Tiger leaping gorge

This gorge is described as the unmissable trek of Southern China. One of the deepest gorges in the world at 16km long and 3900m above the river it was set to be a good few days in the hills and we were hoping this would rekindle our affection for China.
We got the early morning (07.20) bus from Shangri-la to Qiaotou at the start of the gorge. After a quick breakfast stop and leaving our big bags at a local hostel we started up the path to the gorge. Not amazingly well signposted, but we managed to find the trail (unlike some European chaps we bumped into after 30 minutes or so coming down the hill who admitted to having gone the wrong way for 45 minutes before a local pointed them back on track).
The first 5 hours or so were good walking, with lots of ascent into the hills and some nice spiky mountains appearing out of the cloud on the other side of the gorge:

There were even mini waterfalls to cross:

Most people stop at half way or go on to a place called Tina's guesthouse, down by the road, but we planned to walk to almost the end staying on the high route and staying overnight at a place called Walnut Garden and come back again the next day. At 6.5 hrs the route splits and the main path goes down and we stayed high on a smaller, sheep track as per the instructions. Unfortunately for us there had been a landslide and what had perhaps once been a track turned into a scramble up a steep side of the gorge. Luckily for us the owners of one guesthouse had painted little green arrows on rocks to direct you as the original path was nowhere to be seen.
Having completed the additional hour or so of ascent to Walnut garden, we then lost the helpful arrows and failed to find a single guest house, instead finding a ghost town. We ended up back down at the road and walking back along the lower path to the place called Tina's we'd seen advertised everywhere. In total it was 8 hours decent pace underfoot for a good day out in the hills.

Rather than try and find somewhere else to eat, we stayed in the hostel, which turned out to be one of the worst decisions so far on the trip as Alistair got horrible food poisoning, and Sam got a much smaller dose, associated with being the vegetarian who only eats the veg around the meat dishes. Sadly this put an end to our plans to walk back the next day so we hopped on a bus, then a tuk tuk to the relative luxury (?!?!) of a hostel back in LiJiang. Such a shame as this was the best day in the hills since New Zealand and actually some quite impressive mountains!