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Date: August, 2004
Location: China
After Sapa I crossed the
nearby border into China. Anyone who has
been to China can testify that the first thing you notice, besides the
sheer number of people (1.3 BILLION), is the amount of men who smoke and
spit ... loudly! I have yet to see a Chinese woman smoke in public, and
I soon learned that that is taboo.
With two girls from Sweden I took a night bus to Kunming.
This was the first bus I had ever ridden that had actual beds in it, so I
slept great! Kunming was not particularly interesting, but I got some
recommendations from two Dutch guys I went to an impressive stone forest
with, so I headed on a night train west to Dali, the capital of a former kingdom.
My "highlight" in Dali happened on a nearby mountain that I climbed up
and got hopelessly lost on. This was also a rather scary moment! I
eventually found an empty stream bed that I trekked/slid/jumped down for
a good hour before I miraculously found a recently-dynamited road.
Biking back into town I got more than a few strange looks, as I was caked
in mud and full of cuts!
Also in Dali I visited a kung fu school with an American I had met. It
was in a monastery on the side of the mountain and was really
interesting. Although the students had a day off, one of them
demonstrated some of the AMAZING things he had learned in the year he had
been there. After he becomes a "Master," he would like to teach kung fu in a Western country.
My next stop was a town called Lijang,
which like Dali, has a very interesting Old City. The highlight there was
a traditional musical performance I attended that included 25 performers,
each playing a different instrument! While in Lijang I also met a
Mandarin-speaking Singaporean who invited me to join a big road trip he
had planned to a Tibetan horse racing festival in a town called Litang.
Since I still wanted to trek Tiger Leaping Gorge I agreed to meet him in
a town called Zhongdian, where they
were going to stay one night, and I took off for Tiger Leaping Gorge
the next morning.
The first three hours of my trek into Tiger Leaping Gorge were uphill and
full of loud, echoing explosions from a road that was being dynamited at
the bottom of the gorge. On a particularly steep uphill climb through
mud in the rain, one of the explosions caused a small landslide, and a
huge boulder landed about 10 feet in front of me. Between that and
getting lost on the mountain in Dali I was beginning to think I was
pushing my luck!
The rest of the trek was nothing short of spectacular though, and I am
not exaggerating when I say it was the single, most impressive thing I
have EVER seen in nature. If you ever go to China, do not miss it!!!
The following day, I took a helacious, seven-hour ride on terrible
roads over numerous mountains to Zhongidan. At one point we had to wait
over an hour to cross a huge mud pit that was backing up traffic, as
passengers had to push their vehicles through the pit (that was actually
quite fun though!). The next morning I joined Teri's caravan, and for
the next two full days we drove through AMAZING scenery that changed
dramatically the higher we climbed.
- Greg
For the next leg of Greg's around the world trip, click here...
Or if you want to see what he was up to before China, click here...
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