NEXT!

Click for link to recent photos... stupid problem with site won't let us add photos... grrr...

We left Guilin in search of some slightly more rural parts in the south western province of Yunnan. We had the pleasure of spending a couple of days in the famous tiger leaping gorge.. which was absolutley gorgeous and such a relief to get into the mountains again... clear blue skies and sunshine accompanied us on our 2-day hike through the gorge. After the first day's 7 hour's hike up and down steep rocky paths with stunning sheer mountain faces on either side of you, we slept at the cleverly named "half way" guest house which reputedly has the toilet with the best view in the world... was a pretty beautiful pee stop I must say! A second, much easier day, mostly downhill, took us to a convenient resting lunch point where we all felt we had seen enough gorge and decided to make our way on up the province.

We arrived in Zhongdian (Shangri la county), supposedly for a bit of a rest and chill out, however this pocket-sized Chinese girl, Helen, staying in our dorm room had other ideas... she decided we were going with her to visit this place called De Qin... ok then... so off we go at 7am with her and our friend Eithan from Israel.. no idea really where or why because she spoke no english but she sorted us out and really it was amazing. The bus journey took us through 6 hours of continuously changing scenery, through stark dry hills, to forest covered mountains and finally in view of this spectactular mountain range, whose name none of us can remember but it was seriously impressive towering 6750m above us with a 12km glacier carving up the valley towards us!!! Lame I know, but details like names are unimportant! The next day was another compulsory 6am start (this is no holiday!) to see the sunrise over the mountains and get some compulsory tourist pictures. The rest of the day was spent figuring out through broken chinese and english how to get to the mountian and trek up the glacier a bit. Helen sorted out a rude boy taxi and his amzingly bad chinese-english techno-house music, took us down to the bottom of the mountain and a 3 hour trek along a well trodden forest path took us to the toe of the glacier and we all cheered! Hurrah!

Pretty exhausted we all tumbled back down the mountain and into our rude boy taxi again... I think they have only just discovered backward caps over here... and back up to our hostel. Having our Chinese friend Helen with us did make the whole thing a little easier to handle and ordering food has become much easier wince we learnt the word for rice - "mee fahn" and vegetables "chutzi" this pretty much gets us by. ANything els you want you just point at what other people are eating and they'll make that for you!

Anyway, we're back in Zhongdian again now and off up to Sichuan tomorrow... 5.30am start... I'm telling you this is no holiday! The whole of the restaurant and hostel decided to organise the next leg of our tour for us advising us not to go where the lonely planet says cos it's all over rated... so off we go into the unknown... much more fun.