In the morning we woke up to an actual rooster crowing! Cock-a-doodle-doo rang through the encampment and surrounding fields. Today we only had a short walk to go before reaching our second hostel. So we woke up at 830, had a nice breakfast with pancakes and headed out the door by 10. We all had our backpacks this time since our donkey man had left the night before. Day two was almost as beautiful as day one. This time the hike included huge waterfalls cascading down the mountain side. Some of them we had to cross wooden logs tied together to get to the other side. The last section we ended up on the low road and had a leisurely stroll along pavement. Before we knew it we had arrived at Sean’s Guest House a more western style place with Tibetan owners. Checking in, we grabbed lunch (which actually took a couple hours because there were only two women working and one stove so they made one meal at a time and by the time all seven of us were fed it had gotten to be almost three o’clock), and headed back out onto the trail for a mini day hike before dinner. Around this area of the gorge there are a number of trails that lead you down to the river. Tiger Leaping Gorge was named after the local legend that a hunter had been stalking a tiger and to escape the tiger jumped out onto a large rock in the river and then leaped over the Yangtze to escape death. Well it’s possible to get down to the rock the tiger jumped on and climb out to it yourself. So we did. The trek down the mountain was interesting. We were strolling through the local people’s cornfields and passed many farmers during their daily work. One woman stuck out to us especially. She had one eye and one tooth which was about three times as long as a normal tooth and stuck out above her bottom lip as she smiled at us. We got a bit lost and ended up taking a random animal trail through the pine trees in search of the main path.Eventually we found it and kept on moving. This part of the walk was actually quite scary. For most of the trail if you made one wrong step off the mountain you went. Since it had been raining it was also really slippery. Fortunately on some of the more dangerous areas there were rope railings to hold on to. After climbing down an old rickety ladder and scrambling across piles of rocks we finally made it to the tiger’s jumping point. On the famous rock there is a flag pole at the tip so the goal is to shimmy your way out far enough to touch it. Now, the entire time you are out on this rock the Yangtze is rapidly rushing past. This was probably one of the fastest parts of the river and the rapids were just shooting up everywhere. One wrong step and you would have slid down this rock, fell into the water, and probably never be seen again. Luckily, a local family mans the rock and has set up basic rope barriers as well as supports to help you climb out there. You pay ten kuai for their time and whoever is there comes out with you to insure that you make it back safely. I asked our guide if anyone had ever fallen in and she said no, so hopefully that’s true. We all made it out onto the rock and most of us made it up to the flag pole (Ben and I got up there and actually stood up holding onto the pole as the Chinese woman was yelling at us to sit back down). It was a sheer drop on the other side so it was not seen as any less of a feat if someone didn’t touch the pole. Plus, if you sat still enough you could actually feel the rock moving under you as the waves crashed against it! We took pictures and then slid back to the bottom edge of the rock to climb back down to firm ground. Then the hike back started. Despite the absence of our backpacks, the climb up the mountain was still pretty brutal. Getting extremely lost didn’t help matters either. Since we had strolled through the pine trees on the way to the rock we weren’t sure where we were supposed to turn to get back to the hostel from the regular path. We ended up going on a completely new route that seemed to not have had any visitors in quite a while. This was proven to us when Ben walked straight through a huge spider web. The spider was the size of a fist but luckily just sat and took the abuse, hopefully just as afraid of us as we were of him. At that point we sent out some scouting parties – Ben and Andrew headed around the next bend to see where it led and I climbed through this section of underbrush looking for a path upwards. We could see the cornfields far above us and just needed to find a way to get there. Finally we decided to backtrack a bit and found a small path that seemed to head in the right direction. We were right and found ourselves back in the fields and then moved on to find the road. Coming out of the path we found ourselves in a local family’s backyard. They were really nice and were probably very used to strange visitors stumbling upon their livelihood. At this point we were all exhausted from the straight hike up and stumbled through the town back to Sean’s where we crashed. After sitting for a moment we wandered up to our rooms and the outdoor deck for dinner. Wayne was there! He had finally met up with his friends, Sonya and Barry (who are from the UK), and they had wound up at Sean’s for the night. Our groups merged and we spent the evening together and were joined by a couple from Australia as well. I had a Tibetan pancake for dinner – delicious! It’s not really a pancake, more a circle of salty fried dough, so good. Eventually we turned in and tried to get some rest after our long day. Sean’s provides each bed with a teddy bear as well which was really cute.