I'm sitting at the guest house with possibly the most magnificent mountain views in the world. It's the 'Halfway House' that's halfway along the Gorge hike. I haven't hiked like this since army cadet annual camp when I was 17 in Year 11 - it was quite hardcore and intensive today. I was in a group with the aforementioned 4 top blokes and all day we were hiking along the high gorge trail which is an extremely remote path that follows the Northern side of the gorge with really grand views of the Haba Snowing Mountains on the southern side. They are 5500m high at their peaks and the Yangtze rapids are maybe 1500m-2000m below you. You look up and all you see are snowcapped mountain peaks up close, you look down and you can catch glimpses of the Yangtze,at it's source almost, deepe chasm.
We ourselves had to climb a 2670m peak with a scorching Sun on our backs the whole day. THere was a 900m ascent at one point called the '28 bends' that absolutely killed us. I think I drank at least 4 litres of fluids (excluding the beers tonight) just to get through the day alive. We walked along rocky ledges with sheer cliff drops only centimetres away for much of the day but it was totally worth it for the view. Words can't describe it and even the photos that I've taken can't capture enormity of this natural wonder.
On the social side of things, Olaf, Max, Stefan, Santiago and I had an absolute blast of a time doing the trek together - we've been drinking quite a lot all night on this balcony and with 3 of them being engineers we've been talking shit on how to solve China's energy crisis.
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