Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [105]
“You okay?” Jack asked.
“It could be worse, I guess. There could be a waterfall too.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off my feet. I hugged the cliff. The trail was less than two feet in width, and beside me was air, a huge expanse of air, a terrible void, and far below, the river, utterly soundless. We marched on into an approaching dusk, noting the gathering clouds swirling around the mountains, and the distant rumble of thunder, and even Jack, poor Jack, poor tired Jack, began to walk, to climb, to clamber with urgency until finally, as the sun began its final descent, we entered the dusty courtyard of the Tea-Horse Trade Guesthouse, where we were greeted by a friendly English-speaking Asian man.
“So where are you from?” Jack asked him, breathing more evenly and comfortably now that the perilous climb was behind him.
“Korea,” he said.
“North or South?” Jack inquired.
He looked a little oddly at Jack. “South.”
“What, you don’t get many North Korean tourists here?” I asked our jovial host.
“No,” he said, and laughed. He was spending a month on the mountain, he told us, helping out the owner of the guesthouse.
“It is so beautiful here,” he said. “And so quiet.”
Except for the buzz saw. The guesthouse was expanding. Even up here, you couldn’t escape the thrum of Chinese construction.
The sun had nearly set as we vacuumed our dinner, when in stumbled the fashionable Chinese couple. There was much to surmise. He, I discerned, a young Shanghai businessman. Founder of an environmental NGO perhaps. Someone who valued the natural world—a rarity in China—and wanted to share this world, this majestic scenery, with the woman he loved. She. The Girlfriend. The girlfriend from hell, apparently. I’d seen her riding a donkey up the 24 Bends. She was not in her milieu. And then, once they’d arrived and she’d been apprised of the toilet situation here high above Tiger Leaping Gorge, well…she went completely ballistic. And this was interesting, because now her boyfriend, the tree hugger, the one who had suggested a stirring hike up above Tiger Leaping Gorge, felt compelled to loudly berate the toilet situation up here, dozens of miles from anywhere. He didn’t want this fight. We could tell. But fight he did, loudly, theatrically, in true Chinese fashion, yelling at the owner, who gave as good as he got. They screamed. On and on, into the darkness, beneath the glimmering light of a million stars. Until finally, the last shouts were made, the last curses were uttered, and the doors were slammed.
“They’re nuts,” Jack said. “But I don’t care. I am going to sleep so well tonight.”
There are few things more discombobulating than arising from a slumber and, as you shake the cobwebs loose from your head and try to answer the basic questions—who am I? where am I?—you step out and discover that you are facing a wall of rock, a wall like no other, a wall of Mordor proportions, dark and massive, a forbidding cliff of black stone rising to a cragged, snowcapped peak surrounded by wispy clouds. And a sky so blue that you are left so very awake, so very cognizant of everything around you, that you begin your day in a state of wonder, which is a good way to start a day. I was happy to be here, did not want to be anywhere else but here, somewhere far above the frothing Yangtze, in the mountains, away from everything.
Jack, too, arose in good spirits. Being here, high above Tiger Leaping Gorge, was an accomplishment, particularly for those with a fondness for fries and smokes, and we returned to the trail because that is what we did, walk like Mountain Men among the rocks. We had, I thought, hiked the hard part, conquered the ascent, and only had to follow an even trail until the descent to Walnut Creek, where we would end this hike. But, apparently, our troubles had not yet come