We had another early start to the day. I think we got up at about 6am or so, and we were going to get a van at 6:30 that had been arranged by Mama Naxi to get to the Gorge. It would take about 2 hours to get to the North tip of the Gorge, so this would let us get a start by 8:30, 9am at the latest, which should give us plenty of time to get through before sundown.
Getting everyone out of bed was easier said than done, but it didn’t take too long to rouse the troops to get gathered up. Mama Naxi was actually awake this time, which I was a bit worried about, since she had failed to do the same just the previous morning. This time, though, there was money in it for her, so naturally she was up and at ‘em. She was gloriously dressed in her PJs, and had no idea where her driver was.
That was a bit unnerving, to say the least. Every minute lost was a minute less that we had to get the thing done. She made a series of phone calls, and soon enough, it was decided that they’d be there really quite soon. A few people went to convenience stores nearby to get water or some small bits of food, and soon enough we were off. Just one more complication to throw into the experience, I guess, but ultimately meaningless. Again we were packed in to two minivans, as is usually the case out in the boonies of China. You tend to have to use those to get around anywhere for tourist purposes.
Most of my van conked out for the majority of the ride, even though it was a bit bumpy. Jing in particular seemed to have totally passed out, or at least kept trying to, switching back and forth between lying her head on my shoulder, the seat in front of her, and anything else.
At some point, half of the way through, Jill called me. She wanted to know if we were interested in getting something to eat at a restaurant up ahead. I was totally out of it, as I had been trying to sleep a little bit as well. I wasn’t really able to give her a straight answer. I told her I’d ask the others in my van what they wanted. I was worried about how much time this would further cut out of our ability to get going. I don’t remember how all of this went, but I remember basically that I asked her whether or not we would be able to have it ready for us when we got there, and it sounded like that was basically the idea. I thought I told her to go ahead and count us in for all of that.
We were brought to a simple entrance road, and we had to buy tickets to enter the area; if we had our student IDs with us, we could get a pretty good deal on the entrance cost. Soon we all had glossy tickets letting us explore the wonders of the Gorge. Not long after, the drivers brought us to the first guesthouse of the gorge. Or at least, the first guesthouse if you decide to go through from the North. This is apparently where we were going to eat, and so we walked up some stairs to get to the scene of the dine, and sat down in anticipation of a bunch of dishes of fried rice.
It turned out, however, that Jill had apparently not gotten quite the right message from me, so there had been no effort to prepare the rice for my van. This frustrated me at first, as at the time I could only think that she had basically ignored what I had asked of her, I couldn’t possibly think that maybe I just hadn’t spoken clearly, as was probably the case. This had just topped things off from the past few days, but it turns out they hadn’t started cooking in advance anyhow, and although I should’ve been happy that this meant that we were all in it together, instead, I just got even more frustrated that something else wasn’t going right, and that we were going to have to wait a bit longer to get started.
The fried rice came piling out eventually, as well as a glass of hot chocolate for myself, and a variety of other drinks for other people. Hot chocolate and fried rice might not sound like the greatest combination to you, and if you thought so, I’d hardly disagree. For a moment, though, I had pondered the possibility of ordering food other than fried rice, like some nice fluffy French toast or something. At that moment, some hot chocolate sounded like a perfect coupling, so I ordered that while still thinking about the food, but ultimately I figured it’d be best to keep the food orders simple, so I stuck with the same fried rice everyone else was getting anyway.
The walls were covered in writing, left from all sorts of itinerant travelers, and I think one of them had mentioned getting a specific kind of coffee drink, some sort of recommendation for a warm beverage there. Lauren decided to get one based off of that recommendation; I was sitting at the same table as her, though we still hadn’t worked out the issues between us; the amount of talking going on was pretty few and far between. I tried to not pay attention to all the chatting going on between everyone else, and all the conversation going on not including me, and not focus on the fact that I was sitting at a table with people who either wouldn’t talk to me or that I didn’t want to talk to anyway, although Christine was sitting to my right, at least. I should’ve been happy of that, but at that time, I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to her, let alone almost anyone else.
Whatever the case, I ate my fill and left the guesthouse to use the rest room, which was down a corridor filled with webs, which I think I had heard a few girls, maybe Ariel, yell/complain about a bit just a little earlier; there didn’t seem to be any spiders though, so I just ducked under and ran into yet another third world restroom.
