We arrived in Deqin after a brief stop in Shangri La with the intention of doing some more extensive trekking. The crack team was Tom (lad from Newcastle), David (New York), and Cathal (Ireland). Deqin is in the very north of Yunnan province on the borders of Tibet. Given the current situation in Tibet, this was as close as we were going to get, with 80% of it's inhabitants Tibetan.

We were met off the bus by a french girl touting this trekking guest house called Tashi's that was run by a couple of Irish guys. Anyway I think the marketing on the Irish management swung the vote and we got ourselves up there after a spot of lunch. If anyone has seen any of the Cheech and Chong movies you'll have an idea of the management team at Tashi's. I'll leave it at that, but they were sound guys just extremely laid back.

Anyway we'd agreed on a 3 day trek from Feilaisi through Xidang and Yubeng and the waterfalls, then back to Ninong to get a cab back to Tashi's. It didn't quite work out like that being a group of testosterone alpha males. We ended up going 10 hours on the first day after passing a point of no return. This left a 5 hour trek to get the next village before nightfall. We must have had 4 group conferences on whether to turn back after initially deciding to push on through to Yubeng on the first day, but we went for it and made it with about half an hour of daylight to spare.

Needless to say the next day we were shattered and decided to cut the 3 days into 2 and forget the 6 hour trek to the waterfall. Whilst it was completely knackering the 2 days was brilliant and everything I hoped rural China would be. Over the 2 days we saw no other trekkers until the end of the 2nd day. It was just us trekking through mountain passes, villages and forests. There were no signs to guide us and we often had to backtrack to find the right path again.

The people in the villages were fantastic as well. Basically there's usually one entrepreneur in each village who sells bottled water. You point to your bottle of water and the person you ask will take you to said entrepreneur. One woman insisted that we come into her house to have some bread, rice and tea. She offered us some milk as well but we weren't initially sure what it was until Tom gave the international gesture from his man boobs which had the woman and everyone else in hysterics.

Once we reached Yubeng at about 7.30pm we stayed a local village guest house. I say guest house but there was no electricty or hot water. We had dinner in the local villagers house which consisted of noodles/rice and fried onions and fried cauliflower, but it really was good. All prepared on the house fire with the head waiter (owner) with a wind up touch on his head, that he graciuosly lent us as our table lamp. Next day we set off back to Feilaisi tracking the river, and the scenery was breathtaking. We passed through numerous villages and were greeted in all of them by the locals. An exhausting but superb couple of days and we estimate we must have covered over 25 miles. I hope the photos do it justice.

Next stop back to Dali for some much needed rest and relaxation!!!