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Published: November 6th 2008
We are having a wet and rainy weekend, so decided to carve out some time today to add a few new blogs. Over Chinese National Day, which was back on October 1, we were given a week off during which we travelled to one of the most visited sites in Northern Yunnan, Lijiang. Lijiang is a 10 hour bus trip northwest of Kunming and sits at about 8000 feet, 1500 ft higher than Kunming.
We were accompanied by our friends Wendy and her daughter Zoe, (who used to live down the road from us in Juneau) while her husband Tom stayed behind to catch up on lesson preparations.
The weather in and around Lijiang is about as much of a crapshoot as it is in Juneau. So things did not bode well when it poured the entire bus trip there. We had fantastic seats however, at the front and top of a double decker bus, even though we used every kleenix we had brought to keep the constantly fogging windows clear for viewing.
Not long into the trip we found the weeks of riding local taxis and buses had hardened us into savvy passengers as
we only screamed out a couple of times when full head-on collisions were very narrowly missed due to our bus passing scores of cars/carts/wagons/ponys/ tractors/bikes and scooters on a narrow 2 lane road, with no shoulders, often flanked by steep mountainous drops on one side, and with no regard for what vehicles were where, nor having overdrive capacity.
Aside from that, the scenery often mirrored that of Alaska on a cold wet rainy day, so we felt right at home. In many of the fields we saw local farming families harvesting crops by hand, but it wasn’t till I returned and discussed the pics with my students that I found out it was rape seed which they press into oil. After the cut stalks dry out some, they then are beat by hand to get the seeds into these enormous collection baskets.
About 2/3rds of the way there we finally stopped for lunch, which we shared family style with the other bus passengers. We had been told we would get at least one stop, but as the hours ticked by and our snacks and treats dwindled to a few sticks of gum, we figured we were
once again experiencing the interesting phenomenon of being told how something would go, but finding it seldom followed what you were told.
Arriving in Lijiang, we found our way to the Panba Courtyard Guesthouse and Hostel, located within what is referred to as the Old Town. (It is the red X on the map). Our guesthouse was quaint and comfortable and the service provided by the 2 sisters who worked there was unparalleled. It has gotten quite an international following so we met folk from around the world as well as from around China.
Lijiang's history goes back more than 800 years and it was once a confluence for trade along the old tea horse road. It differs from other ancient Chinese cities in architecture, history and culture due to it being primarily inhabitated by one of the 55 minority groups indigenous to Yunnan, the Naxi people. A major earth quake in 1996 required about 1/3 of Lijiang to be rebuilt, though where new and old met was lost on us.
Old Town Lijiang has been described as “crisscrossed by gushing canals, picturesque bridges, rickety old buildings and a maze of cobbled narrow ‘streets’.
” It was all this and more and we never got tired of wandering around the CARLESS (and horse and cartless!) walkways. As you can see from the map, it didn’t take much to get lost, so we kept track of our turns and usually backtracked our course when returning to the guesthouse. Late one afternoon we strolled around Black Dragon Pool Park, located adjacent to the old town. It was lovely and felt old and historic as most parks of this type do.
Even though much if not all of the vendor stalls, stores and restaurants lining the streets are completely oriented to the huge tourist trade (primarily made up of Han Chinese) which ply this area, the physical beauty and picturesque views at every turn left our memory of Lijiang as a truly enchanting place and it was easy to imagine what it might have been like in its infancy.
Some recent articles bemoan that the original Naxi culture is becoming eroded due to the tourist atmosphere, but a telling paragraph in Lonely Planet puts forth another thought:
"While it's true many of the Naxi stalls have made way for the sourvenir stands
of Han Chinese entrepreneurs and that some of the old town's soul has gone with them, don't worry too much about the locals. Many are making a fortune leasing their highly coveted property in historic Lijiang and have happily decamped to slick, modern apartments in the new town." And we saw some of these new developments and they would rival any similar upper end development going up in any US city. It was almost shocking to drive around the modern city adjacent to the the old town and see these incredibly landscaped huge homes and condo communities in this little town at the foothill of the Himalayas. I was also told by one of my students that the little granny the girls posed with one morning, can make as much as 1500 Yuan/day from charging folks who want to take her picture. She never uttered a word to us though, and perhaps she was as taken with our girls as they were with her.
Though somewhat expensive compared to Kunming, we none-the-less found ourselves separated from our money as vacation mode kicked in and unique items presented themselves around every bend. A highly popular item was tie dyed
scarves and the girls bartered the best they could, but even they could not move some vendors to lower their prices.
One day we rented a van and driver so we could see some areas out of town and do some horse back riding as had been mentioned in one of the travel books. Thinking we were heading out for a 3-hour ride toward Snow Mountain, (due to the fact we could not read the sign with the rental amounts) we were confused when a short while later the guides leading our horses began to demand money in order to travel further. We were a bit put off, and not sure of what was really going on, but managed to negotiate a small fee to continue our journey. When it happened a second time we threatened to get off of the horses and walk back as we were under the assumption we had paid for 3 hours. This was all accomplished, however, while carrying on a lot of laughing and singing and relatively positive spirits on our part as we were still unsure about whether we were being taken or if we had somehow misunderstood how this horseback
riding adventure was supposed to proceed. Well to make a long story short, we found out after the fact that we had paid for ONLY 30 MINUTES of a ride, not 3 hours, and that the guides were allowing us to continue on, if we paid them. Well as they say, you live and learn. A short clip of us as we were departing is above.
Later that day after choosing to forgo some of the more touristy stops the driver was kindly suggesting, we ended up in Yuhu, a tiny village closer to Snow Mountain base where we saw where Joseph Rock had lived and researched the Naxi people between 1922 and 1949. He wrote many articles for National Geographic about his expeditions, which were said to have inspired the novel Lost Horizon, by James Hilton, about a remote Himalayan community known as Shangri-La. Afterwards, we wandered up into a large meadow, hoping to stretch our legs on a small hike, and were amazed to find many wild plants very similar to those we see in Juneau. The surrounding mountains, and minor glaciers hanging off a few felt familiar and had it not been for the blissfully
warm breeze blowing, we might have mistaken our location. NOT!!
Hundred's of guided horses passed us in groups of 10 to 20 enroute to a location closer to the mountains. As we were returning to Lijiang, we saw many locals walking with a (their?) horse along the road, presumably back to their homes. We assumed the many horses we had seen that day were, instead of being owned by one rancher, owned by many individual folk who lived in the area, so the wealth got spread around. This was also verified by my students.
A final stop on our trip back to the Panba Courtyard found some Naxi women dancing in front of another site of interest. I got it on video, which is shared at the top of this blog page.
Perhaps we will return to this area early next year to do some trekking/hiking along Tiger Leaping Gorge and travel a bit further north to Shangri-La.
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