Trickery in the mountains.

I knew hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge wasn’t going to be easy. It’s a mountain after all, even if it does have Chinese characteristics—terraces carved into the sides at unthinkable heights—this only reassured me that indeed the Chinese are crazy, not me. I’d probably break a sweat, sure, and inevitably curse myself for not running more prior to the 28 bends, but hey, I could do it. I’d backpacked Patagonia—I knew what I was doing.

Wrong.

I wish I could say it was just at the 20th bend that the difficulty crept in. That, later I'd find that it hadn't been my calves that had gone weak like limp pasta, but like a foreign fool, I’d fallen for the trap of the Chinese Minority woman selling a bowl of her locally grown weed--it's offered everywhere a foreigner may travel to in Yunnan--and yet I had blissfully decided to sit for a spell. (But really, later I'd scream, "What sucker would do that before hiking a mountain's steepest, most unforgiving hurdle?" And truly, I do not know.)

For those who don’t know the “bends,” they're zigzags that curve like a tight-coiled spring, not akin to a natural trail in the least. They’re undisputably the hardest part of the whole 18-mile hike. In the matter of those 28 bends, which only spread to roughly 300 meters, you ascend that distance three times over, I'm sure of it. But we hadn’t even gotten close to those troubles when our turmoil began.

No, we hadn’t even found the trail. We had only paid for it.

“200 meters ahead, turn left,” the Chinese ticket seller told us in plain English. Easy enough, we thought.

Running track in high school is only my preparation and attempt to understand the measuring system outside the United States. But no matter my time away, I’m ingrained like the homing syndrome of a duck raised by a human. I’m sure I’ll always think in pounds, miles, and Fahrenheit. 200 short meters, however, is simple because of my running sport. I can even visualize the speed that used to go with. But we breezed past the 200 meters, there was no clear left turn.

She was a bitch, I’d hear Wes rant 30 minutes later, still speaking of the ticket seller, as we tried without luck to find our exit from the paved highway. We needed to find the high trail, the low trail wasn't a challenge. We asked each passing patron, in car or foot, retracing our steps several times over as each pointed in contrasting directions.

(Later, this would become typical of the signage. Not highly visible, in the least if you actually looking at the trail.)

That's the thing, the Chinese are notorious for giving you false answers if you ask one for directions. Rather than admit they’re not sure, they'll save face by replying, yes, that way, I am sure, even when they have not a clue.

First, you're a chicken without a map, then you lose your head once you ask, where?

So, on the second time we climbed up the same gravel road (it just seemed wrong), we asked again, and I prayed to the nonexistent gods of China (officially an atheist country) that we’d finally find the trail-head before the sun slipped past the mountains encasing us.

We had a meeting point to make before the sun quit, our bed at the Naxi guesthouse.

(The fake trail sign created by donkey men trying to sell their steads, true asses.)