Fire festival & shooting stars in Shaxi

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Playing a little catch up here. Shaxi was recommended to me by another traveller and after having such a great experience on The Tiger Leaping trek I wanted to spend some more time in Yunnan and with my extra days on the passport I had nothing to stop me.

Shaxi was on the old tea horse trail and was once a main crossroads. I had originally intended to only stay for 2 nights but ended up extending my stay for another 3.

I arrived on the day they were celebrating their fire festival which involved little physco children walking round with a 3ft torch throwing some sort of powder at people which resulted in the victim literally going up in flames. However I found a way of not falling prey to these prospective ASBO adolescents and that was to hide behind an old lady or use a baby to shield myself and it seems that westerners were the main attraction that night. Oh what I did miss out was the fun part just before the fire throwing started the locals were handing out some very potent alcoholic shot and peanuts and the great thing was these shot glasses were self-filling. I am in heaven! For the rest of the evening the air was heavy with the smell of fire and westerners burnt flesh and singed hair. Apparently the idea of this is to cleanse your sole. Not too sure if it worked or not?
Most days were spent walking around the surrounding hills and each day in a different direction and there was always a temple to see a pagoda or two and the odd Buddha and even a few monkeys en-route. The village was surrounded by rice fields and grazing water buffalo.
The evenings were spent eating fabulous chines food drinking Dali beer and watching shooting stars from the court yard of the hostel. Ah, a travellers life however all good things must come to an end and I made my escape with four other people on Saturday morning for Kunming.
Apologies for the poor photo quality of the fire festival as my camera cannot keep up with any high speed action but I hope you get the idea of it.
Thanks for reading.

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