Uploading photographs of Tiger Leaping Gorge in Chengdu

I'm at a fast computer with a mug of coffee, a modern browser and a proxy. After four days of everything interesting being blocked, the whole internet is available again! If someone could bring me a plate of cheese, I'd promise never to complain about China again.

Tiger Leaping Gorge was spectacular. The Lonely Planet was all "this is the hardest hike ever even for people who are really fit. You'll probably fall down and die, unless you're killed by bandits instead. We really don't recommend it" (I'm exaggerating. A bit.), so I almost didn't go, but of course it was completely wonderful, completely doable, completely safe. Stupid book. The first half day is all uphill, but there are only a couple of hours (the famous "28 bends" section) where you hate your life a bit. The altitude makes it a bit harder to get your breath back, but I took a lot of rests and it was mostly ok.

The various groups of us who kept passing each other out eventually made a party of eight and we reached the peak together. And stopped there, because the peak had a fantastic old woman who had set up a barricade and was charging hikers 8 yuan (somewhere between a dollar and a euro) to get to the best view. Very clever! A couple of guys in our party were inclined not to pay and there was an entertaining few minutes where she was waving a rock and shouting and they weren't sure what their options were. In the end they paid. She was half their height and she had two teeth and a rock. You'd have paid too.

The minority people who live around the gorge, the Naxi, are actually pretty enterprising about making money from hikers. Apart from the photograph extortion and good guesthouses dotted along the trail, there are old guys with mules offering a lift to the top and women selling fruit, water, chocolate and marijuana. The last of those grows in fields all over the gorge and is probably a pretty valuable cash crop. There are also little fields of corn anywhere they'll fit, and we saw occasional cattle and goats, pigs, geese, hens and (I don't know why) a monkey losing its mind in a small cage. It was not a good situation for the monkey and we were sad.

The second day was a pleasant, easy four hour stroll along a cliff edge. I'm looking at my photographs now and they don't even start to do it justice. It was so great :-) They've carved a little path into the cliff, maybe a couple of kilometres up, and you're walking along with a perfect clear view of the mountains from base to peak, tiny dots of other hikers on the path in the distance. It's absolutely stunning. From time to time you have to argue with mountain goats about who's going to pass on the outside, but other than that, the path is wide enough that it's never scary, just exciting. I mean, you could definitely die if you wanted to -- if you were looking at the trail through a camera, or walking along reading text messages on your phone, you would, no question about it, walk off the edge -- but so long as you pay attention, it's really not dangerous at all.

That said, I did start the first day by hilariously walking into a drainage ditch as I left the hostel and cutting open my shin. I'm calling this good luck: (a) it's useful to get a lesson about watching your feet when you're about to walk along a gorge, and (b) if I'm really lucky it'll scar and I can be vague about how I got my impressive Tiger Leaping Gorge injury.

Here are my pictures of Tiger Leaping Gorge. They are, to be honest, not as good as other pictures you'll find of Tiger Leaping Gorge, but these ones have me in them :-> http://whereistanya.smugmug.com/China/Tiger-Leaping-Gorge/