DRIVE FAST ENOUGH AND PERHAPS THEY WON’T COUNT YOU TOO
You can ask yourself many existential questions while navigating the narrow road down Tiger Leaping Gorge in southwest China. Can a river cut through a Himalayan Mountain range? Can a tiger leap across a 20 meter-wide torrential river? Can we survive this ride without being crushed by falling debris?
The answer is: Surprisingly Yes. Unlikely. We did, barely.
Now for the details.
Busted inside a Chinese police station
“Your weight!”
– “67Kg, mam.”
“Your height!”
– “163cm, mam.”
“Your name!”
– “Dan Emodi”
“No! Your Chinese Name!”
– “Huh?! errr…. Don’t have one, officer”.
“No problem! Your Chinese name is 丹伊莫迪!”
– “Fine. What does that mean?”
“Red He Do-not Follow”
– “Say, what?!?”
“No worry. Chinese name sounds like western! Dan Yimodi”
– “OK. What’s next?”
Now don’t get me wrong. Sitting in a barren Police station in Kunming being interrogated by an English-speaking policewoman could have been a lot worse. I came out an hour later with a newly minted Chinese Name and a Chinese driving license to boost. Not a bad day’s work.
“Just remember five important rules,” she told me before I left:
- don’t pass the speed limit
- If a Police officer tells you to stop, stop.
- If you see an accident or someone wounded at the side of the road stop to assist.
- – 5. Don’t remember, but they were equally unchallenging.
We took a photo together with the station officers and off we went. Who said driving in China is complicated!?
The river that could
Driving in real China – as it turned out – stand in stark contrast to the simple – straight forward traffic rules I was taught in the previous chapter. The back roads of Yunnan Province, contain surprises of all the wrong types. Semi-Trailer trucks performing U-Turns in the middle (and all over) a four-lane highway. Family camps in the middle of the road just behind a blind curve. Road collapse into an abyss (last one – very common), Transformational Darwinism – in which pedestrian is the lowest on the food chain and truck is on top. I’m not even talking about speed signs and traffic Police – there are none to be found. To cut a long story short, we survived the 10-day drive. Shaken a bit, but thankfully not stirred.
As we drove all along the vast Yunnan Province, we also discovered a river CAN cut straight through a Himalayan mountain range. And what a cut it is – almost 4,000 Meters deep! 15 KM long from one side to the other. There are very few examples of a river dissecting a massive range into two. Then again very few rivers are the mighty Yangtze – Earth’s 2nd largest river.
The gash is called the “Tiger Leaping Gorge”. Standing (in owe) at its entrance, It looks as if a giant’s hand drove a wedge-looking hot knife through a 5.5Km-high lump of butter. The Funny thing is that – Geologically speaking – that’s pretty much a good description of what really happened.
Natural History. Condensed
So how can a river cut straight through mountains?
Well, to begin, it needs to be big, and it needs to be running water through the land before the mountains rose in the first place. This is exactly what happened in this corner of the world 40-odd million years ago when tectonic shifts collided the Indian subcontinent straight into Asia. The impact has been slowly rising up the Himalayas (which by-the-way are still rising as I write these words) allowing the river the necessary time to constantly cut through the slowly crumpling terrain around it.
As the range continued to grow so did the river continue to curve deeper. It still is.
The land is alive (with the sound of falling rocks)
We stand at the southern entrance to the gorge. It is an unearthly sight to behold. Like a scene from the Lord Of The Ring, a wall of impenetrable spiky mountains tower 3,5Km meter above our 2,000-meter viewpoint and stretches to each side as far as the eye can see. 400 meters below us the mighty river flows out of the gorge silently. I snap a picture with my Nikon DSLR. You can see it here, but nothing I can post would deliver the sheer size of the thing.
Imagine this: you could fit NYC Empire State Building between the road entering the gorge – visible is the photo as a thin line – and the river below. THIS is how massive Tiger Leaping Gorge is.
It’s also dangerous.
As the mountain around it keeps growing, the Yangtze keeps digging, and gravity keeps being gravity, Falling rocks is nature way of telling you the whole system is alive.
You don’t a degree in geology to understand this firsthand. A quick look at the scarred, wounded tarmac ahead – a result of many avalanches – is enough to understand nature isn’t joking here. This is not Disneyland or a Six Flags rollercoaster. You could get hurt. “12 foreigners died on this road last year, says Rina, our local guide. “How many Chinese?” we ask her back instinctively.
“The government doesn’t count dead Chinese, only foreigners. Besides, it’s the dry season now. The chances of rock avalanche are much lower”, she answers reassuringly. We think about her words for a minute as we look at the gray sky which now starts to drizzle, and then plod on.
The tiger that probably couldn’t
Tiger leaping gorge is massive. It’s so massive as to defy one own perception of massive. The towering cliff on the other side of the gorge? Yes, the one that looks like it’s almost the size of Bourge Khalifa in Dubai? That’s 2,500 meters high!
Go figure.
The battered road is pockmarked with few villages and settlements that look tiny only when compared to the nature that surrounds them. We continue to drive up the Yangtze river, always hearing it pounding some 400-500 meters below us.
Our goal is the narrowest point of the gorge. A place where the world’s 2nd largest river squeezes its way through a 30-meter-wide ravine. The pace that gives this unreal place its name. Like almost everything in China, this place has a story wrapped in legends. Since I am a “get-to-the-point” uncultured “Wei Lo” I’ll sum it up as follows:
Once upon a time, there was a tiger who was viewed by someone to jump from one side of the narrowest point of the gorge to the other. Hence – Tiger Leaping Gorge. There. Simple.
We stop at the said point and descend a string of long staircases to the gushing waterway below. The sound is incredible, and so is the view – like a horizontal Niagara Falls in which the water doesn’t fall down but rather shoot sideways through the tight gully. In the middle of it all there lies a massive village-killing rock making the water pathway even more constricted. Could a tiger really cross this thing? Not unless it was a T-1000 Schwarzenegger cat with JATO units strapped around it.
On the other side
But hey, we’re here for the experience, not to spoil old Chinese legends. Climbing up the staircases back to road reminds us all that we’re nowhere near sea-levels (and probably also nowhere near our optimal physical fitness levels).
The roadsign that greats us as we drive away from the parking place to the nearby gorge exit say “beware of falling rocks and truck”. We have no idea how to best comply.
By now the Tiger Leaping Gorge is behind us. The semi-dry landscape at the other side has now changed to lush green. We are relieved to have survived the massive canyon without being added to any statistics. On our way to the town of Lijiang, we can’t help but think what would have it taken us to cross that gorge ourselves.