I didn’t go back up to sit with everyone, but instead just hung out downstairs outside. There were some dogs around, so I hung out with them a bit and wandered aimlessly. People trickled out, and soon enough we were back in the damn vans one more time to scoot up to the actual beginning of the dirt walking trail. The drivers dropped us off, more or less without a word, and that was pretty much where we were left.
And boy was it a nice start; right off the bat, we were presented with two possibilities of going, and no particularly good indications which one was right. One of them doubled back a bit, but went to a higher level, the other one look already like a straight shot down the valley. So, I just took a guess and started going down that path. Then, a lady came out of the grain stalks just above and to the left of us, with one of those woven baskets and all, and mimed to us that we were going the wrong way, and needed to go up that other path. So, we took her word for it and doubled back up the loose gravel trail towards her direction.
I was a bit nervous about this, and would be nervous in the future when other people gave us directions as well, as, when I originally researched the place, I had read that sometimes you have to worry about people in that area leading you in the wrong direction to other trails, then demanding money for access to those trails.
I’ll just go ahead and spoil the end of this mini-story by saying that my fears were unfounded, no untoward entrepreneurship ever arose during our time in this place.
Anyway, before I go any further, here’s a couple pictures taken from what was basically the first bend of the road in the trip, with a nice view of the Yangtze River drifting on:
Mindy decided she wouldn’t be able to do this trip, due to a few health complications that are not a big deal (for the most part) in daily life, but would preclude her from taking a trip like that. The previous night, I had recommended to Tyler to stay behind with her so that she wouldn’t be all alone.
Mindy and Tyler still wanted to see the Gorge, though, so they had come along in the morning with everyone else, but after the other twelve people were dropped off, they were ultimately taken to the midpoint of the Gorge, where Mindy hoped she’d be able to continue on from with relative ease.
So that meant Sarah, Lauren, David, Jing, Julie, Yong, and Ariel made up the rear group. It was ridiculously easy to spot, thanks to Yong’s bright yellow shirt that could be used as an emergency signal from at least a few miles away. I’m not even kidding.
For evidence, see this photo:
I saw a guy in front of me walking on his own. I don’t remember perfectly clearly, but I seem to recall that he wasn’t carrying anything other than a water bottle. I decided I would demolish him, just as a waypost.
So I kept up my steady pace, and sure enough, around the time I reached the end of this bend (and if you have really good eyes, you can make out the maroon of his shirt in the middle of the trail shown in this picture):
I managed to catch up. This didn’t work out the way I had originally planned on, but ultimately worked out for the best. Turned out he was a twenty year old American who was studying in China for a semester while he normally attended West Point Academy, which neatly explained how he was able to try to tackle this 20 mile long trail with just a single bottle of water.
I ended up matching my pace with his for the next twenty minutes or so, and chit chatted with him. To some degree, this ended up being a huge relief, being able to talk to someone outside of the circus of our tour group. One of the parts I love best about traveling, thus far, is the people you meet as the single-serving friends given so much disdain in Fight Club. It’s my belief that single serving friends, in the right circumstances, are actually invigorating and awesome in a way that would be hard for people who haven’t had the experience to imagine.
The two of us didn’t have anything important to talk about, as is usually the case, just exchanging our current life situations, goals, and thoughts about China and missing America, as almost every single conversation seems to mirror here, when you speak at length with foreigners.
Not long after this, maybe a bit over an hour into the hike, we reached the hellacious 28 Bends. This is a spot that almost everyone from the Yunnan group will remember in infamy. The 28 Bends were a series of, yes, you guessed it, twenty eight switchbacks winding up the part of the trail with the swiftest rate of ascension.
This part kicked everyone’s ass except for the Army guy. I don’t remember his name at this point, but he was long gone anyhow, after just five minutes trudging up this crap.
By the time that he left me in the dust, due to having slowed myself down with talking to him, Christine, Jill, John and Varun had caught up with me. I still wasn’t really talking to them, as I had avoided conversation with almost everyone all day long up to this point.
I was actually fairly tired by this point in time, and ready for a small break, so I let myself stop with them after we had gone up a certain number of those bends, maybe a third of them. Along with a water break, we took a couple pictures, as shown here:
At this point I actually started talking with people again, though pretty lightly. Varun worked at setting his camera on a rock, shown below, to take a group shot of the five of us, as shown here:
From that point on, we continued as a single group. To be honest, it isn’t easy for me to recall the step by step plays of the rest of the trail, but I’ll try to hit up the main points.
