As we left Shangri-La, bleary eyed at 7am on a Chinese tourist bus, the sun was shining and it looked as though our decision to delay the trek had been fully vindicated! Our bus was so comfy we even managed to get a bit more sleep on the way down, although the tour bus wasn’t half as fun as a local minibus! As we pulled into Qiaotou (a real building site of a town) the sun was well and truly and shining and the 22km trek beckoned! We dropped our bags off at Jane’s guesthouse at the start of the trek at 9am and set off on our way, meeting another group of French, Argentian and Japanese people. Eventually we found the right path with some help from the locals and set off on the four hour up hill ascent (not helped by the fact that we took a wrong turn after the first village which wasted a lot of energy). By the time we had made it to the bottom of the 28 bends, about 2 hours in, we were already knackered and the local muleteers were following us like vultures waiting for us to drop so they could carry us to the top! We refused to give in and stuck to our task, eventually reaching the top at around 2700m altitude after around hours of hard uphill – severley out of breath! The good news was that the rest was downhill and the views from the top were absolutely incredible, from the towering peaks of the Haba mountains on one side at 3990m down to the rushing Yangtze river way below us in the bottom of the gorge. From the top we could see all the way down the gorge in both directions, a truly incredible sight!
Motivated by the thought of downhill we set off at a much quicker pace with our new friends down the valley side, passing through bamboo forests and passing yet more stunning views of the mountains and gorge on our right and now to our left we could see the mountain range that we were walking along towering way above us. We left our fellow trekkers at the Yacha village and continued on, determined to make it all the way to the end, spurred on by the graffiti telling us it was only a few more hours to Seans guesthouse in Walnut Garden at the end of the trek! As we continued over the more level track we passed through more villages (with yet more stunning views), perched high up on the valley sides – it really is amazing where people live and farm, on such high terrain with high sloping rice terraces that must take a lot of effort to look after! Having made it to the halfway point in good time, around 6 and a half hours we pressed on to the steep downhill, passing round some precarious cliff edges and stunning waterfalls before the steep descent down towards Walnut Garden. By the time we had reached Tina’s our legs were just about to drop off and the 2km along the unfinished road seemed like an eternity as huge trucks rumbled past us carrying huge loads of rocks. We had heard dynamite explosions throughout the day (slightly scary as we thought at first they might be rock avalanches) and when we reached the road it was evident that construction of the new road was being undertaken at a fast pace. The aim is to create a paved road through the gorge to accomodate all the Chinese tourists so that they can view the stunning beauty from the comfort of their reclining chairs – such a shame that they are going to end up destroying a large part of something so beautiful. Luckily there isn’t much evidence of all the construction from the high road so hopefully that will remain unspoilt. Finally we stumbled into Sean’s guesthouse in Walnut Garden for a well deserved cold beer and a slap up meal of pizza, chips and burritos to replenish our energy levels! The village is situated at the end of the gorge, 22km (a long 9 hour trek from Qiaotou, although guesthouse owner Sean told us he can do it in 5 and make it there and back in 12 hours!!) surrounded by towering mountains on both sides and close enough to the Yangtze that you can hear it powering through the gorge below.
The next day we set off back to Qiaotou by minibus after a chat with Sean about the gorge, apparently the mountains are still home to tigers, bears, monkeys, snakes etc – although I think tigers and bears are very rare, it is nice to think that they might have been roaming around way above us! The minibus drive turned out to be an adventure all in itself – after about 20 minutes of driving along the bumpy unfinished road, littered with rocks and trucks and construction workers, we came across a huge rockslide that had covered the entire road where we had to change to a bus the other side. Only problem was we first had to climb over the rock slide, desperately clinging on as the raging river loomed several hundred metres below, any wrong step or loose rock and we would have soon ended up a small splash way below. Fortunately everyone made it without incident to witness one of the scariest drives in the world as our minubus rattled along, passing trucks, carts and more rock piles and on several occasions coming very very close to the edge of the road – something like the Jeremy Clarkson manouevre on the Death Road in Bolivia on Top Gear! Finally we made it back alive to Qiaotou to flag ourselves down a bus bound for Lijiang after an absolutely amazing adventure in one of the worlds deepest gorges with some of the most breathtaking scenery in the world – lets hope the Chinese don’t get greedy and manage to maintain it as a beautiful place, sadly I don’t think that’s likely…
