The Two Sisters of Tiger Leaping Gorge
To begin the walk, usually people suggest you begin from Daju to walk to Qiaotou, but I think it's better to go from Qiaotou, because from the other end people will charge 80 yuan to go into Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, and then 30 for the gorge (it is cheaper with a student card). From Qiaotou you pay for the gorge but not for the mountain. And the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain there are more tourists there. Haba Snow Mountain is not so busy.
We started from Qiaotou, left Lijiang early in the morning, arrived at Qiaotou around noon. We went in January. I was with a friend. We had 20 days in Yunna: 3 in Kunming, 3 in Dali - there's a famous mountain there we climbed (Cangshan), we didn't use the cable car. From our guest house we could see the cloud laying on the mountain,it looks like a blanket of snow. Then we went to Lijiang, we only spent one day in the beginning, then to Qiaotou.
We started early afternoon, we walked until 7 pm, it was getting dark, we had to find a place to put up our tent, at the beginning we were not sure if we could camp or not, but we met a man from Naxi Guest House .He said we could camp, there was a Project Hope Primary School, that means people from the rich families in the cities give money so that children from poor families can go to study for free. It's also supported by the Government I think. Because it was winter holidays we could camp in the playground. He said because it was winter it was going to snow, we shouldn't camp, but we thought he was just trying to get business. So we camped in the playground and it did snow! The tent was leaking and it was freezing, so we couldn't fall asleep because it was too cold, it was like an igloo, We had to go out and run around the playground for warmth. At 7.30 the sun rose, so it was quite warm outside and the ice began to melt.
We slept for about 3 hours in the morning, and we went to Naxi Family to have lunch. We met some people from Belgium doing the trail. There were other people walking it, mostly foreigners. Chinese people usually like to take a taxi along the low route.
Then we climbed up the 24 Bends. People say if you walk from Daju it's easier because you go down the 24 Bends, it's not as steep to climb up from the other side.
It wasn't icy on the route, if it snowed at night it would be melted in the day. The waterfall section is a bit dangerous. There was not a lot of water, but we had to go through it. The path is quite narrow and you have to help each other - if somebody is crossing you hold their hand.
After the 24 bends we had our second day dinner at Half Way at about 4 pm and then stayed in Tina's House, we arrived when it was already dark. We met a girl who was walking it by herself, she's from Shanghai working for a Hong Kong company, studying architecture in the school, I liked her very much. She said hello first, and then we kept talking. She told me I could earn a lot working for foreign companies or Hong Kong companies. She said she could earn more than 10,000 yuan a month, that's a lot for Chinese people, but she has to work very hard, so she saved up her time for holidays. She went to Shangri-la and then down to the gorge - she said she would quit her job because it was so relaxing here and it made her think about her busy life!
We stayed at Tina's House and tried to guess the people where they were from. There were quite a few foreigners and quite a few Chinese. Because the next day was Spring Festival, the time for families to be together, they were worried the next day there was no boat, so they wanted to finish the middle gorge and then get the bus back to Lijiang, they asked if we would join them but we wanted to finish the gorge.
There were two middle-aged people from Finland there. They spoke with my friend, who's from Scotland, and he wanted to sleep. They wanted to talk, for more than two hours - they were almost too friendly. Also, they broke a hot water flask and the owner said they must pay 40 yuan for it. Next morning my friend cut his finger opening a can, and the blood wouldn't stop. Maybe it was the altitude. I was trying to tie it up and used a lot of dressing.
We stayed there one night. We got up at 8.00 a.m. and tried to find Teacher Zhang, the first man to build a route down to the gorge and get some ladders, and then we went down, it was quite dangerous really. He suggested we leave the heavy rucksacks at his guest house because it wasn't easy to climb. He had built a kind of gate or door to take charge of that way down. In the past he only took 5 yuan, but now he took 10 yuan each. Maybe you could bargain, but we thought that was OK, because it is quite difficult to build a road. He got another man to guide us down, but I don't think it's really needed. Then we got down to the rocks at the deepest part. It's very narrow. You have to climb over rocks.
To climb up we climbed a steel ladder, a Ladder to the Heavens, a different way up, then back to Teacher John's house to get our rucksacks, then we continued along the trail. The girl on her own had two bags and wasn't good at her climbing, and we each helped with one of her bags. If she didn't go with us, I don't think she could manage it. We became friends. This is a picture of me relaxing in the sunshine after climbing up the ladder. That's my rucksack on the left, that's hers on the right, and she had a bigger one. Then she asked could she go with us to the end of the travel, we said yes and went to find the ferry.
