Jin Dao Gorge

On a beautiful Saturday (October 18th), we took a group trip to a nearby gorge. The gorge has its own King Arthur legend where a villager found a golden knife buried in a stone inside a cave and easily pulled it out. He went on to become a great general. The village and the gorge came to be known as Golden Knife Gorge (i.e. Jin Dao Gorge).

The bus dropped us off at one end of the gorge and we followed the river through the gorge where the bus picked us up; a fair amount of walking, but mainly downhill. (At one point we descended what is called the "thousand step ladder." There weren't really 1000 steps, but it felt like there were.)

At some points, the gorge widened and contained crystal clear, blue pools of water. (Most other water in China has been very silty.) Several of the guy students took this opportunity to go swimming, which the few Chinese tourists who passed by found very entertaining. The students described the water as chily but refreshing.

Elsewhere the gorge was very narrow, with us walking 50 feet above the water while the cliff rose a 100 feet above us. For a long stretch (close to a mile?) we were walking along a walkway that juts out of the cliff, with rickety board slats covering the walkway. Occasionally, we would see a place where the walkway used to be somewhere else and was now broken with rotten boards. Fortunately, none of us fell through to the waters below.

At one point when we crossed the river from one side of the gorge to the other, we saw a family of ten to twelve monkeys below in the riverbed. The students stood and watched the monkeys from the bridge, and the monkeys watched the students. Connie and I continued on and were about 100 yards downstream where another bridge again crossed the river. I looked back and saw the head monkey take offense at something, bound up the bank and suddenly land on the bridge. I don't know how 20 students could vacate that bridge as fast as they did, but they were off in an instant! Fortunately, the monkey did not chase them further. (Jim)