Tiger Leaping Gorge Trek

Typical diologue while hiking the 28 bends of the Tiger Leaping Gorge trail:
Me：Okay，I'm a famous person.
Walsh: Are you famous?
Logan: I kill famous people!
Liam: Do you belong in the kitchen?
Me: Probably.
Liam: Sacajawea!
Me: What? no. How...
Liam: Yeah, how do you think lewis and clark survived?!
Aidan: Yeah- Don't you know her nick name?! Sandwich-ew-ea
Liam: That's my joke!

ahahahaha.. no? it was funny on the trail..

Tiger leaping gorge is about 2 hours outside of LiJiang and is known to be one of the deepest, most beautiful gorges in the world. It absolutely lives up to its reputation. Where it valleys, runs a wide river eterally murky from constant mudslides. From here the land on both sides swells up steeply into the clouds and on. Everything is lush green. But I dont really think you realize how many different color greens there are until your in the middle of nowhere with nothing better to do then look at the trees. Here and there are little villages scattered about- houses sprawled and clumped haphazardly. Around the houses are are just rows and rows of corn all on different levels making that land look like its covered in wavey greens. In all of this keep in mind that, more often then not, you can't see anything. The clouds hang low blocking the view and fog seems to obscure everything. In particular- my video camera. Due to a persistant mother and a beautiful water fall we kept getting a glimpse of, i now have a ridiculous number of pictures of fog. hahah.. But thats the thing, thats kind of what makes it so cool. Its like a curtain that opens and closes unexpectedly so only every now and then do you see the beautiful show behind.

Our first day we spent about two hours on the trail- slight incline but nothing terrible. Men with donkeys followed us the whole way up offering rides on their horses for small yuan. Walsh sorely begged for my parents to take this deal up and was denied. We stayed at Naxi Guesthouse. It was clean. Thats whats important. The electricity was bipolar and the shower head was a pop bottle but the food was rich and tasty and no one seemed to care about much else...

Next day we headed for the crux. The 28 switchbacks up steep incline. Three hours of walking... it ended up not being so bad at all- even with the packs. Anyway... we stayed at another hut that night. With nothing much to do I went to bed almost as soon as we arrived.

This morning we decided to turn back instead of finishing the trail. Due to word of mouth we found out that a mudslide had blocked the road back. We hiked out, then caught a taxi and ona wimp headed for shangri-la (our plane out of lijiang isnt for acouple days). The three hour ride was spent by me, liam, aidan and logan jamming out in the back to the kanye, ratatat, phoenix, and mgmt. very good.

Tomorrow I think well just explore this town. Shop, eat... the usual. Don't freak out, I'll keep you posted with whats happening on my side of our spinning world:)