As the evening light slants across the gorge a terrific panorama unfolds. On the other side of the gorge the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains, easternmost bastions of the Himalaya, rise in a series of smooth columns, sinuous ravines and needle-sharp pinnacles, their dark grey sides streaked with waterfalls. What makes this place different from Annapurna, Everest, even the Karakoram, is that the tremendous height is so close. When I stop on a narrow ledge to look around me, I find myself having to plant my feet very securely, for it feels as if the soaring vertical walls across the gorge are exerting some magnetic force, determined to tear me from my flimsy ledge.
No-one speaks now, and as we plod onwards round the mountainside, silenced by the sheer scale of the place, there is only the reassuring sound of the horse bells, and the distant hiss of the river unthinkably far below.
It’s dark by the time we reach Bendi Wan village and an overnight stop at a place called The Halfway House, run by the redoubtable Mr Feng De Fang. I’ve felt rather Hobbit-like for the past hour, as the scenery increasingly grew to resemble a Lord of the Rings backdrop, and the feeling that I might have morphed into Frodo Baggins is only increased as we pull the doorbell in the dim, lantern-lit entrance and are shown into a stone-flagged courtyard hung with gourds, pumpkins and stacks of drying corncobs.
Mr Feng is a slim to cadaverous young man, quietly busying round and making sure we have a warm fire to sit beside, and from his dark barn of a kitchen he and his wife produce an excellent meal of pork and fresh-picked wild mushrooms.
There’s a small, very hot shower down below and the rooms are like those in an old alpine chalet - cosy, cool and with very thin walls.
Kept awake by a noisy game of Chinese chequers on the balcony below, I bundle myself up in the duvet and tot up the day’s work. A 12-mile walk, a 2500-foot climb and, apart from the quivering grey things, two of the best meals since we started out all those months ago.
Day Seventy Seven : Tiger Leaping Gorge
On the steps leading down to the lavatory of The Halfway House a wooden board is nailed up with a Chinese inscription that translates as ‘Number One Toilet in Heaven and Earth’. As a bit of a connoisseur, I put this ambitious claim to the test. I can report a plain and simple squat toilet, in a room half open to the elements and cantilevered out over the mountainside, with a narrow, angled channel running away into the garden below. Once in the crouch position, however, the real beauty of this little facility becomes apparent. The land seems to fall away, and all that can be seen are the walls and saw-tooth peaks of Ha Ba Snow Mountain on the other side of the gorge. In normal circumstances I’m out of these places as fast as I can, but here, feeling myself suspended above the earth, halfway to the realm of the gods, I am tempted to linger long after my work is done.
This morning an ethereal mist lingers over the mountains, making breakfast on the terrace a chilly affair. Mr Feng De Fang produces coffee or green tea, walnuts, pancakes with smooth local honey, scrambled egg and fresh apple pie in a crisp batter.
We sit and eat too much and look out over the terraced fields below, where beans, sweet corn and wheat defy the forces of gravity and an odd mixture of walnut and palm trees cluster around farm buildings whose stone walls are set solid and sturdy against earthquake impact.
It’s a serenely calming view, timeless save for a mobile phone inside a doctored mineral water bottle which hangs out over the balcony on the end of a stick. I ask Mr Feng if they keep it out there for security reasons but he says no, it’s the only place they can get reception.
Mr Feng speaks good English, which he says he learnt from British hikers on their way through. Maybe this accounts for the fact that, as we have a group photo taken, he encourages us all with shouts of ‘Lovely jubbly!’
The track continues north, clinging to the side of the rock face, the Yangtze a boiling froth 4000 feet (1220 m) below. At one point a sizeable waterfall comes bouncing off the rocks above us and we have to pick our way beneath it, over 50 yards of wet stones. I’m most concerned about the horses but they’re a lot more sure-footed than I am; perhaps there isn’t such a thing as equine vertigo.
The stony, slippery path reaches its narrowest point. The other side of the gorge looms so close that perhaps a tiger might just have made it after all.
Then we’re descending fast on steep and potentially lethal tracks of crumbling, chalky rock past bulky rhododendron bushes.
An almost unstoppable momentum delivers us eventually to the river as it emerges from the gorge. It’s 100 yards wide here and the jade-green stream twists and turns and eddies and swirls between banks of bleached brown boulders. We’ve been told that a ferry crosses here but it seems highly unlikely. There are no moorings or jetties and the water looks decidedly tricky.
Then I make out some movement on the far bank and a small, steel-hulled boat emerges from beneath the shadow of a colossal overhang and, after taking the current in a wide arc, runs in towards us and docks by ramming its stern hard up between the rocks. Painted lettering on a metal arch at one end of the boat announces it to be the ‘Tiger Leaping Gorge Ferry’. We clamber in and a man with a long bamboo pole and the looks and physique of a Spanish gymnast pushes us out onto the Yangtze with a flourish.
The boat seems very fragile all of a sudden. Its two outboard motors do their best but the current seems in control and swings us downstream beneath the overhang, where it’s very hot and very quiet. For a moment I’m anxious. The power of the river and the power of the boat seem unfairly matched. The looming rock face above us offers no comfort.
The outboards surge, choke and surge again, but we hold our own against the current and soon we’re grinding up onto a gritty beach.
An hour later we’ve climbed up to where the vehicles are waiting and I look back at the Yangtze, silvery in the twilight and calm and serene now after the trauma of the gorge, and I turn my back on it with a pang of regret.
Day Seventy Nine : Lugu Lake
There are 26 officially recognized nationalities within Yunnan, the most ethnically diverse province in China, and this morning, after a drive over the mountains and through gentle foothills spotted with Yi farms, we’re entering the homeland of the Mosuo, who, like the Yi, are primarily Tibetan in origin. Their numbers are small, around 36,000, and are concentrated around a lake that straddles the border with Sichuan Province at a height of nearly 9000 feet (2740 m).
I’m going to meet Yang Erche Namu, known simply throughout China as Namu, a Mosuo woman who, after winning a national singing contest, ran away from home and found fame and fortune as a singer and later a model in China, Europe and America. Already I’ve had a glimpse of what to expect at Lugu Lake. The tourist authorities, as anxious to bring people to these ethnic areas as they once were to keep them away, have made much of the matrilineal tradition of the Mosuo. A billboard on the way here showed inviting girls in local costume above the slogan ‘Lugu Lake Women’s Kingdom. God Living There’. They meant ‘Good Living’ but for the men who troop out to the lake in search of liberated ladies it comes to the same thing. The irony is that there aren’t enough Mosuo women willing to live up to this hype and they have had to import Han Chinese sex workers masquerading as Mosuo to satisfy the demand.
It seems to be working. With 60,000 tourists visiting Lugu last year, the lakeside village of Luoshi has become a boom town, with property prices rising as fast as the multistorey, log cabin-style hotels.
Today the waterfront has an out-of-season feel to it as I set out to find a boat to take me to the hotel Namu has just opened on the other side of the lake. A few tourists are out photographing each other, an elderly Mosuo woman walks beside the water, spinning her prayer wheel, and a line of little black piglets trots out from beneath the timber-framed buildings. In almost every shop, whether it’s selling groceries, Mosuo jewellery or tourist tat, there is a stack of Namu’s books and CDs. She’s prominent on all the covers, her trademark dark hair centre-parted and framing her face mysteriously, like a half-open curtain. She displays a range of personas: Namu looking ruminative, Namu looking beguiling, Namu looking distant, Namu showing a shapely, fish-netted thigh. She certainly looks like someone who’s outgrown Lugu Lake.