Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (34 page)

“The air is a little thinner up here.”

“I…My head hurts. I don’t know. I can’t go on.”

“Look,” I said. “This is the hardest part. But we’re almost at the top, and then it should flatten out. If you’re really struggling, we’ll just hail another donkey.”

Slowly, we continued to climb, until finally the trail evened out. And then, around a bend, it was my turn to fall apart.

The trail had been carved across a cliff that plunged thousands of feet to the river below. Every year, a few hikers go toppling off. Probably right here, I reflected. Because this looked like an excellent place to fall off a mountain. I was achingly familiar with the knowledge that, now and then, shit does happen. People do fall. Indeed, once while clambering on some rocks above a waterfall in southwestern Turkey, I’d slipped and found myself hurtling over said waterfall, landing unhappily on the rocks below. I spent the next six months waddling around in a tight-fitting corset waiting for my fractured vertebrae to heal. So I knew, painfully knew, that bad things do happen. People do plunge off cliffs. And thus the wooziness with heights.

“You okay?” Jack asked.

“It could be worse, I guess. There could be a waterfall too.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off my feet. I hugged the cliff. The trail was less than two feet in width, and beside me was air, a huge expanse of air, a terrible void, and far below, the river, utterly soundless. We marched on into an approaching dusk, noting the gathering clouds swirling around the mountains, and the distant rumble of thunder, and even Jack, poor Jack, poor tired Jack, began to walk, to climb, to clamber with urgency until finally, as the sun began its final descent, we entered the dusty courtyard of the Tea-Horse Trade Guesthouse, where we were greeted by a friendly English-speaking Asian man.

“So where are you from?” Jack asked him, breathing more evenly and comfortably now that the perilous climb was behind him.

“Korea,” he said.

“North or South?” Jack inquired.

He looked a little oddly at Jack. “South.”

“What, you don’t get many North Korean tourists here?” I asked our jovial host.

“No,” he said, and laughed. He was spending a month on the mountain, he told us, helping out the owner of the guesthouse.

“It is so beautiful here,” he said. “And so quiet.”

Except for the buzz saw. The guesthouse was expanding. Even up here, you couldn’t escape the thrum of Chinese construction.

The sun had nearly set as we vacuumed our dinner, when in stumbled the fashionable Chinese couple. There was much to surmise. He, I discerned, a young Shanghai businessman. Founder of an environmental NGO perhaps. Someone who valued the natural world—a rarity in China—and wanted to share this world, this majestic scenery, with the woman he loved. She. The Girlfriend. The girlfriend from hell, apparently. I’d seen her riding a donkey up the 24 Bends. She was not in her milieu. And then, once they’d arrived and she’d been apprised of the toilet situation here high above Tiger Leaping Gorge, well…she went completely ballistic. And this was interesting, because now her boyfriend, the tree hugger, the one who had suggested a stirring hike up above Tiger Leaping Gorge, felt compelled to loudly berate the toilet situation up here, dozens of miles from anywhere. He didn’t want this fight. We could tell. But fight he did, loudly, theatrically, in true Chinese fashion, yelling at the owner, who gave as good as he got. They screamed. On and on, into the darkness, beneath the glimmering light of a million stars. Until finally, the last shouts were made, the last curses were uttered, and the doors were slammed.

“They’re nuts,” Jack said. “But I don’t care. I am going to sleep so well tonight.”

There are few things more discombobulating than arising from a slumber and, as you shake the cobwebs loose from your head and try to answer the basic questions—who am I? where am I?—you step out and discover that you are facing a wall of rock, a wall like no other, a wall of Mordor proportions, dark and massive, a forbidding cliff of black stone rising to a cragged, snowcapped peak surrounded by wispy clouds. And a sky so blue that you are left so very awake, so very cognizant of everything around you, that you begin your day in a state of wonder, which is a good way to start a day. I was happy to be here, did not want to be anywhere else but here, somewhere far above the frothing Yangtze, in the mountains, away from everything.

Jack, too, arose in good spirits. Being here, high above Tiger Leaping Gorge, was an accomplishment, particularly for those with a fondness for fries and smokes, and we returned to the trail because that is what we did, walk like Mountain Men among the rocks. We had, I thought, hiked the hard part, conquered the ascent, and only had to follow an even trail until the descent to Walnut Creek, where we would end this hike. But, apparently, our troubles had not yet come to an end.

“Okay, you go first,” I said to Jack.

“Why do I have to go first?” he asked.

We’d reached an impasse, an obstacle. The path had been blocked. By goats.

“Look at the way he’s looking at me,” I said. “The one with the big horns. He has ill intent. I can sense it. And now he senses my sensing his ill intent—a recipe for certain disaster.”

“You’re not quite one with nature, are you?”

“I am one with my nature, and my nature is telling me that I’m about to be rammed by a goat.”

Jack strode boldly forward into this herd of goats, which scattered to the side of the trail. And then the goat, the one with the malevolent intent, returned to the trail, again blocking it. He stared. I stared. And then, resigned, I approached it buttocks first. If I was to be rammed, better from that direction.

“I had no idea you were such a pansy,” Jack said as I joined him on the other side of the herd.

“I am a pansy,” I agreed, “but not enough of a pansy to ride a donkey above Tiger Leaping Gorge.”

