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Published: January 4th 2010
the mountain
the guide told us that the mountain connected the chinese mountain range with the tibetan range, interesting.Getting to the train station was pretty exciting in itself, they were already preparing for the huge crowds of when millions of people leave the city for spring festival (lantern festival) over only a couple of days. Hopefully I wont be travelling then.
Getting into the train I think is most I will ever feel like Harry Potter, it was great going into our little compartment where we would spend the next 25 hours. The beds we chose were soft sleepers, but really it’s the same as any Chinese bed so very hard, but still we had the privacy and nobody joined us in our compartment, which was great. Almost as soon as I got on I fell asleep because it was so comfortable and easy on the train, plus I had very little sleep the night before. But Paris woke me up after a wee bit because were in the country, something we had not yet seen in china, it was really amazing countryside, I don’t think the photos do it justice at all.
Life on the train was great, so relaxing, food came to us and all we had to do
was lie and bed and look out the window, the only problem was we were allowed to go to the toilet when the train was stopped, which seemed to be the only time whenever wanted to go to the toilet. When woke up in the morning we were high in the mountains going through passes and tunnels and also we only had another 6 hours to go before arriving in Kunming. Arriving in kunming nothing really exciting happened except wandering around trying to work out how we could possibly get to the airport, but thankfully the travel agent had assumed we would be as confused as we were so had given us an extra 4 hours to make the 15 minute trip to the airport, so we just made it on time.
So we got on the plane to lijiang, for a very very short flight, less than half an hour in the air, but still saving us 8 hours on the bus, and only about $30nz more, at Lijiang airport everything went smoothly and thanks to the GPS on my phone we were able to go straight to the lijiang old town. There we walked into the first
team western
he was very keen on the lion man, I had to tell him the truth about the lion man, alley we saw, a bad move, because me gps no longer worked since we weren’t on streets so google directions wouldn’t help us there. We walked for about 2 hours in the huge maze of cobbled streets, before we talked to a lady from shanghai who was also lost, but she still had no idea where we should go so still we wandered for another 2 hours before we finally found our hostel, which was nice but a little plain, we had decided we would only book the one night and then try a new place every night.
The next day we explored the old streets got breakfast at a place where we made friends with a little dog. Every time one of the ladies selling stuff on the street come to sell us something the little dog would bite their ankles, it happened about 6 times, a very well trained dog.
For a few days we just walked around Lijiang being lost. On New Years Eve day we had organised a tour up the big mountain nearby, so we went and it was in fact a big mountain, a very cold big mountain. Paris bought us some
oxygen tanks for us though it wasn’t necessary it did make walking up all the steps a lot easier, I tried not using and it was really cool, how we would just take a couple of steps and be exhausted. But maybe I’m just getting really unfit.
On top of the mountain we were at 4600 metres (when I say top I really mean the highest point the steps would go, nobody has ever been to the top. The view was great and the cable car was heaps of fun. We were surprised when our tour guide told us we had to go down for lunch. We were even more surprised when we found out it was paid for and even more surprised when we found out the mountain was only the first stop of 6 of our tour. So turned out to be a good deal, the next stop was a river with some yaks, which was quite nice to look at, and then we went on through some fields and to a huge greenstone store about the size of the wharehouse in New Zealand, all just green stone, and not cheap either. Then it was off to another
old town where we met an old man who only knew how to say “cool” and Finger painting” he painted a picture of Paris and then we were back to Lijiang old town where we had to book our flights back to Guangzhou, not so cheap this time, so we worked on getting the bus to Kunming and then the plane from Kunming to Guangzhou. We spent a heap of time trying to decide what to do and in the end decided on the plane because we felt the bus was only about $50nz cheaper but took an extra 8 hours. Interestingly, well sadly we just found out today (we got back last night) it turns out the bus we were going to go on from Lijiang to Kunming went over a bridge that collapsed in the rain and everybody on it died. So now were feeling quite lucky.
Anyway after getting the tickets we wanted to find a new place to sleep, which turned out to be the Shelter Inn, a really cool old Chinese building.
