger Leaping Gorge is a contender (depending how you define it, apparently) as the world's deepest canyon, and is irrefutably the deepest river canyon in the world. There are several gorges that are deeper on this crazy planet, but they are all under the sea - this is the one, if you are stupid enough, that you can actually go to.
Around 15km in length, the gorge is where the Yangtze river passes between 5,596 metre Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and 5,396 m Haba Xueshan in a really just incredible series of rapids under steep 2000 metre cliffs. Legend says that in order to escape from a hunter, a tiger jumped across the river at the narrowest point (still 25 metres wide), hence the name.
The inhabitants of the gorge are primarily the indigenous Naxi people, who live in teeny weeny hamlets that make my home-town of Wishart look like a teeming metropolis. I seriously think there are more piggies than people living up in those hills. Fortunately for us, their primary subsistence comes from foreign hikers, which means we had really very nice guest houses to stay in, with reasonably good food and much more importantly hot showers! We even stayed in the same guest house as Michael Palin did when he came through on his Himalayas exploration. But that lazy pampered sod did the trek on a horse (pussy).
I later found out that the gorge is not considered navigable, which didn't surprise me much. In the '80s, four rafters attempted to go down the gorge and were never seen again. In 1986, the first known successful attempt to sail through the gorge was made by the first expedition to float down the entire length of the Yangtze, starting at the river's high source at the Gelandandong glacier lake. The expedition did need to re-fit the boat after the Gorge section, half of the crew abandoned the project before the attempt and they had helicopter support but hey, they did manage to make it.
The area only opened to foreign tourists in 1993, and was mostly known only to backwood backpackers, who took the same high trail we did. Originally a route for the 'tea horses' transporting the famous Yunnan tea out of the hills to the market, this trail is 22km long and 900metres straight up. Then down again (which I actually found harder).
Times are changing at the Gorge: now there is a 'low road' along the river and rapids, so the tour buses are pouring in. You can even get a sedan chair and get your fat ass carried down to the rapids, and back up again. And, of course, the Chinese are going to stick a dam on the gorge, as they tend to do with any unique and large volume of water they have. As you do.
We were lucky in so many ways. The weather was cloudy (no sunburn), it only rained at night and left only a bit of mud. The guest houses were clean, and we met nice people. But most importantly, we didn't get killed in a landslide, as three people did in two seperate slides a couple weeks after we left.
