Lijiang - Thousands of goldfish and a German

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Lijiang Jan 08

We left Yangshou and headed to a city called Lijiang via a bus, an overnight train and then another bus. On the train we met a German guy called Jens, he seemed nice enough and was also going to Lijiang so asked if he could tag along. We arrived there early in the morning and went to the old town were everywhere was closed. The old town was very pretty with it's cobbled streets and small canals running alongside them with loads of goldfish swimming about ( We were to learn later that they are relased by the chinese for good luck , hence the thousands of them ! ). We wandered around for ages banging on hostel doors until we finally found one that was open. The lady there didn't speak any English (or German) so I used my best Mandarin and sign language combination to try and ask for a room, she found this very amusing. I have this unfortunate ability in China to make adults laugh and children cry without even trying.

Anyway we did manage to get a room which was good but the only problem was that in a bid to save money, Jen's talked us into sharing a room with him, this was cheaper but a bit weird! We got changed and went to have some breakfast in a cafe that served beltin' food, so we returned frequently. Afterwards we went for a walk up elephant hill, we had bought a map so we thought that getting there would be easy! Just getting out of the old town is tricky enough, it is made up of narrow streets all looking the same with identical shops all selling pretty much identical stuff. Cabbie and Jens started to disagree on the direction to go in. We went Jen's way and ended up in a random housing estate, we could see the hill but there wasn't really a path and it was hard work scrambling up in the sun. When we eventually reached the top we saw the steps of the actual path which we should have come up on the otherside of the hill (this was the route Cabbie had wanted to take and he was secretly feeling quite smug about being right !). After looking at the superb views we went back down the hill, the right way this time, which brought us down to Black Dragon Pool. The view was beautiful with the pool and the snow capped mountain in the background.

On another afternoon we had a wander up the cobbled streets to a great look out point above the old town. It was a quality view looking down on all of the chinese style grey roofs all tight together, looking at it you wouldn't believe that they could fit roads in between.

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Comments

[michelle]

hey dolan happy birthday hope your having a good one. Did get you a card but didnt think it was worth sending it to you so glad your having a cool time. Cant wait too see you both !! Palmer xx