Tiger Leaping Gorge is a World Heritage Site carved into the mountains by the Yangtze River north of Lijiang. Being a WHS, you better recognize it’s worth visiting compared to those anemic “scenic spots” that every county in China has. Many people go on an overnight trek through the trail system, and wind up either on the Lijiang side, or on the northern side and head to Zhongdian (aka fake shangrila.) With the economic meltdown ushering in a time of fiscal restraint among the populace, I decided that instead of an exhausting 2 day trip that would surely necessitate spending more money on rations than otherwise, we would do the trip in one day, thus saving money for far more important things like beer and strippers. We booked through the outdoor travel agency in Lijiang Old Town and it was 元210 per person. This included the return bus fair, entrance to the site and a Chinese guy wearing a fancy tracksuit that we could follow through the trails, so I would say it was a sweet deal.

The ride up to TLG is a trip in itself. It takes a good 2-3 hours to get from the main square of Old Town Lijiang up to the gorge, depending on how suicidal your driver is. Of course we got the guy that longed to be a kamikaze pilot, in fact he reminded me in particular of a scene in one of the nightmare on elm street movies, where the bus driver (who turns out to be Freddy) just drives a bus full of kids right off a cliff straight into hell. Most of the drive is actually chilled out; you could even catch some Z’s if you were tired from the bottles of wine you drank the night before.

The road of no return

Once through the tunnel at the parking lot where I thought the bus would be stopping, it gets a little loco. Instead of letting us out at what looked like an idyllic place for a stroll through the massive gorge, the bus continued to rumble on through an unpaved road that looked like it was once under construction, but they halted it because too many people fell off the ledge. Lucky me, I had the front passenger seat, so not only did I get to see the dead drop off to the right, but I also got to see the hairpin turns that we flew around in advance. We literally came inches away from the left side tire going off the road on more occasions than I’d like to think about. There was also a couple of times the bus would just stall on these pieces of gravel road that looked like they would collapse into the abyss far below.

my awesome view…straight down

By an act of divine mercy, we somehow made it to the drop off point in tact. The actual trek consists of a short maybe 30 minute decent into the gorge. We then stopped at the narrowest point in the gorge, the spot where legend has it, the gorge dusted off it’s pants, and jumped over a tiger to audition for a part in Circle du Soleil. Hence the name: Tiger Leaping Gorge. Sadly, the gorge did not get the part; it went instead to an Austrian midget named Zwerg.

narrowest point of the gorge

Ok so the name really comes from the obvious, a tiger supposedly outran a hunter by jumping over that narrow part of the gorge. Boring you say? Well allow me to put my physics hat on and lets go through the numbers to look at the plausibility of such a scenario. Now this part of the gorge is 25 meters across. Assuming the tiger in question had zero air resistance (if one of you geniuses out there knows the air resistance of a tiger, drop me a line), and knew that jumping at an angle of about 22 degrees would be the best way to maximize speed and distance (45 is best, but there’s no way to do that without heavily compromising running speed, ask an Olympic long jumper), the projectile…uhh I mean tiger would have to be moving at a velocity of about 18.789 M/s, or 67.6 KM/h to be able to clear that gap. Now adult tigers are reported to have top speeds between 49-65 KM/h so, if our striped friend managed to build some extra momentum coming down the side of the gorge, it might have been just enough to clear it, ignoring the resistance issue. Although there are some other points that could skew it in the Tiger’s favor, for example Tigers haven’t roamed in that part of China for a long time, and taking into account erosion, the original gap might have been narrower. So, the myth busters verdict is: plausible.

The climb up is a little tougher than the way down, but there are lots of rusty old cables running along the way for you sissies out there to hang on to. There’s also two very tall metal ladders that you can climb. I would say the hike is definitely not a walk in the park, but should be doable by pretty much anyone who isn’t in a wheelchair. Fortunately on our excursion, only 3 people died, but they were all eaten by crocodiles. The part we did begins and ends not too far from Tina’s guesthouse, which looks like it would be a decent place to stay if your going for the overnighter. Bring your own food and water. There are some huts along the route, but they, of course, are ridiculously overpriced, and the food is nothing but packaged Chinese snacks…aka chemicals shaped into unidentifiable objects. Definitely a must see if you’re in Lijiang, and apart from our group I didn’t see any of the flag following, red hat wearing tour groups that usually spawn at these types of places. I have to say it was awesome…but not nearly as awesome as chilling out in an outpost of tyranny…Dun dun DUNNN…