Oh I have completely forgotten to explain Lijiang; it’s a town apparently 2000 years old all old Naxi (a minority Chinese
group) style houses all with cobbled streets, a really cool place but really easy to get lost. Alongside all the cobbled streets are little streams where everyone gets their water and does their washing. Its really cool and pretty much everything there is Tibetan all the people we talked to said that their family was from Tibet. So it made for a heavily yak based town, we ate and drank pretty much only yak (I even brought home with me a big bag of dried yak) heaps of the stores were selling yak coats or yak horns. The cheese was all made from yak, and all the meat was yak. My favourite treat was definitely the yak yoghurt which tastes almost exactly the same as Dutch butter milk, the main local food was a type of bread pancake thing called Baba, I felt it was abit plain so didn’t have to much of it.
Now to new years, we weren’t sure what we were doing so decided to head to the bar street of the town (I’m still not used to the amount of dancing girls that they have in all the bars in china, and even in this
town, very odd, sometimes even dancing boys and the bigger places) at the bar street we met some people from Greece and turkey, with them we decided the bar wasn’t good enough so we should head to the town square, this is 2 minutes to midnight. We made it in time for the count down (after half an hour I started counting down again and the whole crowd joined in and cheered all over again, I felt it was quite amusing) about half an hour later I was going to try count down again but then the police came and cleared the whole crowd away, we ended up with a whole bunch of westerners who were all keen for abit of English conversation. We stayed with them for the rest of the night, which was heaps of fun.
The rest of the lijiang trip made for a whole lot more wandering the streets and hiring bikes for one day to get out to the real countryside away from the tourism.
When it came to leaving day we had pretty much done everything we could in the town so spent a heap of the day playing chess in a
arriving in Kunming
meal of lijiang number one café on top of the hill. On the way to the airport bus a lady came up to us saying her husband was a driver and would take us for Y60 to the airport we said Y45 and we followed her to check out if her driver husband was legitimate, turned out he was and it only cost us an extra $3nz dollars and saved us catching an extra 2 buses and working out where we have to go.
It did mean we were at the airport super early.
When we arrived in Guangzhou we had just missed the last bus by 3 minutes meaning we had to get a taxi for the 2 hour trip to the other side of the city, we did some heavy bartering. one guy agreed to take us for the price we wanted to pay and asked us to follow him, we did and we follow him for a we while until we got to a car that wasn't a taxi at all and already had 3 guys in the car, he asked us to put our gear in but we were abit unsure, one of the guys told us it was ok
the view by the panoram guest house
an old man took us to pray with him, quite a cultural experiance and that we should get in, he said he worked for the government and showed us one of the cheap plastic wallets with the emblem on them they sell in heaps of the shops around the city so we decided we would much rather pay the extra $4nz dollars and go with the nicer taxi driver. We got it down to Y180 about $40nz, on the way home we saw a girl that had been hit by a car lying on the road, obviously really hurt with a lot of blood around her, we tried to tell the taxi driver to stop because it didn’t look like anyone else was, cars were just driving around her, and though she was moving she looked really badly hurt, though the taxi driver didn’t understand we wanted to stop I feel terrible now that we should have tried harder to help. It was definitely one of the more upsetting things we have seen here. There are a few things I have found very hard to deal with that I didn’t expect to happen here. the things I expected to be hard I have found much easier but its things I hadn't even thought
about that I'm finding difficult to accept and deal with.
Eventually we got home at 2.30 in the morning and were very very exhausted.
I think that’s mostly al that happened in the world tour of lijiang, heaps of fun but I’m also really glad to be back in the big city, I didn’t realise how much I really missed it.
Even the smog, and thick air, it was nice to be back in it, the noise and they way everything is so easy. Made me realise how much I really like the city we are in. also it was great when we got home, a cleaner has been organised for free for us so we got home and the house was spotless.
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Caleb
non-member comment
Wow
Wow, Lijiang looks really cool! I love that picture of the yak!