All along the trail, markers here and there would tell us how much farther we had to go to reach a variety of points, with arrows. The most important ones were the guesthouses at either endpoint, the one we started at, as well as Anne’s at the other side of the trail. They were all listed in terms of how many hours it would take to reach, which was interesting. There were even advertisements for some other guesthouses and their happy hours, with comments on how good it as. Here’s an example of one of those kinds of waymarkers:
There was also an even more important thing listed on some of these way markers, which was the halfway point, as well as the Halfway Guesthouse.
Eventually we found out the Halfway Guesthouse wasn’t actually at the Halfay point. A while before we reached the Halfway Guesthouse, we passed by a small rock, which had written on it a celebration by some other itinerant traveler celebrating having reached the halfway point. I’m pretty sure by this point we all hoped to God it was really true. Ever since the 28 bends, the forward group + me could really no longer see the rear group, with the occasional exception.
One of the reasons we hoped it was really the halfway point was that, if true, it would be nothing short of incredible. I don’t remember the exact time, but I guess if we started at about 9:40, it should’ve been right around noon. Given that, according to most people and resources, we were bound to need at LEAST a full day to get through the Gorge, this would’ve been tantamount to breaking a record or something.
I can’t read the minds of the four others that were with me, (although Christine has since shed some light on what was going on then, I had no way of knowing at the time, so I’m going to write only to reflect what I did know at that time) but I figured they were also happy to see that hauling ass was having a practical impact on our attempt to get through the Gorge in a fairly short amount of time.
Surprisingly, it took a while to get from the Halfway point to the Halfway Guesthouse, and given there wasn’t any official plaque on the halfway point rock, it was impossible to tell whether or not it was true; reading another dozen little bits of graffiti saying that we still had a while to go to reach the Halfway Guesthouse made us question the veracity of the previous path marker. It didn’t even really matter, but it was messing with our minds, as uncertainty tends to do, which is never good in the heat of a gigantic exercise in physical exertion.
Finally, around the corner of yet another bend, we spied a complex of extremely well built wooden structures, and figured that must be the Halfway Guesthouse, at least.
By this time another half hour had passed, and it as 12:30. For some silly reason, I was worried that this Guesthouse was actually at the halfway point ( I mean hey, false advertising anyone? ) and that we hadn’t reached the halfway point in less than three hours.
After asking around a bit, we found that the previous rock really was the halfway point, and that therefore we really had kicked ass.
We decided to sit around at this halfway house for a while, got some Snickers and free tea, and lounged around for ten minutes or so. We gave the rear group a call to see how they were doing, and they assured us that they were still well on their way.
It was around this time, I think, that I got a phone call from my parents, and I think that was actually the first time I had heard my dad’s voice since I left America, so that was kind of cool.
Just after that, we got going again, and just five minutes later or so, I asked one of the people with me to give a call to the other group, and let them know they could get some free tea at the place we just left. Apparently, they rejected the offer, wanting to try to catch up with us instead.
Silly mortals!
Insofar as it could be said, the first half (the northern half) of the trail felt more like open fields in a valley, with plenty of farms to lend itself to this idea. Although at every point the valley careened down below, it still just seemed as though these slopes were open fields just put on a slant. None of the vegetation was particularly tall, and the slopes still seemed fairly gentle, with no exposed rock surfaces to speak of.
The second half was a bit different, in my mind. Starting with the 28 Bends, it felt almost like we were climbing up towards a forest, and as we continued further and further, it became more and more like an actual forest. Also, exponentially more severe cliffs manifested, and a few waterfalls were spotted, such as this one:
The path got tighter, more constricted and with more drastic drop offs on the other side. At one point, a water drainage system of rusty cast iron pipes ran parallel to the edge of the path, at one point shoddily making a steep incline to go up and above out of sight to the top of the mountains next to us. It leaked out in a dozen places, but not with a small plodding leak, but rather a minor jetstream of water threatening to drench us. We wended and weaved through it to minimize how damp we would get.
