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Published: September 6th 2009
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When I arrive home after 8 months of travelling, and if I never see the inside of a bus ever again I will die a happy person. Another day, another 8 hour long bus journey in a beat up old vehicle filled with people who have never heard of that nifty invention we like to call deodorant, and at least 6 of them who light up cigarettes every 15 minutes INSIDE the bus where there are no windows to let fresh, breathable air in. All I can do is roll my eyes, mutter useless curses under my breath and bang my head against the bolted down windows. I don’t mean to completely whinge about the journey, the scenery was actually spectacular, we passed about 30 little villages all painted white except for massive murals on one side of each wall depicting dinosaurs roaming through hills. It was so random, and I couldn’t work out what the hell was going on, until about 40 minutes after seeing the first mural we came across this massive shiny, silver building with ‘Dinosaur Valley’ written across the top. I wish we could have stopped and got our Jurassic Park on, but the bus continued north
and I’ll never know what dinosauric awesomeness I missed out on.
We arrived in Dali (new town) when I needed to be in Dali (old town) which completely confused me so I tried to organize a tuktuk to take me to where I needed to be. Unconsciously I caused a massive fight between two tuktuk drivers, fists came out and punches were thrown because I went with a different driver than the one I had originally agreed to go with (my mistake, but I’m a tightass backpacker and I’ll take the cheapest offer possible). Awkwardness over, we arrived in Dali old town and the first thing I noticed was how damn pretty the town was! The second thing I noticed was the substantial amount of Chinese tourists that were in town. There were so many Chinese tour groups, with everyone in the group wearing the same coloured hat (or the same jacket for those in the more expensive tour groups) all following a leader carrying a brightly coloured flag. It amused me to dodge them through the streets and to stealthy jump into their group shot photos! I met Kent from Alabama on the way to the lake and
neither of us wanted to fork out the ridiculous price for a boat ride, so we instead made our way to the other tourist attraction of Dali, the Three Pagodas. It took us ages to walk there (we clearly suck at judging distances) and after finally arriving we were met with a 120 Yuan entrance fee. So we walked around the massive wall surrounding the pagodas and tried to avoid paying by finding a weak point in the wall, distract the guards and stealthly wander in, dig a hole and crawl through to the other side or Mission Impossible it with ropes, pulleys, and high-tech gadgetry just to get to the other side. Failing that as the guards had all sides covered, we left, had the local specialty of across-the-bridge noodles for dinner and watched Tomb Raider back at the hostel.
After a few days in Dali I headed to Lijiang, an 800 year old UNESCO Heritage Site and such a pretty little town. The number of Chinese tour groups quadrupled, and for every foreign tourist there was roughly 50 Chinese tourists. I spent my days just wandering around taking photos of every thing because it was just so
beautiful. That’s really all I have to say about Lijiang.
After 12 days I finally made it to Shangri-La! I was so excited I was bouncing in my seat during the whole bus ride. My initial reaction after seeing Shangri-La was one of disappointment mainly because I had Hollywood’s vision of it in my head which is obviously not what it would ever look like in real life. But I quickly got over it and started to really enjoy the city, which I will always remember for the Tibetan people I met, and Yak. Yak is now my favourite animal, especially when in a hamburger or meat pie. We ate yak kebabs, yak pasties, yak noodles soup, yak fried rice, yak hot pot and the most delicious food in the world, yak hamburger. I met some awesome people while in Shangri-La, on the way to the monastery out of town I met Anna and Mattius from Germany, who I spent most of my time with, shopped with and ate various yak meals with. My friend from the hostel, Xiaoyang (pronounced Shy-An) made us take part in the Tibetan dancing that took place in the main square every night. It
was awesome to see nearly every single local dance the traditional Tibetan steps, men and women, young and old, the ‘cool’ young guys in their Grease leather jackets and oiled hair dancing next to the older ladies in their complete traditional Tibetan dress. My favourite dancers to watch were the cowboys, they were terrible dancers, they couldn’t get a single step right, but they were having such a great time trying it was hard not enjoy it! It was such a great feeling of community, and it was sad to think that something like this would never ever happen back home! I think that’s why I loved Shangri-La so much.
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