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Published: September 1st 2006
I'd originally planned to spend a few days in Zhongdian, but the Israeli girls I'd met on the bus from Xiangcheng were keen to move on to Tiger Leaping Gorge... and me, well I was keen for some company. I'd only seen 2 other foreigners in the last 5 days so loved the idea of practicing my English! Whilst I've enjoyed the freedom of traveling alone there are times when I've wished for company, usually when I've been near to national parks... it would have been great to strike out and go hiking for a few days, but not on my own. To be honest I probably would have started the TLG walk alone - every other traveler I'd met said it was easy to meet people along the way - but given the opportunity to travel with others for a while....! The start of the walk was a 4 hour bus ride from Zhongdian, but after 4 hours of peering out the widow at the pouring rain I was seriously starting to have second thoughts! I don't mind if it rains when I'm walking, but I absolutely hate starting out when it's raining.
We arrived in town and as
usual got dropped off at what seemed to be some random street. I literally fell off the bus, much to the amusement of some locals who pointed us in the direction of Margo's - an Australian lady who runs a coffee shop at the start of the walk. Decent coffee served in mugs... heaven!! After Margo briefed us on where to go and the local con-artists to watch out for we finally set off. By now it was about 4pm and there were two choices - walk for two hours to the first guest house or push on and walk for 4 hours to the second one. The TLG walk is posh trekking you see, none of the camping thing here!! Cute little guest houses are dotted along the way, ready to supply you with lunch, dinner and endless cold drinks! Personally I was all in favor of a short walk but the other girls wanted to push on... the downside of traveling with others is having to consider their options... geeez ;0) As it turned out by the time we'd walked uphill for 2 hours and reached the first guest house we were all ready to stop. A perfect
unanimous decision because as we sat on the veranda sipping fresh mint tea the rain started again. Chatting to the other guests that night we discovered that we'd actually done quite well - a few wrong turns and some bad directions meant it took one group 5 hours to walk up!!!
Next day we had a leisurely breakfast and left @9am, the three of us plus an American girl Molly who joined us. For me the scenery we saw today for me was the best..... as we started out walking through the small village and into the hills the cloud was low and each time we turned to look the views were slightly different, with high peaks, small hamlets and the river below appearing and disappearing at random as the cloud shifted. As the day wore on and the cloud cleared we had stunning views along the river valley, the river itself was a muddy brown colour but the steep slopes rising above were green and rocky. We passed farmers working in the fields and donkeys carrying huge loads of crops. The terrain itself was pretty easy - the first hour was up but after that it was a
mix of downhill and flat. Today was supposed to be a long day of walking; we'd planned to push on for 6hours.. or at least that was the plan until we stopped at a lovely guest house for lunch with great views out over the river valley. Whilst we were eating a Canadian couple came through from the opposite direction saying that the views here were far better than the next set of hostels which were all down on the road. Sooo, to spend the rest of the afternoon lazing on the balcony with a cold beer and amazing views or walk for another 3 hours? Everyone we'd met on the track had the same plan, to push on, but as the word spread they almost all ended up staying - an English couple, a Dutch couple and a Scottish family that we'd met at the hostel last night and a couple of Aussie boys we'd met at Margo's... it was a great chilled afternoon!!!
Our last day of the walk was a short one... sliding down the hill to the road for @ 3 hours. We'd lost Molly yesterday as she needed to get back to Lijiang to
Starting the second day
L-R, Jasmine, Molly, Me and Noameet a friend, but we spent the day walking with the English couple and Aussie boys. At the road we waved goodbye to the Aussies and the rest of us hired a mini-van to take us back to town. We'd seen a few tourists on the walk, mostly at the hostels, but nothing prepared me for the mass tourism that we were to see as we drove back along the valley. The path we'd followed was the high path, we got occasional glimpses of the road below but mostly it was peaceful, beautiful scenery. The road ran alongside the river and to start with the views were good, until about half way back when we rounded a corner and oh my god, package tourist overdose - there must have been 30 plus tour buses parked up along the road and the air was clogged with all the associated exhaust fumes you'd expect! Ugh.