I don’t mind tall laders, but I do mind climbing rickety old wire ladders, while about 20 other people climb with me:

The historic city of Lijiang is one of those places that look so amazing in post cards, no matter how much money you drain on Canon L glass, no matter how well your Photoshop skills can edit Jessica Alba’s head on some porno model’s body, no matter how many grams of mushrooms you eat, you’ll never be able to capture its magic in that camera of yours. There might be a slight correlation between that unlikelihood and how it’s been transformed into a giant tourist trap.

Yes it does eat tourists, and by the thousands. But compared to any other normal Chinese city Lijiang is a breath of fresh air both literally and figuratively. I’m going to admit straight up that I liked Lijiang. From my careful research on the matter, people are polarized on it. They either see it as a tourist inferno, an unending gauntlet of knick knack shops stocked with mass made merchandise straight from the forge of hell, OR as a window into another time and a great place to kick it for the weekend. I fell into the later group because, once you get over the touristness, it’s actually very relaxing, with an endless supply of cafes, restaurants and bars. Even though it’s 100% geared towards visitors, there is a complete lack of the “lOOKa lOOka, WATCH BAG DVD” crowd. The town is well planned, there’s a dedicated bar street that’s in the west end, restaurants and cafes are strewn about everywhere and guest houses, hotels and hostels are in the east. This minimizes the eternal battle between the awesome drunken hooligans and the all-powerful army of people who want to get some fucking sleep.

With the unstoppable juggernaut of modernization, it was only a matter of time before it was transformed into what it is today, or bulldozed to make way for factories and condos. Sadly there just isn’t any money in ancient Chinese towns that don’t whore themselves out in some way. So I prefer it’s current existence to the wrecking ball. I realize that there are some disneyesque qualities about it, but it isn’t entirely fake. For example you still see people who live in the old town washing their clothes in the brooks that crisscross the cobble stone streets. The naxi food is different from regular Chinese food in a very good way. I’ll admit I’m not so sure how authentic it is because I’ve never had it anywhere else, but I do know that the Naxi sandwich (with naxi bread, not regular toast) is a tasty mofo. It’s actually probably a good thing that you’ve got places bling’d out like this mainly for tourism, because it might pull attention away from the smaller towns that want to keep their souls. Apart from the not so real aspect, the only thing I didn’t really like was the inflated prices for everything in the old town. If you’re planning on spending time there, do yourself a favor and buy all your snacks, foods and booze in the new town, you’ll probably save about one quarter. And you can put that money towards a neat trip outside of the town…like…say…Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Things you should do in the “beautiful river”:

• Eat a real naxi sandwich
• Eat some naxi cakes for breakfast (the ones with honey)
• Try drinking some Salima (drink some for me, my bottle was stolen by a dickless taxi driver)
• Take a walk down bar street and wonder why this little city of 300 odd thousand has this many bars and the city you live in of roughly 7 million has less.
• Chill out in a cafe and drink some Yunnan coffee, then get so wired that you go…
• …rent a bike, ride up the big hill to the north east of the city and check out some REAL naxi houses with courtyards, the real naxi market, and maybe score some real naxi food.
• Dump some bodies in the river and survey people’s reactions as they float by.

Lijiang Airport: Home of quite possibly the world’s smallest luggage carousel.

The two pictures on this door are called “nianhua”. They go up during the new years festival and are there to give good luck or protect the house. The one on the right is General Tao, and he ensures and unending supply of succulent chicken. The one on the right is the Unicorn Prince, he makes sure your unicorn horn isn’t forlorn…if you know what I’m sayin.

Finally a picture of Lijiang new town. The mighty peaks of Jade Dragon Mountain almost keep your eyes from being burned by the ugly, poorly made modern cityscape that’s not unlike any other.

A friend and I decided to hell with the fact that Chinese Spring Festival is the worst time of year to travel, we passed around the lube, bent over and with big bearing grins prepared for the exorbitant pain prices that we would pay for airfare and to stay in hotels at this time of year.

Our sketchy travels plans were something to the order of: go down to Kunming in Yunnan provinces, get acquainted with the scene there, get some visas to enter the member in training of the axis of evil (Burma), fly up to the fabled Lijiang to experience more tourist stalls per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world, then fly back to Kunming and onwards to Rangoon.

