This post has been a long time coming. My last update here was published at the end of August, when I first got back to the States at the end of my travels. While it’s been slightly over a month since, the memories of my trip are still fresh in my mind, and so I feel obligated to see the whole thing through before I can no longer do so.

Appropriately, today, October 1st, is the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The nation turns 69 years old today, and everyone is in a frantic rush to enjoy the accompanying week off of vacation time.

Excluding this entry, I have three other parts of my trip that I have yet to address: my excursion out to Kazakhstan, the day and a half I spent in Urumqi, and my last few weeks back in Jinan. Hopefully those accounts will be written promptly after this one.

I last wrote about my trip to Yangshuo with my friend Zack, and that ended with him returning to his apartment in Shenzhen while I headed the other direction westward toward the Himalayas and the Burmese border, to the province of Yunnan. This was perhaps the most convoluted series of transportation that I have ever traveled on. Because of the mountainous terrain of the region, not all areas here are connected by high-speed rail like the rest of the country. I had to take a train from Yangshuo to Guilin, the cultural center of Guangxi, and from there I had to transfer train stations by taxi from Guilin North to Guilin Central, as I had to change rail lines.

From Guilin North, I took another train to Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, and from there I had to take another taxi to transfer from Kunming South station, which handles high-speed rail, to Kunming Central, which handles traditional trains. And afterwards I took one final train, a sleeper car, from Kunming to Lijiang, which is in the northwest of Yunnan.

I spent my first two days in Lijiang exploring the old city, a holdover from imperial China that has long been taken over by the insidious coils of tourism. While the traditional architecture has been preserved, the whole area is rife with luxury good vendors, American fast food restaurants, and high-end hostels and hotels.

The morning of my third day, I boarded a bus that would take me to Tiger Leaping Gorge. The gorge is where the Jinsha River, a major tributary of the Yangtze, passes between the Haba Snow Mountain and the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. It is one of the deepest river canyons in the world. I had done a fair amount of online research on hiking the trail, so I was prepared for where to go and where to stay.

When I got off the bus after a two hour drive, I bought my entrance tickets at the gate and headed to Jane’s Tibetan Guesthouse to drop off my luggage. There is an extensive system of guesthouses in the area, and Jane’s has been designated as the de facto storage space, as all transportation out of the gorge for tourists stops there.

After I dropped off my luggage, I started the hike upwards to the rim of the canyon. The weather in the area is remarkably similar to the Bay Area, and it was my first time hiking in China where I didn’t feel like I was being strangled by the heat and humidity.

The initial climb upwards was honestly the most difficult part of the hike. It was steep and muddy, and the entire trail was covered in horse manure. After two hours, I had almost given up when I came across a local family that offered horse rides. After bargaining with them to cut the price down from 150 to 75 RMB (I always love a good haggle), they took me up the rest of the way, and from there I hiked to the Naxi Family Guesthouse and decided to stay there for the night. I ate a big bowl of fried rice for dinner, and when I got to my room I was greeted with the unexpected ephemeral beauty of a rainbow right outside.

I did a bit of reading and went to bed early that night, content.

This was the view right outside my room.

I woke up the next morning at 5:30, and immediately set out. The bus I needed to catch left Tiger Leaping Gorge at 3:30 pm, so I was on a schedule. The next part of the hike is ominously named the 28 Bends, and is a series of switchbacks that ascends about two thousand meters in elevation over the course of a mile and a half.

At the top, I crossed path with two other hikers, Dominic and Loris, and I joined them for the rest of the hike, as they were also trying to catch the 3:30 shuttle. They were invaluable hiking partners to have—the banter between us kept us in good spirits and Loris had a map on his phone that saved us a few times.

We hiked through the canyon bit by bit, stopping at every guesthouse along the way. The two of them are both from Europe—Dominic is Welsh and Loris is Swiss, so we had a lot of cross-cultural questions for each other about our lives on either side of the Atlantic. The views were amazing, and since it was the rainy season, the distant roar of the Jinsha River sat behind our ears the entire time.

We had to ford two or three small waterfalls, and there were a few parts of the train we had to scramble over, but otherwise we got exceeding lucky with the weather. It normally rains every day during the rainy season, but somehow we managed to choose the one day without any rain at all. One other part of the canyon that caught my eye was the diversity of butterflies in the area: it felt like I saw five new species every hour.

We managed to catch the shuttle in time, and our driver on the way back was an ethnic Naxi man who was planning on opening his own guesthouse in the area. When he found out that I was a Chinese/English bilingual he asked me to help him create an English name for his guesthouse. After connecting with him on WeChat, I suggested “Stone Dragon Lodge,” and he happily agreed to it. I guess there is a part of me that belongs to the gorge now.

If any of you reading this ever hike Tiger Leaping Gorge, let me know and I can put you in contact with him.

After taking the scenic route back to Lijiang, I got dinner with Dominic and Loris, and as I had a train to catch that night, we parted ways.

Looking back, I am still astounded by the sheer luck I enjoyed during my hike of the Tiger Leaping Gorge. Dominic, Loris, thank you so much for letting me join you two that day. I honestly don’t know if I could have made it out of there without your help. Those two, the driver, the weather— all chance encounters that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

Afterwards, I went back to Jinan, back to my grandparents, back for the final leg of my travels.

(left to right): Oliver, Loris, Dominic.