At that time we wanted to go to Daju to take the bus back, so we went to the ferry and he tried to charge us twice. I tried to bargain with him, he wasn't very polite, so we didn't take it. We had to walk back and met some Englishmen, They said there.was another ferry. It was late and we had to walk under the stars for a long time, we had to use a torch. Then we saw a light, it was really a house, but we didn't know if it was a guest house or not. People were in having a family dinner for the Spring Festival. We asked if we could stay because we had nowhere to go, and they said of course, it was a guest house! They had wind for electricity but it was not strong that day, so only a couple of rooms had light and we had to use candles. They put them on the end of the bed, on the wood, and I was worried it would catch fire.
I couldn't get my phone to work in the gorge, and missed my parents. At about 3 in the morning I went for a walk round the village, and thought of last Spring Festival when we were in a warm house having a meal with my parents, but now there's no warm water, no TV set, no electricity.
So we stayed one day there. The next day we tried to go to the next ferry. On the way we met a boy who said he could show us the way. On the way we talked about the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. He said we‘d have to pay, why not climb his Snow Mountain, and we could stay with his family, and go to Baishuitai. The other woman didn't go, she got a minibus back to Qiaotou..
We rented a room in the family house for 3 days for 100 yuan including food and bed, and we could use the car too. The man from the house drove us around in the car for 3 days for 200 yuan. Some foreigners might think they local people are very generous and don't talk about price, but then they get asked for more than they expect at the end. It's better to agree on the price at the start.
This is a picture of some of the family, the grandfather and grandmother, and grandchildren. The father was like a businessman, he knew everyone in the town. The grandmother is Naxi but the grandfather isn't, he's from Henan. He has a goat fur jacket, it's quite typical - they raise a lot of goats, and I got bugs in the bed. The woman hadn't seen a 1 yuan coin before. I don't think the grandparents have been polluted by the outside world. The grandchildren go to school there, but the oldest one was 17 years old, and he was only in junior 3, normally 14 years. The big brother called me back after I sent him things - he wanted to come to the big city, but he hasn't been to visit yet.
We stayed there three days with the family, they drove us to Baishuitai. It's a very nice place, because it was just two days after the spring festival, and all the Naxi people go to Baishuitai to kill a rooster there and eat it. This is a picture of the white rocks (white lime deposited by running water). We stood on a stone river, where the water runs through the stone.
People kill the rooster and cook them all in a pot and eat it just at that place. If you want to have a son in the future you throw some Chinese herbs in a very small hole in the rocks, you use your nose to touch the hole. I did it.
Then the man drove us to Haba Snow Mountain and we took a half day to climb the mountain, halfway up. When we were driving to the mountain, the car got stuck in the mud, and the wheels splashed all my trousers, but we got the car moving again. Then we walked on some ice, you could hear the water running under the ice, so we used sticks to test whether the ice was hard enough. I got all my socks and clothes wet, it was very cold, so after we came down we knocked on somebody's door to get warmed up, Then we came down again to stay with the family for the night.
After 3 days we went to the ferry where we met an American girl - she finished the gorge by herself, and she slept on the beach of the ferry alone just in a sleeping bag without a tent in the winter - she liked to look at the stars in the sky and just to sleep like that.
Then we got to Daju, it was a short walk from the ferry..
On the way to the bus station we met a woman from Snow Flake guest house and she said we could go to her house to buy something to drink and she could get the bus ticket for us. She only charged 2.5 yuan to get the ticket, and we could get the bus from her house to Lijaing round the other side - it was 25 or 23 yuan to Lijiang, so 2.5 yuan was OK. We didn't have to walk to the bus station, and we didn't want to miss the bus.
Her grandad had died and so we could see some minority people when someone died, their decorations in the house. She told me some of the people there live quite long, they can do farming work in their 80s, they drink the clean water from the snow of the mountain, that's why they have a long life.
When we were in Daju it was nearly 12.00, she said if we had started at 8.00 we could still have time to visit Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, but we had already climbed the Haba Snow Mountain. She told the bus driver we wanted to have a look at the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, so he found a place to stop on the way back.
Contributed by: Gong Ying
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