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Published: August 8th 2008
(Day 121 on the road)To get to my next stop, Lugu Lake, I had to backtrack to Lijiang in order to catch a bus from there to the lake. In Lijiang, I was also going to meet up again with Karen, who had not made it into Tibet after all and was travelling around the same area, so we decided to travel together again.
The five hour bus-journey from Shangri-La to Lijiang was awful: The middle aged woman next to met spat right on the floor between her legs continuously, making the floor so disgusting after a short while that she couldn't put her own feet on the floor anymore. After about two hours, I realised that she wasn't feeling too well (maybe all that spit made her sick) and sure enough, a few minutes later she puked all over the place, including herself. I am not sure why she didn't get one of the sick-bags provided, guess she preferred to make the bus journey unbearable for everyone. So for the next two hours until Lijiang I had to sit sideways with my legs over the armrest (the bus was full to the limit), as the floor was absolutely soaked
with vomit, not to mention the smell of it.
The next day, we caught a minibus to Lugu Lake. During the journey, we thought more than once that the crazy driver would get us all killed. We told the driver to slow down and to please not overtake right next to the edge in a sharp bend where he couldn't see one bit of the road ahead, but he just replied that he had been driving on this road for more than ten years. I guess that made it alright then, plus the Chinese in the car thought it was all pretty funny. Guess we have a different sense of danger, or possibly a different attitude to life.
Lugu Lake is famous for the Mosuo people that live in the area. The Mosuo are a matriarchal society, as they still live in accordance with the patterns of matrilinearity and matrilocality (meaning that the women basically call the shots in all aspects of life). Marriage is unheard of, and a woman can choose as many or as few "husbands" for as long or as short as she likes; the casual term for this these days is "walking marriage". Women
are, unlike Han-Chinese (the controversial one-child policy in China), allowed to have more than one child. The children are raised solely by the women, and families are composed of the members of the matrimonial kin. Women also operate production and management, and they thus hold the principal position in the society.
At the lake and after settling into a decent and affordable hotel, we went about the get some dinner: Frogs! There were guys selling alive frogs on the street from big buckets, so you just pick the ones you like, they kill them for you (by banging their heads on the pavement) and then take their intestines out. Afterwards, you simply take them to a restaurant where they cook them for you for a small fee. It was delicious!
The next day, we set about to rent some bikes, as we intended to cycle around the lake. That was by no means an easy undertaking: For some reasons the police had ordered the locals to stop renting out bikes, so it took us about three hours and numerous tries to find a guy who finally rented out his kid's bikes to us for two days, who turned out to be way too small for us. After that was sorted we realised that did not have enough money on us for the next few days and that the next bank was back in Lijiang, a seven-hours bus-ride away. Great. So we spent the next two hours wandering around town trying to get some money. I had Euros and Dollars on me, Karen had British Pounds, and just as we were getting desperate we met a group of Swiss travellers (the only Westerners we had seen in the whole village) wo agreed to exchange 50 Euros in Yuan.
After that was sorted we finally set off with our bikes. Our goal for the night was a small village with a hot spring, which on hour map looked like two hours away by bike. As it turned out, the map was - like all the maps we had been given in China actually - not to scale at all, and it took us five and a half hours to reach there. But the journey was just amazing! We were completely off the beaten path, going down a route which at the hostel we had been told was "impossible" to take. We didn't listen to that - so many times in the last month had we been told by some people that it was "impossible", or there were "no road", or that we "couldn't go there" only to find that whatever we were looking for was perfectly fine after all. So by now we just ignore when people tell us that it is for some obscure reason "not possible" to do something, and once again this was was the right decision. The landscape that we cycled through was the most rural and authentic that I have been to in China; it is difficult to describe in words, but the pictures give a good impression. Towards the end of the day we got soaked in heavy rain, but as the rain stopped the hills we were cycling through were bathed in the most beautiful shade of green,all topped by two rainbows. We finished that day with a good meal and a long soak at the hot springs.
We realised that it was impossible to bike around the whole lake, so the next day we made our way back to "civilisation", and the day after we caught a bus east into Sichuan towards Mount Emei.
Next stop: Emei Shan (Sichuan Province, China).
To view my photos, have a look at
pictures.beiske.com. And to read the full account of my journey, have a look at the complete
book about my trip at Amazon (and most other online book shops).
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ronnie
non-member comment
Mosuo customs
Mosuo society may perhaps be matrilineal, but it is not matriarchal and women certainly do not call all the shots. Further, fixed marriage most definitely is practised. Portryal of the Mosuo as at once both matriarchal and 'the land of easy women' is a contradiction perpetuated by the local tourist industry, state discourse on minorities and is increasingly entering into the mindset and vocabulary of tourist-conscious locals. Perhaps you ought to stick to the scenery and refrain from projecting your Orientalist assumptions onto "local culture".