From town we had to get another minibus to Lijiang, a few drive hours away. The scenery on the way to Lijiang was stunning and despite passing bus loads of 'follow the flag' Chinese tour groups on the way in to town I arrived feeling super
chilled after having such a good three days away from it all. Or at least I did right up until the point where I realized I'd left my camera on the bus, when panic, deep despair and a horrible sinking sick feeling ensued as I rushed around town trying to track down the minivan we'd used. Suddenly there seemed to be hundreds of white minivans around and the only distinctive thing I could remember about ours was that the windows were wind-down ones rather than the ones that you slide open. Not overly helpful! Finally I managed to track it down but surprise surprise my camera wasn't there... another passenger must have taken it... yeah whatever. Losing the camera was a pain but loosing the 2 weeks of photo's that were on it... aghhhhh... that almost had me in tears. :0( The Israeli girls and Molly were really sweet and sent me copies of their TLG pictures, but those from the last day of my Songpan trip through to Zhongdian were gone :0( I love taking photo's and sightseeing without a camera??? I just couldn't bear to do it so I booked myself on the sleeper bus to Kunming, the
nearest big city where I thought I'd be able to get a new one, for the next night. I had a day in Lijiang waiting for the bus and that was quite long enough to see the town itself, although it would have been nice to explore the surrounding countryside. Lijiang has a pretty 'old' quarter (mostly rebuilt/restored after an earthquake in 1996) that is very popular with Chinese tourists and many of the 'traditional' buildings are now souvenir shops, restaurants or hotels catering to the tourist industry. If you take off down some back streets and get away from the hustle there is a charming old town to be explored where people do still live and work a 'normal' life. The city and local area is home to the Naxi people, of which there are some 300,000. The houses of the old town are in the Naxi style, based around a central courtyard and the women wear distinctive blue aprons and headwear with dark trousers.
The sleeper bus to Kunming was pretty vile and I got off swearing I'd never do another one again. Being at the back of the bus, the bounciest place and never a good
spot to be, combined with the constant stopping and starting, I assume to pay bribes/tolls, to the local officials, and the cute small child next to me who started throwing up after mum fed it an apple, meant I didn't get much sleep. But yeay I made it Kunming and in the next few days managed to buy myself a new camera! I briefly contemplated going to the police station to report my old camera missing, but decided the amount I'd actually get back from the insurance company if they deigned to pay up wasn't worth the pain of a) finding the police station and b) then having to explain to someone who undoubtedly would speak no English at all how I lost my camera....
I took myself off to Yuanyang, a small town in the hills some 7 hours south of Kunming to road test my new toy. For once I'd been super organized and bought my ticket at the bus station the day before..... and then managed to nearly miss the actual bus!! I left the hostel late, the bus to the bus station got stuck in traffic, the stupid cow driver wouldn't let me off in
between stops even though we were stationary in a traffic jam at the time... etc etc and I ended up sprinting into the bus station a few mins after the bus should of left. Fortunately buses in China can be relied on not to leave on time.... at least that's been my experience every time so far ;0) I rushed around frantically waving my ticket at different staff and finally found one who ran me out into the bus parking lot and stopped my bus just as it was about to leave. Excellent! Except, oh dear, what I hadn't realized was that it was a sleeper day bus.... and the down side of arriving late was that I got the worst 'bed' on the sleeper bus, the one under the (leaky) air con unit where even a small Chinese person would have been physically challenged to sit upright. So I was horizontal for the next 7 hours, could see very little of the, I imagine, lovely countryside outside, but had a perfect view of two mums and their young kinds on the bunk below. OK so I understand that kids want to go to the toilet a lot and over
here they don't seem to use nappies, rather they have little trousers with a strategic hole cut out so that when they feel the need they just squat wherever then are.... or mum helps them to (these day's I always avoid 'puddles' in the street). But I watched on with horror as the mums set up a carrier bag on the floor of the bus, which they would hold the kids over whenever they wanted to go pee pee (which seemed to be every 15mins). Except the kids invariably missed the bag so we had a nice stream of baby wee winding its way down the bus. When they needed to go for a poo I couldn't bare to watch!