Not long after those pipes, we reached the waterfall I showed in the above picture, and oddly enough we ran into a group of Americans, whom Varun was actually familiar with, so we stopped and chatted in the middle of a waterfall, one of the most bizarre meeting places I’ve ever known of. We took a picture of them, and they took a picture of us:
We continued on, and on, and on. Everything after the 28 Bends, physically, and everything after the Halfway House, psychologically (due to no longer being tormented about whether or not we had indeed passed the halfway point) was easy peasy. Most of it was almost entirely on the level, no slope of any sort, and we were able to just tear through it. At one point, we had two way traffic with some horses, which weren’t exactly easy to make room for.
At another point, a pack of goats sat in the middle of the road, which I didn’t exactly know how to deal with.
Although I've only captured two in this photo, there were in fact at least a dozen of them here. The best I could come up with was taking out a big water bottle, brandishing it at the goats and promising them a beating if they tried to mess with me or my friends. Also, one of the goats had their back to me, and I couldn’t notice that it seemed as though he’d been having some sort of intestinal trouble or something, as it had what was the, and I pardon the expression, puffiest most protruding asshole I’d ever seen. I gave him my sympathies, and kept slowly making my way through the crowded slope, with the others following close behind.
I don’t have many pictures from the rest of the hike, after this point, as shortly after, it started raining. Also, I started literally running, as in the final third, the path stopped being stable, and started going gently downhill, and instead of sanely taking it easy, I decided I’d literally skip down the slopes, bouncing off of the big rocks, rebounding left and right to keep myself centered down the slope. I guess the others didn’t quite feel like doing the same, and soon I could barely hear their voices above and behind me. At one point, the forest disappeared, and we were back in an open field once again.
A guy came up from behind us out of nowhere. The trail got so constricted it was hard to see how it continued on, and I decided to try one horrible path that was somewhat scary, especially with the addition of rain. Then, the rest of my group noted that the surprise visitor ambled down a far easier way, and I kicked myself a bit and worked my way back and followed his lead.
After working our way around yet another bend, I kept running like hell, and Christine kept up with me. I was amazed that she had stayed along this whole time anyhow, but this was even more incredible. The two of us loped down the path, slipping a couple times along it, getting ourselves royally messy, finally seeing what we figured was Tina’s Guesthouse. We couldn’t exactly run full out, because we didn’t want to fall down anymore, but a couple of Chinese guys breezed down it like it was nothing. Crazy fuckers. Christine joked that it seemed as though they though we were just amateurs, and I couldn’t exactly feel otherwise.
Whatever the case, we finally made it down off the path, onto asphalt, a hundred yards from the guesthouse, and thank goodness for that. We were soaked through and through, and our legs felt like solid columns of iron, pumped further than I’d ever known before, but it still felt great. A spigot outside looked useful enough to clean my shoes off a bit, so I did my best to get off of what mud I could.
Inside, I felt ecstatic to be not running through a valley anymore. Somewhere along the line, we had called Mindy and Tyler to check up on them and see where they were along the way, and we kne that they should be at Tina’s too, so we looked around a little bit, and sure enough, found them in a small dining area in the back, and they were sitting with a few other travelers.
We sat down with them and talked about the time we had. The strangers sitting there sat slack jawed when I told them we had just run the Gorge in about five hours and fifteen minutes. THEY SAID IT COULDN’T BE DONE! Or something like that. Ha. The endorphin rush combined with the ego rush I got for completing what most people thought was a two day trail in five hours was enormous, and, though I don’t know for sure, I think Christine felt the same way.
The two of us hoped we could find some ice cream there, but no such luck. Its kind of our thing to eat ice cream together, and it seemed like there’d be little better to celebrate than some cold vanilla and chocolate goodness.
Anyhow, we sat back down, and John, Varun, and Jill showed up not long after this. Everyone settled in, and some people ordered some food. We checked in with everyone else, and found out that at some point, Jing, who had been apparently afflicted with some allergies, had ran off from the group she had been with, to try to catch up with us. So Christine and I went outside to look for her, and soon enough, she came trudging down the end of it as well. She looked utterly spent, and we had to encourage her to go the last few bits of the path, then gave her a huge hug, and brought her into the guesthouse. She really was pretty swollen up from her allergies. I felt so bad for her, but there was little we could do other than relax. So we got her settled in, made sure she was warm enough after going through the rain, and got her some food also.
She had never done anything remotely like this in her life, so I was pretty worried about her anyhow, but she made it through, and I was so proud of her. There was a little kitten nearby, which we had been playing with a bit, and I suggested Jing hold it for a while, saying it’d help make her relax a bit. She’s not a huge fan of cats, but eventually she relented, and all for the better. No one can resist the cuteness of little kittens.
