The bus trip to Litang was disappointing in that we were subject to allocated seating for the first time (meaning we were ejected from the prime seats we'd nabbed and ended up near the back of the bus). Movies played constantly throughout the journey, but before midday we'd arrived and checked in to the Crane Guesthouse, which did laundry with a 4 hour turnaround. The Tibetan influence in Litang is very clear, in terms of longer hairstyles, clothing, facial hair, many cowboy hats (a great combo when in conjunction with shades and a motorbike), decorated motorbikes (with hardly a moped in sight), taller people, some really dark skins, and people wandering around with hand-held prayer wheels. In fact there's a higher percentage of Tibetans in Litang than there is in Tibet. Litang is also more than ... read more

The trip to Zhongdian only took 2.5 hours but it seemed like we were entering a different country. The climbing road levelled out onto a plateau on which low pink- and purple-flowered bushes were commonplace (and were being picked), women were wearing pink-hatted outfits, yaks started putting in an appearance as did a profusion of shops selling yak tail brushes, the buildings were unmistakably different (being sturdy in a Tibetan style), and the sky took on an extremely vivid blue. Though the bulk of Zhongdian was an uninteresting modern town (and completely unworthy of the rebranding to Shangri-la that has taken place), the Old Town was most enjoyable to stroll around. With its cobbled streets, souvenir shops, and hordes of Chinese tourists it reminded me of Lijiang Old Town but with Tibetan architecture and culture instead ... read more

Given how few Westerners seem to come through Zhongdian it was surprising that the bus station announcements were in both Mandarin and English. Half the passengers on the bus to Deqin seemed to be Chinese tourists, including one irritating woman who'd tied a cowbell to her backpack and hence sounded like an approaching cow every time she moved. The road was generally winding and slow - not unlike Corsica - and the journey felt about 50% longer than it actually was. To compensate, the scenery was excellent, with plunging valleys and wandering yaks, and snow-topped mountains looming closer and closer until we were essentially on the other side of the valley from them. A startling blue sky provided a vivid backdrop. At Deqin, 2 tourists from Beijing (Song and Li Jingjing) and their friend Jimi from ... read more

Next stop on our way north was going to be Tiger Leaping Gorge, known to many Brits after it was visited by a certain M. Palin in "Himalaya", which can be hiked from either of its 2 endpoints at Daju and Qiaotou. It seemed like Daju was going to be more inconvenient and expensive to get to, plus would be a less useful place to leave our main luggage from the point of view of an onward journey to Zhongdian, so we took a slow minibus through mountainous landscape to Qiaotou. Once at Qiaotou, many people opt to hike for a couple of hours to the Naxi Family Guesthouse, partly to chop a bit of time off the next day's hike and partly because the sunrises there are supposed to be magnificent. However we wanted to ... read more

We caught a bus to Xianguan, aka New Dali, then attempted to change there to get to Old Dali. Unfortunately no-one seemed to know of the bus number mentioned in our guidebooks, but we ended up on a different bus going in the right direction. In Old Dali there was similar confusion, as none of the street names we saw tallied with the meagre map we had. We eventually found the cable-car that we knew would lead to our guesthouse - unfortunately it was in a park, which we also had to pay to enter, leading to expenditure equivalent to 1.5 days in the guesthouse before we'd even reached it. By the time we reached the top, it was chilly and pissing down. The "couple of minutes" walk as per the RG turned out to mean ... read more