Yuanyang is a small town in the hills, where the outlying villages are surrounded by rice terraces. It's not really on the tourist trail and apart from a NGO guy that I found I was the only English speaker in town - that and the fact that this area isn't in my LP made trying to work out where to go and how to get there v frustrating. After falling off the bus, spending 30mins wandering around town going
oh my god what have I done and then calming down as I watched the most spectacular sunset over the hills, I checked into a hotel. Alas it was a 3* one so I had to endure 2 days of air-con, satellite TV and ensuite bathroom. I've spent most of my 2.5 months in China staying in dorms and for the last month I'd been staying in places with squat toilet shared bathrooms, some of which were bearable and others of which you needed to take several deep breaths and be really really really really desperate before using. Given the price I was paying I was pretty sure that the bed linen wasn't changed in between guests either, the odd rogue hair from previously occupants was also a bit of a give away.... thank heavens for my sleep sheet! So 2 nights in a 3* place was pure luxury.... although altogether it cost me the equivalent of 10 nights accommodation at my normal standard!
I spent the next morning wandering around the market area trying to take inconspicuous photos of the locals, particularly the women who wear colorful tunics decorated with beading and embroidery. In the afternoon I set
out on a walk through local villages to some rice terraces recommended by the NGO guy. Most of the 'villages' I passed through had just a few houses with the elderly and very young the only ones to be seen - everyone else seemed to be out in the fields. I just had a hand drawn map to go on but surprisingly for me I didn't get tooo lost - I had the name of the halfway village and Yuanyang itself written in Chinese, which I waved in front of each person I encountered whilst trying to say 'which way to' in Chinese each time. I'm sure my pronunciation was awful but it all worked out ok! One local decided to be helpful and send me on a short cut, but as I found myself scrambling down a steep overgrown path that ended in a rice field I wondered if the long route might have been preferable!! He waved at a village maybe 200m away to indicate where I should go. Great. The only tiny problem was that it meant I had to traverse the rice fields to get to it. To me rice fields are like a maze and
several wrong turns and double backs later I seemed to be further away from the village than I'd started!!! In the end one of the locals pointed me along the right path - I think he was fed up with me trampling all over his crop more than anything. I did manage not to fall in and get wet feet though which I was rather proud of - my balance is bad at the best of times and with all the rain, the narrow, raised, muddy paths that separated the paddy fields were really slippery. Here, at this time of year the rice crop was tall, green and lush - harvest time wasn't too far away. The terraces that I saw weren't as dramatic as those that I'd seen at Ping'an when I'd first arrived in China and from the pictures I'd seen I think earlier in the season, when the crop is small and you see stunning effects of the light reflected in the terraces, would be a better time to come but alone and with no other tourists for miles it was quite an adventure!
Back in town I spent the evening hanging out with the locals
in the town square. It seemed to be the thing to do and I'm sure half the town turned up at some point, either to let their kids have a go on the bouncy castle, be made spun sugar animal lollies, or to simply take a turn around the square or get some exercise on the public gym equipment or aerobics classes. I had grand plans for my second day in Yuanyang - I was going to take a minivan out to a village some 20km away where it was market day then spend the afternoon exploring more rice terraces. Except it rained... all night... and when I got up it was still raining, the cloud was low in the valleys and the surrounding hills were obscured. Several buses and 7 hours later I was back in Kunming.
Another day another bus.... this time to a place called Dali. The guide books all warn you that most of the buses go to new Dali, not old Dali, even when they say old Dali. As I bought my ticket (which said old Dali) and climbed aboard my bus (which had a sign saying old Dali) I had high hopes..... but
of course we arrived at a big modern Chinese town rather than a quaint old one. A short minivan ride later and I got to Old Dali, which like Lijiang this is a popular tourist destination with the Chinese. It has a quaint but very touristy old quarter, some extortionately priced pagodas (I made good use of the 12x zoom on my new camera and took photos though the gates instead ;0)) and enough shopping to keep you occupied for ages.... I'd met a number of travelers who'd managed to spend a week or two here just not really doing much. To be honest I could see why - the only other place I found like it in China was Yangshou - lots of westerners, restaurants selling everything from pizza to curry, coffee shops selling proper coffee, book exchanges, menu's and signs in English... ah life is so easy here.
