When we finally reached Qiaotou around 11.15, it was baking hot. A man came onto the bus telling us we had to pay the 30 yuan each for a ticket to go into the gorge, and a woman who sounded vaguely Australian called into the bus to say she had some important news to tell us. It turned out this was Margo who runs the Gorged Tiger Cafe in the town, and provides food, information and baggage storage for gorge walkers. She had moved the cafe to a new location a few days earlier and it was only half painted inside. A group of Americans whom we had spoken to at Lijiang bus station were there too, as well as the English people from our bus. Margo offered drinks and food - we needed to stock up on water, and had some tea while we caught up on the news. Apparently there had been an attack on a lone female walker on the trail below Tina's Guest House, down towards Walnut Grove. There had also been reports of hikers getting upset stomachs after staying at one of the guest houses. It seemed there were more perils than just falling off the side of the gorge!

Margo also had a pile of sketch maps available showing the route, and we took one - it had been impossible to get one in Lijiang. We weren't quite sure how far we'd get on the first day, as we were starting so late, but hoped to reach the Tea Horse !

LET LEAPING TIGERS LIE

Visit southwest China’s Famous gorge before two dams put it under water, advises Michael Beatty

Victorian-born Margo carter surveys the drizzle sprinkling onto the muddied street outside her Gorged Tiger Café in Qiaotou, southwest China.

“well, the wet season’s started, but that hasn’t stopped the buses,” she says. “There seem to be more every day.”

The buses are lined up on the road as if for a drag race. From Qiaotou they’ll hurtle down a 5km winding stretch of road that boasts Unprotected

2000m drops and leads the first part of a monstrous gorge that flanks nearly 30km of the jinsha River in Yunnan province.

The buses are packed with tourists, about 90 percent of whom are Chinese. They have come to reflect on the towering rock majesty of Tiger Leaping Gorge,

So called because at one point the walls of the gorge are so narrow, the locals say a tiger once leapt across to escape a group of hunters.

The gorge now hosts hundreds of visitors every day; some are too old and frail to walk down the 2000-odd steps to the raging river but the locals have capitalized on that problem. They offer either a stretcher or horseback service, and along the track Naxi children pose in traditional costume and charge one yuan for a photo.

But it’s not the Chinese tourists their large, erratically driven buses who are Margo’s customers. Hers are foreign backpackers who call in at the Gorged Tiger Café before setting off on the exhausting trek through the gorge to Daju. She dispenses tea, coffee and beer, and offers advice about clothes, provisions and accommodation.

Margo was born in Bendigo, Victoria, and makes special recommendations for Sean’s Guesthouse, an eight-hours walk from Qiaotou.

Locally-born Sean (xiashan quan) is Margo’s husband, whom she met while trekking the gorge nearly 10 years ago. She has lived in china for eight years, speaks reasonably fluent Mandarin and has a fair sprinkling of the local dialect. Sean looks after the Guesthouse with the help of assorted family members and Margo runs the Gorged Tiger Café, meaning they spend a lot of time apart, and there are no phone lines or internet cables in the gorge.

But natural wonders far outweigh the lack of electronic trappings. The gorge is 2500m deep, with the Haba and Yulong Snow mountains towering a further 3000m, The sheer size is Breathtaking, but trekking can be hazardous, particularly in the wet season. Landslides are, quite common often obscuring the existing tracks and leaving puffing trekkers wondering where to go next (although for those with limited fitness, local transport is available on the road below).

     From the entrance of the gorge, where large buses deposit their tourists from Beijing and Shanghai, the road is mostly dirt, with loose rocks and gravel often making steering tricky. Even though none of the larger buses ventures off the bitumen, to the uninitiated, the drops make the journey terrifying. During the past 10 years, small guesthouse have sprung up on the walking trek and by the road. Sean’s lies in a tiny hamlet bearing the unlikely name of Walnut grove Goats graze on the mountainside above and patio tables face a gigantic wall of rock that seems to stretch into the heavens.

Sean is an engaging host with a longer ponytail and a crippled left hand; he attributes the latter to a beating he received during the Cultural Revolution. He’s passionate about the future of the gorge and sees big problems ahead.

“They’re talking about paving the road and that will mean anin flux of large tourist buses,” he says.” instead of building small guesthouse that blend in with the environment, they’ll build gaudy hotels that will ruin the area  and eco-tourism will disappear. The locals won’t be able to compete and they’ll lose their livelihood.”

It’s already starting to happen: the owners of Woody’s and Tina’s guesthouse have constructed building that would not look out of place in modern Shanghai. A big hotel chain is also interested in acquiring land in Walnut Garden and if  the road is paved, development will undoubtedly follow. But the real problem facing the locals could be much worse. Two large dams have been proposed by the Huaneng Power Corporation. One would create a200km reservoir that would drown whole communities and the farmland of the Naxi people. Would be displaced and Tiger Leaping Gorge would effectively be come a stagnant lake.

No environmental impact study has been completed, but work has already begun, with engineers Drilling narrow tunnels into the mountain. Part of the the corporation’s apparent immunity could be because it is controlled by Li Xiaopeng, the son of former premier Li Peng .Incredibly, most local Naxis seem to be unaware of what the future holds. But back in Qiaotou , Margo knows only too well. “It would be a disaster,” she says.

“We have something unique here; not just for China, but the world. Would the world allow the US to flood the Grand Canyon? Of course not. Well Tiger Leaping Gorge is deeper than the Grand canyon.” The future looks uncertain. See it while you can: six years from now, the Gorged Tiger Café could be under water.