we think this is actual fog, not pollution, but thats not really clear

As far as gorges go, this one was pretty sweet

Actually did this trip on monday, but haven’t had much time to post since then. There’s barely been fifteen minutes this whole week where I haven’t been either wandering around china, doing homework, or sleeping; I generally write stuff here when I feel like studying isn’t getting me anywhere. In any event, the gorge was actually incredible. We got up bright and early Monday morning to catch our 8am bus for a two hour ride to the gorge. None of us had even heard of the place, much less knew what sorts of things to expect. All sorts of things from bungee jumping to hang gliding had been vaguely hinted at, though, so we were pretty excited (W/r/t/ hang gliding — it turned out to be a mistranslation of zipline. Unfortunately, I was way more interested in hang gliding than I was in bunjee jumping, so when the former option dissappeared I ended up doing neither. You can relax now, Mom).

om nom nom, says the dragon. tourists are delicious.

Tacky? nahhh

Anyway, on the way to the gorge, we passed a big section of the Great Wall on the bus. We’re going there in a week or so with the president of Northwestern, which is cool. We have also been promised a very, very good meal at a relatively upscale hotel. I may or may not be looking forward to this more than the wall itself — this food is supposed to be incredible. 

Once we got there, the only way to actually access the gorge and its river was to take a really long series of escalators up a mountain. It made me feel really, really lazy but was actually kind of awesome, especially considering that the Chinese have tastefully elected to conceal the escalators via a gigantic yellow dragon. Thus:

After we cleared the escalators, we found ourselves at the edge of a huge lake/river thing, which we naturally then cruised down to get to all the tourist attractions. The cruise itself though was probably one of my favorite parts of the trip though, considering that it was absolutely breathtaking the entire way. It eventually pulled up to a really sketchy metal dock in the heart of the gorge. We toured through a few temples, and then were set free to paddle around the lake in canoes, bunjee jump, zipline, or eat.

i think that's allison. unclear

Bunjee jumping off the edge of some random Chinese gorge. What could go wrong?

I watched the bunjee jumpers for a while, ate, and then just wandered around. We weren’t there for too too long, and had to leave within a couple hours. We cruised back, then took a really cool alpine-slide style thing down to the base. Just, for a second, look at that slide thing.

Basically, aside from I guess the temples, there wasn’t a single man-made part of this trip that didn’t look hastily welded together and extremely unsafe. But the whole experience went off without a single hitch, which has forced me to reconsider a little bit — I think i’m gradually coming to accept that appearances aren’t everything here. Alternatively, I’m wrong, everything actually is super sketchy, and I’m just stupidly lucky and should probably already have died at the hands of an insane taxi driver or something. We’ll just have to see.

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