We started working on calling the people who were our transportation out of the place.
Over the next hour, the rear group mostly showed up, minus David and Julie, who apparently had fallen behind at some point, and we found out that our vans couldn’t come pick us up. Apparently there was some problem on the road, a rockfall or something like that, and they told us we’d have to get to the other spot on our own. Varun, Jill, Jing, Christine, John and I had already started walking in the direction we thought they were stuck at when Lauren and the others showed, and found out we were actually going the wrong way.
Here's a picture of us leaving the Guesthouse, with TIna's in the background:
A group of guys hanging out doing nothing productive that had some minivans to spare offered to take us to where we wanted to go, though they asked for way too much. I told them it was absurd, and we kept walking, saying they obviously didn’t have any other business due to the problem on the road, and weren’t in a position to negotiate (though not nearly so articulate as that, as I had to speak in Chinese). Eventually one of the snide guys showed up in his minivan to offer again, this time at a lower price, and we forced him down even lower, and I told him that if he had just taken us the first time at the price we had asked then, he would have made more money, so, he was pretty much a loser.\
When he was driving us past Tina’s Guesthouse, we told the others who were there (David and Julie had finally shown up) to just go ahead and get into a van and do the same as us. After just a few minutes, we arrived at the scene of the minor disaster, and made our ways from one side to the other, to get into the other minivans.
Here’s some pictures!
Then we found out that these minivans were actually not the ones taking us back to Lijiang, and that instead we’d be transferred into our original minivans back at the start of the whole trail. This was doubly disappointing, because that meant that some people had to get back into the one van that actually, in lieu of having a seventh seat, had a stool next to two normal seats. That was in the van I hadn’t taken, and I think it was Jill that had had to sit on a stool the whole time, poor thing. So someone was going to have to do it yet again, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.
The next couple hours were pretty uneventful, though we called back to Mama Naxi’s to try to get her to book a ride for us to Dali the next day. She tried to sell us on her own transportation that she had a deal set up with, but it was a bit later than I really wanted to arrive, so I asked her to check into a bus that would leave earlier to Dali, and she said she’d arrange one for us at like 10am or something.
Fast forward a couple hours, and we re-arrive in Lijiang at the guesthouse. Turns out she hadn’t booked a bus for us after all, and it was pretty much too late to book one. I was pretty pissed at this point. Only five minutes after getting out of the bus and back into the guesthouse, I also realized I had left my cell phone in the minivan, and asked Mama Naxi to have the guy bring it back.
Forty five minutes later, and more frustration with Mama Naxi as she basically cornered us into using her own private bus service, the minivan shows up, and my cell phone is nowhere to be found. Someone had stolen it, and that was that. Man, what a night. I ordered a sandwich, and it turned out to be slathered in mayo. I HATE mayo. Mayonnaise is one of the worst condiments ever designed.
But goddamned Asia loves the stuff. If I can give you one tip for traveling in Asia, it would be to not trust menus, and know that mayonnaise can show up anywhere, if its “western” food. Even pizzas, as I saw (but didn’t eat) in Japan. Somehow, when it comes to western food, they just can’t quite get the right ingredients half the time. The other two I’ve most frequently encountered is hot dogs marketed as “sausage” (which sure, it technically is, but you know, there’s a difference between Italian sausage and hot dogs and such), pepperoni, and bacon. The last two are I guess basically the same kind of meat as usual, but never actually crispy. God I miss crispy bacon.
So between Mama Naxi’s conniving ways, my stolen phone, and the sandwich, I was frustrated yet again, after just having spent the entire day working through my previous frustrations. So I went back to my room and uncorked a bottle of wine I had been carrying since Shangri-la and tried it out, to try to just relax a bit, and it tasted awful. Now, China has an awful reputation for wine anyway, but this was a disappointment, because I had heard that the presence of Jesuit missionaries in the area of Shangri-la supposedly had increased the quality of the stuff grown there.
So I went back, and locked down the details for our compromise of transportation the next day. After that, we all rolled out to the Stone Crow yet again. The sudden frustrations of the night had built up yet again, though, so I wasn’t quite feeling it. Christine was pretty beat too, so the two of us went back to our rooms, and I went immediately to bed, wanting to just wake up and move on to Dali.
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