My second night in town was the Torch festival, which is celebrated locally to wish both health and a good harvest, and I booked myself on a trip to go to a local village to watch it. The Dali area is home to the Bai people and back in
touristy Old Dali I'd seem lots of women wondering round in 'traditional' dress, all ready to have their photo taken with a tourist... for a small fee of course. Being slightly cynical I was somewhat doubtful as to how much anyone actually wears the 'traditional' attire these days, so I was pleased to find that the very non-touristy village I went to was full of women in their finest outfits. OK so it may have been because this was a special festival but...... The women wear predominantly white trousers and tunics with a section of solid colour covering the torso - maybe yellow, pink or green - and a matching apron. The edges of the coloured area and sometimes the trousers had detailed embroidery, but by far the most striking is their headwear - white, black and often a splash of colour to match the tunic. Beading stitched around the face and top of the 'hat' sparkled as it reflected the light from the torches.
As the name suggests this festival involves torches... I'd seen people carrying them all day in town but it'd taken me a while to realize what they were as they were huge - often
as tall as the person holding it. In the village I visited celebrations were centered around the village square, where entertainment was provided by musicians and dancers and a huge torch shaped bonfire had been assembled. As it got later and I assume people got drunker, the entertainment turned to jumping over burning torches... where a spectator would through fire lighter over the torch, sending flames shooting up, just as the person jumped over it. All in the name of fun of course! I think I'd decided early on in the evening that I actually don't like fire... so a torch festival perhaps wasn't the best place to be! The later it got, the more people waved torches wildly around, the further I retreated back from the action.... in the end I decided to go back to the bus. I'd be 20 mins early but I figured that was ok.... I was quite surprised to get there and find I was the last one back!
I had a few days just relaxing round town before heading up the mountains behind Dali. The initial plan had been to walk and burn off some of the beers I'd had here, but
I left late, it was a hot day and, and, and,..... well I got the chair lift ;0) At the top I checked into the Highlander hostel, a cute place owned by a couple who speak English! I met an Australian woman and went for a walk with her for a few hours before spending the rest of the afternoon ensconced in a book I'd borrowed from the library there. There is a cafe at the hostel but each night they do a 'family meal' where basically everyone sits down and eats together. We had quite a mix of people staying that night - some Kiwis (I come all the way to China and meet 2 people who it turns out lived round the corner from me in Welly), Australians who'd spent the last 8 years in Africa and Brits who'd spent the last 5 years in Singapore... which all made for some v interesting conversations... ask me anything about the political situation in Ethiopia! Dinner was by candlelight.... not normally the case but the power had gone off in the afternoon and had yet to be fixed. That also meant no hot showers and importantly no chocolate cake for
desert!! Arghhh.
For my last day in Dali I visited another local village which had a 5 day rotating market. There were sooo many western tourists there but interestingly most of the stalls were aimed at locals, selling all the usual fruit, veg, meat and home stuff. Finally it was time to leave Dali.... an early start, for a change, another 8 hour bus ride, yada, yada, yada and I arrived in Ruili, the boarder town with Burma, in the pouring rain. I had a taxi driver try and fleece me - 10GBP for a taxi ride that should have cost 1GBP - we're at the Burmese boarder a very very very very long way from anywhere that I could have entered the county, I mean, which boat did he think I'd gotten off!!! I arrived at the hostel to find a place that would have been lovely in the dry season... bamboo huts to sleep in and a lovely garden area. With near continuous rain for the last month the gardens were flooded and the bedding was damp. I'd planned to have a day here relaxing, catching up on my blog, doing washing etc but the pouring rain
and leaky hut wasn't really doing it for me so I called my guide and arranged to go over the boarder to Burma the very next day!!
Next up, monks, stupa's and pineapple bushes....
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Shirls
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Cool
I love your photos, It's brill following your journey, we can see the whole world from out computer?!! ( whens the next flight out? :) )