Lots of trees and foliage lined the streets in Kunming making the city like a jungle…if you were to make the buildings, roads, people and cars magically disappear.

Kunming was an administration stop, because I like to do the planning for my vacations while I’m actually on vacation. It adds a certain sense of urgency, panic and stress that make the memories fonder. So while we were running around booking hotels, flights, and filling out the 20 odd forms you need to get into Burma, we only managed to grab a mere glimpse of Kunming. Like seeing a naked obese man roll around in jello, a glimpse was more than enough.

Kunming is a cold city. They call it the city of eternal spring, but I would say it’s more like the city of eternal stupidity for not installing a heating system anywhere when in January and February the temperature regularly hovers between 5 and 10 degrees centigrade. I know this is common in southern cities, but Kunming’s altitude of 2000 some odd meters exacerbates the problem. Not only do most places not have heating (hospitals, hotels, modern shopping centers, airports), but they actually open up all the doors and windows, like saying “hey, our balls aren’t quite shrunk enough, lets make them even smaller!” It wouldn’t have been so bad had I brought adequate clothing, but I was again fooled by the lies of weather reports, when I should have known that it’s always 5 degrees colder, sun means smog, clouds mean rain, and rain means volcanic firestorms of hell.

Kunming does have some nice things. For example, the bird market is a great place to buy birds, contract bird flu, or to get a shiny new bong. Yunnan is poor as shit (3rd poorest province in China), so most food is much cheaper than in the east coast cities. I was able to acquire a proper breakfast at not one, but TWO different cafes, which is an infinite multiple of the number of places where this is possible in Qingdao. Yunnan food in general is very spicy and it seems easier to get a greater variety of foods than in the Shandong. Also worth noting, the people here seemed to be more “arty” or whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. There were more punk/goth hairstyles and fashions and people seemed to be more willing to go against the grain of mainstream Chinese style, which for your information is pure blandness with cheap unnecessary frill.

The traffic situation reminds me of that scene in Terminator 2, where the machines napalm the entire city of LA and all the cars are just stuck with unconvincing looking skeletons inside them, blocking the roads and highways. Despite silent swarms of e-bikes nearly flying into you whenever you tried to cross the street, there were cars gridlocked to the point of making driving a car totally fucking retarded. There’s no subway, and of course buses got stuck in the jam too. Walk you say? We were on a strict budget of time, and laziness would not permit a deviation from that. Every taxi ride would take about 45 minutes even though we were going roughly 3 or 4 km. According to one enlightened taxi driver, this is because of the dearth of highways in Kunming, and that one of the two ring roads was completely shut down for renovations. He also claimed that Kunming has the highest car per capita ratio of any city in China.

Before leaving Kunming, we figured it would be best if we picked up some anti-malarial medicine for the trip to Burma. While I seriously doubted it would come into use, being the dry season and lack of mosquitoes, common sense said it was better to be safe, then to get really sick, die and wind up as a ghost haunting the set of some campy Thai daytime soap opera. Funny thing those Kunming hospitals, because none of them seemed to know what malaria was! The one doctor, who had heard of it at some point in med school, directed us to the center of disease control of Kunming. Once there we were told to go to the 8th floor, where one of the doctors who wasn’t hard at work cooking instant noodles finding a cure for AIDS, told us the obvious, they didn’t have any there, maybe we should try the airport. The airport!? The airports here can barely serve up what some might call food, yet alone a series of meds that would protect one against a harmful virus! Giving up hope, we decided to say no to drugs and hope that the malarial mosquitoes were busy with other people…like certain individuals in Kunming.

Our time in Kunming quickly and thankfully came to a close, and it was on to the ancient Lijiang for old buildings, naxi food, things blowing up, and tigers leaping gorges in no particular order.

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There were alot of these old school styled tea shops selling…tea all packaged weird in traditional style bags. Yunnan coffee was despite its growing popularity, much harder to find.

The bird market!! :

Among the treasures we found in the bird market was this Rubik’s cube for people who are angry at Micheal Phelps, and a store that he might enjoy:

Lotus bulbs

For some reason the fruit was all hideous looking, I mean, look at those shriveled oranges, and look at those…uhh…things: