Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [106]
“Okay, you go first,” I said to Jack.
“Why do I have to go first?” he asked.
We’d reached an impasse, an obstacle. The path had been blocked. By goats.
“Look at the way he’s looking at me,” I said. “The one with the big horns. He has ill intent. I can sense it. And now he senses my sensing his ill intent—a recipe for certain disaster.”
“You’re not quite one with nature, are you?”
“I am one with my nature, and my nature is telling me that I’m about to be rammed by a goat.”
Jack strode boldly forward into this herd of goats, which scattered to the side of the trail. And then the goat, the one with the malevolent intent, returned to the trail, again blocking it. He stared. I stared. And then, resigned, I approached it buttocks first. If I was to be rammed, better from that direction.
“I had no idea you were such a pansy,” Jack said as I joined him on the other side of the herd.
“I am a pansy,” I agreed, “but not enough of a pansy to ride a donkey above Tiger Leaping Gorge.”
And so we walked. Onward along perilous ridges, dusty trails, surrounded by mountains, fearsome mountains—not storybook Alpine mountains, or Let’s Have a Coors Light mountains, but fearsome ones. Chinese mountains. Soon, we found ourselves at the Halfway Guesthouse, where we met the owner, the jocund Mr. Fang, who, after we’d professed our admiration for his accommodations and the fine view, announced that he, too, found his guesthouse and this view to be “smashingly good.” He had with him a copy of the book Himalaya, by Michael Palin. A backpacker had left it with him, and he wanted to know what exactly Michael Palin had to say about the Halfway Guesthouse.
“Well,” said Jack as he skimmed the chapter on Tiger Leaping Gorge. “He says that you have an exceptionally fine toilet.”
“Smashing,” said Mr. Fang.
“Oh, and you might want to read this,” he said, handing me the book. “Go on,” he urged. “Read it out loud.”
I looked at the page. The trek continues north clinging to the side of a rock face, the Yangtze a boiling froth 4,000 feet below. At one point a sizeable waterfall comes bouncing off the rocks above us, and we have to pick our way beneath over fifty yards of wet stone…
“Mr. Fang, do you have any jobs for Maarten here? He can clean.”
…the stony, slippery path reaches its narrowest point…
“All right,” I said. “This is where I turn around.”
And yet we did not turn around. We ventured forth. Ever onward. Until we came to a rush of tumbling water plunging over a cliff roughly thirty feet above.
“Do you think this is it?” I asked Jack.
“Could be,” he said. “If it is, they’ve built a bridge since Michael Palin came through.”
“Look. It’s very clear. You can see it. That’s where the trail used to go,” I noted, pointing to a trail that ended in the water. “And now they’ve built a little bridge that avoids it. Yes. Excellent. No problem.”
And so we walked on, mirthfully, in good humor, confident now that the beast known as the high trail above Tiger Leaping Gorge had been slayed. Whereupon we rounded the corner to see cliffs everywhere, a narrow trail—possibly four feet across—and below us, thousands of feet of air, empty air…and then we saw it.
“Okay,” Jack observed. “So we were wrong,”
It was indeed a big waterfall, fifty feet across, and it cascaded upon a trail of mossy stones before plummeting thousands of feet into an abyss of rock. It was a Certain Death kind of waterfall, one misstep and it’s over. No waddling around in corsets. Boom. Over. Done.
“I think I might turn around now,” I said. “I would rather walk for two days than cross that waterfall.”
But continue we did. We had come this far, after all. I made no attempt to stay dry. I crab-walked through it, heart palpitating, pants soaked, looking at nothing else but where I placed my feet and hands. The wet moss was slippery, and as I inched my way forward I felt like I was playing some horrifying game of twister. I’d never been more nervous in my life. People do slip. I’d slipped. I did not want to slip again. Ever.
Finally, we were off that cliff and we began