The high pass to Tibetan Border and tigers leaping
Headed north from Dali (chinese) tourist central to Lijiang (chinese) tourist central. Another undoutedly pretty town, but pretty much remade and filled with souvenir shops but with the impressive back drop of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (jesus they know how to name things round here!). An afternoon was enough to get a flavour of the place and book bus tickets for an early morning exit to the start of the Tigar Leaping Gorge Trek (I refer you to the naming comment made one sentence earlier).Tigar Leaping Gorge is a 2000m deap gouge cut but the young yangzee, along the side of which runs the ancient tea horse trail (part of the silk road) at around 500m above the river. The trek along the length of the gorge takes a day, covering 23km up to a height of 2600m through beautiful pine woodlands and small Tibetan and Naxi villages. I (sensibly) had decided to tackle this distance, altitude and climb with the assistence of a 25kg pack. about 3 hours in at the steepest part of the climb rest stops were about every 10m, locals kept offering me a horse but i refused resolutely remembering the harrison family moto (no joke - 'success through endurance' - so true). The scenery was breathtaking but as i have the assistance of photos today i won't try to clumsily describe it... After an evening spent at the end hitched a ride the next morn back along the 'closed' lower road to the start. Why closed? well that must be something to do with the multitude of landslides our car had to dodge around. I mean, they only covered one lane generally and only were every 100m or so, so hardly needed a closed road, right? wrong. About half way down the gorge we reached a landslip that had enveloped the entire road. 6m high and 20 deep, massive boulders the size of several cars and tons of scree created quite an obsticle. Now we knew what had caused the huge crashing noise we had heard the previous day. The only way past was on foot. Blood was pumping somewhat as i scrambled over, under my feet the rocks slip away and fell to the river 50 m below and from above small stones pitter pattered on my head making me fear another fall was imminent. Once on the otherside i ran the next section until clear of the over hang...phe, still alive.... which was lucky as it meant i got to enjoy the beautiful bus ride to Zhongdian through a plateau of tibetan villages, yaks and large hay stacks drying on enormous trestles.Once at Zhongdian it seemed at first i'd arrive at a bomb site, relentless construction meant the bus station was part of a huge building site. The building boom also meant that the Loney Planet map was completely wrong so it took half an hour of wandering and asking bemused non english speaking locals where the hell i was. Eventually someone pointed us in the right direction and half and hour later we were in the old town. We explored the old town which was still in a fairly origional state, but the building and polishing up had started, so in a year or two it will be another Dali/Lijaing style tourist trap. Zhongdian also boasts a fairly impressive monestry perched on a small hillock in the centre of a valley north of the town. On the top of the hillock the temple sits and around clustered on the hill sides are the monks small residences. They wander about in dark red robes the young ones playfully mucking around and on mobiles whilst the older march stoically, eyeing the tourists.Leaving Zhongdian on an early bus a 6 hour trip took us over a 5000m pass to the town of Dequin. The pass rose firstly a blasted moonscape rift with cut by the mekong and then up through autumnal alpine forest to the snow line and then down again to Dequin. Dequin sits just 10 miles from the Tibetan border but unfortuneately there is no (legal) way for foreigners to cross here. So after a day exploring the area we headed back here to Lijiang and tommorow will be heading to Chengu in China's center.
posted by justplainnigel @ 2:17 PM
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