We have soakers

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After a moderately 11hr bus ride in a rain storm on a "sleeper" bus from Kunming, Thursday night, we arrived in Lijiang around 7am Friday morning. After getting off the bus and getting ourselves organized, we went off to our hostel. Lijiang is split into two seperate cities of sorts - an "old" and a "new". We are staying in the "old" city which is one of China's last chinese looking cities with curved roof houses with clay tile shingles etc. It is really beautiful. The area is in a valley of sorts at the beginning of the himilayan mountain chain. Unfortunately, due to the rain, it has been quite cloudy so any view of mountains has really been out of the question.

We got to our hostel and got a really great buffet breakfast (which we had again this morning) and then got into our room. We are staying at a hostel called MCA Lijiang and it is only costing 120rmb/night total (which works out to 180rmb pp for the time we're here or $27CDN!). Hanmu crashed for a good part of the afternoon (even though it was ME who only slept for about 20min on the bus the night before...), and I headed out to see the town. After walking around the old city for about 3hrs I realized that I was lost and on the other side of the city....woops... It wasn't too bad though. I ended up finding some cows and hopped the fence to take a look at them. There was a small herd of holsteins grazing in a pasture - they look very similar to holsteins we have in Canada. That is not much of a suprise though, since speaking to one of the agriculture profs in Beijing said that the majority of milking cows come from Australia and Canada (and most of the Australian cows from from Canada...). A group of people started walking towards me though as I was taking pictures of the cows, so I thought it was time to leave. I briskly walked across the field, hopped the fence again and returned to the road from which I came from...better safe than sorry right?

I finally met Hanmu and we went a grabbed some food + street veggies as we walked around the old city some more. It started to rain pretty hard, bu we kept going. After becoming completely soaked, we finally headed back to the hostel to get dry. We watched an episode or two of law and order (season 5 - when it was good....) and then headed back out to the old city to meet a student that hanmu knows from Guelph (Leonard Wong). We met up with him (as well as a travel company who tried to swindle us into going on an overland trip to Tibet - which sounds extroidinary - but out of the budget for this trip!). We then headed back to the hostel, got our water fixed (as we had no hot water for a while) and called it a night.

Today we plan on going to Black Jade/Dragon Pool (or something like that...). Hopefully it doesn't rain too much! Tomorrow (my birthday!) we hope that we can go on a full day mountain bike through the region with a guy who runs a small tour company. If not, I'm sure we'll find something else to get up to. As well, Tiger Leaping Gorge is quite out of the question currently due to the flooding in Yunnan province. We're going to wait and see until tomorrow to make a decision. If we can't go, we're going to a nearby city, Dali, on the way back to Kunming. We may spend a day or two there - who knows!

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