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Published: February 15th 2011
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The ride to Shangrila was pretty ridiculous, especially with Mary occasionally feeding me songs from her eclectic iPod shuffle. I highly recommend taking scenic rides with opera music as background. Shangrila used to be called Zhongdian, but it was renamed after a fictitious place discovered by Joseph Rock in the book Lost Horizon in order to promote the tourism industry. Besides a taxi driver who I think was just used to his old route and a "SAVE TIBET!11!!" French couple who also called Xinjiang "East Turkmenistan," everyone seemed to call it Xianggelila. We were clearly entering the Tibetan region of Yunnan. One time we had to stop the bus for Yak crossing and also we passed maybe 20 vultures circling a stupa on a hill, waiting for a sky burial (dinner!). The mountains got taller and snowier and the trees fewer.
We arrived in Shangrila really disoriented, which I half blame on the 10,000 ft altitude and the windy bus ride. Shangrila is not that big, so we got to see much of it by wandering and shopping for a few hours. All three of the hostels I had dutifully copied down from Wikitravel seemed to not exist. We eventually
got directions to the Old Town which supposedly had guesthouses and hostels. As soon as we entered, we saw a couple of hostels right next to each other, picked the Barley Hostel, and got a nice room with electric blankets for ~20 kuai each.
Other hostels arrange minibuses and book tickets, but when I inquired about transportation to Deqin, the desk worker just gave me the bus station's phone number and had me call myself. As Spring Festival was quickly approaching (it was the 29th and New Year's Day was the 3rd), it seemed that busses were not running on the typical schedule and there was just one bus at 8:40 the next morning. I asked if I could show up early and get the ticket the next day, and the guy said, "Come over now." So we took a cab back to the station and I got the last ticket for the bus and also bought a ticket back to Lijiang for Mary. I later found that it was the last bus to Deqin before the holiday, though there were more expensive options like gathering a group and hiring a minibus for a few hundred kuai/person.
Business
resolved, we wandered back to the Old Town. On our way ,we stopped at a restaurant called something like "Wang Family Northeast Dumplings." It was definitely a family affair, with the whole family sitting around a table in the middle of the restaurant furiously folding dumplings. We got a lot of food and chatted with the boss who told us they were from the Northeast province of Heilongjiang. Also around that time, the zipper of my jacket died (along with some other parts of it), so I bought a giant puffy jacket for 150 kuai. Finally we went to bed. I woke up before sunrise to get ready for the bus and found that showers were not available in the morning. The beginning of many days of not showering! I caught a cab to the bus station. Like in the other smaller cities I have visited, the cabs in Shangrila didn't seem to use meters. The rides started at 6 kuai, but the driver told me that "starting today" it was 10 due to the holiday. I shouldn't have believed him! Later that morning I went to an ATM to get cash and then asked the next cab driver about
Driver
With picture of his fav monk. the price before I got in and it was 6 kuai as usual.
The ride to Deqin was among the most scenic I have been on. We traveled deep into a gorge, crossed a river, and came up the other side. The climate there was very dry, so there were sand-colored rocky mountains, a bright blue river, and excellent visibility. The road was a little rudimentary in some of the spots where they were still working on it, but there was very little snow. Past the gorge, we continued to climb in altitude and passed many snow capped mountains.
We stopped in the town of Benzilan/奔子栏 for lunch where I spotted a couple of Chinese men wearing hiking gear. I asked them if they were also going hiking, and they said yes and suggested that the three of us go together. Jiang Wei is a computer programmer from Chengdu and Si Tu is an electrical engineer from Hong Kong. Si Tu actually goes to Yubeng every year. It only took us about 8 hours to get to Deqin (I had read more), so we got there in time to wander the outdoor market and grab an early dinner
of Sichuan food. Then we took a cab to Feilaisi (30 kuai), a small town which has a temple by the same name and a wonderful view of Meili Xueshan/美丽雪山/Meili (beautiful) Snow Mountain. Of course they have capitalized on this view and built a giant wall to block it and now charge a 60 kuai entrance fee. You can just walk down the road a bit to see past the wall though. We got pretty nice rooms (again, electric blankets!!) at a guesthouse for 25 kuai/night and hit the sack early.
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