Next we headed north to another old town - Lijiang. Full of cobbled streets, canals and woodend bridges, Lijiang would have been picture perfect if it wasn't for all the hundreds chinese tourists taking photos of everything! You literally could move down some of the lanes.

We stayed in a crazy hostel run by a local Naxi (a Tibetan Minority group) family, in which the 'Mama' cooked everyone a Naxi family dinner all together - the place was great fun, the food was interesting to try and everywhere you looked there was a dog or cat under your feet/climbing a tree/sitting on your bag (she literally had about 20 pets)! However the next day I was really ill and bed ridden so we had to put off our plans for a few days!

Once I was better we headed to the famous Tiger Leaping Gorge - the must do trek of Yunnan! We formed a group with the other trekkers from our hostel a set off early on our 2 day trek! The gorge was stunning! 16km long, 3900m deep from the top of the surrounding mountains to the rapids below!

The first day involved a 7 hour walk along dirt tracks including a section known as the '28 bends' involving an hour of zigzagging up the gorge! After spending the night in a logde right in the middle of the gorge, day 2 was another 5 hours trekking past waterfalls, past mountain goat and along sheer drops making me feel just a bit dizzy!

Finally we took some scary tracks/ladders down to the rapids at the bottom to see where the tiger supposedly leaped across. I nearly died on the hour climb back up (again im blaming it on the altitude!) but the feeling at the end was great! We'd completed Tiger Leaping Gorge!

xxx