And so we walked. Onward along perilous ridges, dusty trails, surrounded by mountains, fearsome mountains—not storybook Alpine mountains, or Let’s Have a Coors Light mountains, but fearsome ones. Chinese mountains. Soon, we found ourselves at the Halfway Guesthouse, where we met the owner, the jocund Mr. Fang, who, after we’d professed our admiration for his accommodations and the fine view, announced that he, too, found his guesthouse and this view to be “smashingly good.” He had with him a copy of the book
Himalaya,
by Michael Palin. A backpacker had left it with him, and he wanted to know what exactly Michael Palin had to say about the Halfway Guesthouse.

“Well,” said Jack as he skimmed the chapter on Tiger Leaping Gorge. “He says that you have an exceptionally fine toilet.”

“Smashing,” said Mr. Fang.

“Oh, and you might want to read this,” he said, handing me the book. “Go on,” he urged. “Read it out loud.”

I looked at the page.
The trek continues north clinging to the side of a rock face, the Yangtze a boiling froth 4,000 feet below. At one point a sizeable waterfall comes bouncing off the rocks above us, and we have to pick our way beneath over fifty yards of wet stone…

“Mr. Fang, do you have any jobs for Maarten here? He can clean.”

…the stony, slippery path reaches its narrowest point…

“All right,” I said. “This is where I turn around.”

And yet we did not turn around. We ventured forth. Ever onward. Until we came to a rush of tumbling water plunging over a cliff roughly thirty feet above.

“Do you think this is it?” I asked Jack.

“Could be,” he said. “If it is, they’ve built a bridge since Michael Palin came through.”

“Look. It’s very clear. You can see it. That’s where the trail used to go,” I noted, pointing to a trail that ended in the water. “And now they’ve built a little bridge that avoids it. Yes. Excellent. No problem.”

And so we walked on, mirthfully, in good humor, confident now that the beast known as the high trail above Tiger Leaping Gorge had been slayed. Whereupon we rounded the corner to see cliffs everywhere, a narrow trail—possibly four feet across—and below us, thousands of feet of air, empty air…and then we saw it.

“Okay,” Jack observed. “So we were wrong,”

It was indeed a big waterfall, fifty feet across, and it cascaded upon a trail of mossy stones before plummeting thousands of feet into an abyss of rock. It was a Certain Death kind of waterfall, one misstep and it’s over. No waddling around in corsets. Boom. Over. Done.

“I think I might turn around now,” I said. “I would rather walk for two days than cross that waterfall.”

But continue we did. We had come this far, after all. I made no attempt to stay dry. I crab-walked through it, heart palpitating, pants soaked, looking at nothing else but where I placed my feet and hands. The wet moss was slippery, and as I inched my way forward I felt like I was playing some horrifying game of twister. I’d never been more nervous in my life. People do slip. I’d slipped. I did not want to slip again. Ever.

Finally, we were off that cliff and we began our downward descent, gleeful, until we could see at the bottom of a rugged escarpment the village of Walnut Grove. Few places have elicited more ecstatic ramblings than this village near the terminus of the high trail at Tiger Leaping Gorge. So remote for so long, Walnut Grove was once
the
place to be in China to experience that remote, I’m-in-a-beautiful-setting-in-a-charming-Chinese-village-without-electricity-or-telephones-though-there-is-beer vibe. It’s what everyone yearns for in western China: authenticity mixed with beer. Today, however, Walnut Grove is essentially a truck stop. There is a low trail through Tiger Leaping Gorge, and whereas once it was a footpath, today it is a two-lane road, upon which tour buses and taxis and minibuses shuttle Chinese tourists to the very rock from which the tiger had made its leap. The road had finally reached Walnut Grove, transforming a hamlet of Naxis and backpackers into just another chintzy town of cement-block hotels and souvenir shops.

But while the road followed the low trail, it’s all relative at Tiger Leaping Gorge. We’d made arrangements with a minibus driver to take us back from Walnut Grove to Qiaotou, where we’d left our packs, and as we sped over this road, hundreds of feet above the Yangtze, I noted the lack of guardrails, and the enormous potholes, and the huge boulders that had tumbled from above, and the fact that that the driver, driving one-handed as he barked into a cell phone, was of the Fuck You school of driving, and I made a mental note that however I got into Tibet, where I hoped to go soon, it would not be by car because it would combine so much of what I feared in China: heights and driving. And I saw that this mountain was looking to dislodge this road from its slopes, wanted nothing to do with it, and I thought there might be hope yet for Walnut Grove. Perhaps one day it would again be a simple hamlet. Because the road was evaporating, disappearing, tossed down into the river by a spiteful mountain.

When we arrived back at Jane’s Guesthouse, it was too late to go anywhere else. One would think that as the village at the trailhead of the famed Tiger Leaping Gorge there would be some charm in Qiaotou. Or at least something to do. But this turned out to not be the case. It was drab and dull, though as we found a restaurant overlooking the river, we noticed all the trash floating in the water, heaps of it, a colorful antidote to all this natural beauty, a depressive actually. No one would approach us to serve us, however, and so we moved across the street to a simple restaurant where we pointed at the dishes of other patrons.

“It’s kind of a dump here,” Jack observed.

“Yes, it is. But you know what? Tomorrow we’ll be in Shangri-la.”