Tiger Leaping Gorge

From Zhongdian we took the bus down to Qiaotou and stayed the night before getting an early start on the trail. We had 2 gorgeous sunny days and the views and the scenery were amazing. The first day was mostly an uphill trek. The 28 bends in the path turned out to be more than 40 and we ended up at around 2670m. There were many guesthouses along the way, so you only needed to walk for a couple of hours before stopping for tea. We stayed the night at the Halfway House which was far more luxurious than we had anticipated - it even had ensuite bathrooms with hot showers! The next day we continued to descend down to the new road. It was then only another half an hour to the small village known as Walnut Garden. We checked into our guesthouse, had lunch and then spent the rest of the afternoon walking down to the Middle Rapids. This path was very overgrown and in some places had eroded into a vertical drop. There were also rather a lot of yellow and green stripey spiders to avoid. The hike back up the cliff was very hot and tiring. We were pooped. The next day we hitched a lift back to Qiaotou but the minibus didn't have any seats so it was a bit of a kamikaze drive. After one near miss with a tour bus I would have bailed out - only my door was tied shut with some very frayed rope - it made corners a bit of an experience. The bus back to Lijiang was more sedate (the bus unable to do over 40mph). After a day of chilling out in the souveneir capital of Yunnan we took the evening flight to Chendgu.