Excuse me, does this bus go to Lijiang?...No sir, it goes straight to Hell.

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It's a bad sign when you get on board a bus and hear someone vomiting profusely in the back. So began our journey from Dali to Lijiang. Lijiang is only 200km north of Dali through the mountains. It's a routine ride-- only 3 hours. We've endured much longer and much bumpier (Mongolia). But this ride was cursed from the start. The violent heaving and gurgling from the lady in back was just the opening. The bus only sat a dozen, and we were numbers 11 and 12, so had to climb past the 30 lb bags of rice and oversized travel bags scattered throughout the aisles to squeeze into the back. Because of the elevation, it was a brisk 50F out so the windows were thankfully closed. Unthankfully, they remained closed when all 10 passengers began to chainsmoke. And our bus driver, who was all of just 19, had either just broken up with his girlfriend, failed his college entrance exams, or lost a half year's salary in last night's poker game, was now on to meet his Maker- and was taking us with. When you actually make a 3-ton bus skid on a turn, that's when you kinda ease up on the accelerator. The only time he did slow down was to view the wreckage off the side of the road of a recent head-on collision between a truck and....oh dear god...a traveling bus.

Even the one thing that remedied the ride-- the passing scenery of gorgeous green valleys and terraced rice fields (Longsheng, we hardly missed ya)-- was soon obscured by an abrupt coating of foam that came from the left side of the bus. The woman who was sitting in the front seat had now too succumbed to the dizzying sway, and thus bowed her head out the window to splatter a collage, remarkably reminiscient of a Kandinsky, of rejected cabbage and carrots to streak ever so slowly along the side of the bus making the entire busload stare uncomfortably straight ahead for the last half hour of the ride. At that point we had all hoped the driver would actually go a little faster.

But so, despite his best efforts to paste us all to the windshield, we arrived safely to Lijiang to surprisingly have again one of the more memorable experiences of our trip. Lijiang is a mix of old and new, with the modern, capitalist side of town offering the same Western fashion retail outlets found in every big city in China. But the old part of the city, Ancient Town, gives Lijiang it's character. There are narrow alleyways with stone bridges that cross over small canals, and old wood-structure shops selling antiques and artwork. The real Old Town was actually leveled in an earthquake 8 years ago so much of the layout is actually reconstructed and perhaps a bit contrived, but still impressive nonetheless.

After taking the one day that is necessary to explore town, you again head out of the city into the outdoors. 2 hours from Lijiang is Tiger Leaping Gorge, which is fast becoming a rite of passage for many backpackers in SW China. It's 35 km long and 2 km wide, sandwiched between the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains to the east and the less-imposing Haba mountains to the west. Snaking in between is the Yangtze, China's mother river which comes to a raging flow in the gorge. Though we said that the trek was getting mundane in places in the past, this was an exception. The varied terrain was a good balance of level paths that allowed us to safely admire the scenery of snowpeaked mountains and waterfalls, and of steep cliff paths that overlooked crushing rapids below to get the heart racing. We started out as 4-- ourselves, a Swiss and a Korean-- and ended as 7, picking up another Korean, a Kiwi, and a guy from the exotic land of New Jersey along the way. It took 2 days to get from Qiatou at the SW end of the gorge to Walnut Grove near the NW end (Daju is actually the official endpoint, but we were too tired and time-constrained to make it) and it was a 2 days well spent.

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Photos

Yangtze River
winding through the gorge

The Crushing Yangtze
She'll tear right through you

Old Town
A bit tourist-laden, but still quite pleasant

Comments

[Frank]

Vomiting and Buses
At the end of August i went to D.C. on the chinatown bus... not even before we left there was a guy throwing up onto the aisle... that guy ended up throwing up like 4 times the whole ride... partly in a bag and partly on the aisle.