"Tigers Leaping in Lijiang"

Us at the 1st bend in the Yangtse
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Three hours by car from Dali and you get to the higher plains of LiJang. his is a pretty big town with a very well preserved 'Old Town' looking just as you would imagine it (which again you will have to do as the pc won't upload photos). We had a good wander around and visited 'Mu's Mansion' who was the leader of the prominent minority people here the 'Naxi'....all very nice. In the evening we went to a cultural performance of singing and dancing from the minority groups which was good.

1st sight of the gorge
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One of the main reasons to come to LiJiang is to use it as a staging post to get to 'Tiger Leaping Gorge' and this is definitely something we wanted to do. Again the tour guide was asking at least a million quid to take us so we had to make our own arrangements. After our risky business in Kunming we thought that this time an organised tour group would be the way to go so we booked ourselves onto the next day's tour.....only one problem it was in Chinese!

Observations of a Chinese Tour Group

Tiger Leaping Rock
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We turned up at 7:50 as instructed but these Chinese are an unruly bunch, punctuality is'nt really their bag, so by the time everyone else had polled up and got to the bus it was 8:50.

Our tour guide was this elfin like girl who looked at a push to be about 14, so much so that i'm sure she still had her baby teeth. Anyway we didn't catch her name so I will refer to her as 'The Robot'. I'd like to say that her smile was radiant and i'm sure that it is but we never got a glimpse and had to rely on a friendly tourist, Sally, who translated for us.

Yes we were there
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Anyway The Robot started to speak as we set off and no word of a lie didn't pause for breath untill 1 hour 10 into the journey. This would have been ok if her tones were silky smooth but it was like a verbal assault of chinese syllables from an AK 47. I was definitely paying attention which was more than everyone else who had fallen asleep....including alarmingly it seemed the narcoleptic driver!

There was one of those mirrors above the drivers head which enables him to look at the passengers but also us to look at him and maybe it was his droopy eye lids but i'm sure he was nodding off. It was ok though as he had a cow bell hung in the window to which would ring and wake him up just at the right point on every bend.

The purpose of the day was to go to 'Tiger Leaping Gorge' but oh no, not on this tour. We headed off to the 1st bend in the Yangtze, took photos, saw some musicians and a nice stone which means something to someone. The robot tried to get us all to raft down to the next spot (for a price) and the took the half of us that didn't want to go bankrupt 18km's down steam to meet the ones that did. We ate some food, went to the worst toilets in the world and finally made it some 6 hours later to our destination.

In between this the Chinese group had treated us to there favourite group sport of swapping ringtones with the girls favourite being "My Humps, My Humps My Lovely Lady Bumps" which in our observations seemed highly aspirational!

At the gorge The Robot pointed to the trail and sent us off whilst retreating back to the coach to plug herself in, download and charge up for the next verbal tirade. We went off and for two hours had a great time winding along the trail carefully gouged out of the side of the mountain looking at the majestic peaks on the other side and hoping that there would be no rockfalls today (there were a lot of warning signs). The highlight was to see the thinnest point of the gorge which is only 30m across, so thin that the legend says a tiger could leap from one side to another  just by using a large rock which sits in the center. It was very pretty with the sides of the gorge stretching up to 3900m above us at that point.

Back on the bus it was more of the same with our narcoleptic bus driver relying more and more on the cow bell, more ringtones and a couple more meaningless stops on the way back. All in all 10 hours for a 2 hour trek....not a bad return i'm sure you'll agree!