Baisha

---

Hi All,

We decided to hire a bicycle to go out to Baisha. We chose to take a tandem which maybe wasn't the best idea. Going was hard work because we had a headwind a slight incline and a tandem built to withstand a tank attack!!! It must of weighed a ton. We shan't do that again.

Baisha is about 10 kms north of Lijiang and is again another capital city of the Naxi minority. After walking around the backstreets of this little village I could begin to imagine what Lijiang may of been like before the facelift. In the village are some temples with some religious murals. It is the only place in China to have Taoist and Buddist murals together in the same temple. The murals aren't in the best condition and how they survived the Cultural Revolution is a miracle. There are ruins of temples up in the mountains that were completely destroyed in this period.

We then went on a little bit of a mystery trip. I was trying to find a temple called Puyi Temple and people kept pointing us in the same direction but we never seemed to come across it. We did however stumble across a Naxi village called Shuhe. This was the place where the Naxi first settled in south western China around 1000 years ago. It was a centre for the trade of tea and horses.
We've really enjoyed our short time in Yunnan. The scenery and blue skies here are really stunning. I did prefer Dali to Lijiang as I felt it still had an old feel to it where as Lijiang just seemed too new.

Enjoy the photos

Jah Bless

---