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Lijiang old town
Silly number of bridges.Hello!
Ok, so we've been pretty bad with the communications of late, I've decided to blame Fay and Chris for keeping us busy with trips to hospital etc...
But also the internet is definately not as big a feature in China, there is WiFi here and there, but I can't always connect to it or the staff have long forgotten the password.
So taking the story to China, we've started on the only part of our trip to be completely planned for us in advance, our 29 day Chinese Panorama organised tour. Fortunately the tour is small, there are only 14 of us and have a guide who lives in the region that we've just been travelling through. Our first impressions of China isn't quite what I expected. The city of Kunming, far from being a dusty concentration of peasants, appears to be a bustling, big, flashy, and CLEAN city, more akin to what I imagine a qieter Tokyo to look like. Cat and I decided that we definately had a sort of reverse culture shock, in comparison to the CRAZY busy and dirty Hanoi, where every ride is a rip-off (again, sorry) The culture shock continued as we checked in
Lijiang old town
Grey roof labyrinth to our big hotel with a reception of grey marble. We tried our best to look clean and inconspicuous for fear of being thrown out of such a shiny establishment.
We're going back to Kunming tomorrow, so maybe cover it then, there's not much more to say other than its a clean quiet city.
The next stop was Dali, the home town of our tour guide. We stayed in a Bai minority accomodation, with a traditional courtyard with a whitewashed wall for improved lighting. Bai people had fought with the Tibetans in the 8th century against China, but were forced to switch sides later on and became part of the China we know today. Very big on agriculture, but suffering from a grave drought at the moment (where have I heard that before?) which the news said is affecting 23 or so million people... Dali itself started us on the gradient of touristy towns. This one is very much geared towards Westerners, but still you can see a lot of local commerce and activity going on in the streets. A quick ride up a mountain gave us a good view of the Swiss-like town sandwiched between a lake and the
mountain itself. Very Geneva like. I had good fun running through the dried up riverbed full of giant boulders, only abandoning the run when I came accross the cliff-face of a waterfall in the wet season, only managing to stop in time!
After Dali, we went to Lijiang, possibly the pinnacle of tourity towns, though incredibly pretty at the same time. The cobbled streets and the small canals earn its name of Venice of China, and the streets lack any form of design creating the createst maze in the world, not helped by the fact that all streets look the same due to the amount of commercialism that has gone into it- silver trinket shop follows silver trinket shop, next to a small trinket shop. Though Cat as always is able to find something different and original to buy! The stunning Jade Stone Mountain overlooks Lijiang and was the perfect backdrop to our morning bike ride through the countryside; stops were made every few minutes as we found just another perfect photo opportunity. It is also possible to view the mountain in the reflection of the Black Pearl Pool so we made sure to visit the lovely location, however wind
Teaching Go
I'd already lost the game at that stage. rippling the water prevented us from taking the 'perfect' shot. We were pretty happy anyway. It was quite amusing to watch all the men with their tremendously enormous lenses on tripods. Phil took a cheeky photo of someone else taking a photo of them taking a photo!!
Despite the touristy nature of Lijiang we quite enjoyed our stay there. We walked up the only hill to the pagoda to take in the view and were quite surprised at quite how large the town was (our visit to that point having only taken in the UNESCO Old Town). Naturally Phil wanted to explore and we got 'lost' in the winding streets playing the game of trying to find anywhere we could take a photo with no one in it! Our evenings were spent in Lamu's a restaurant just opposite our hotel (so there was no chance of getting lost) which had great tibetan food and a relaxed atmosphere. One of the evenings we convinced Langer (our guide) to teach us how to play Chinese Go. Well, we had no idea what we were in for. After an hour we had 'some' idea of the BASICS. Langer challenged us to a
game and apparently we lost after only about a tenth (probably less) of the pieces were on the board! Apparently if you play 10 to the power of 600 games of Go, no two will be the same and it takes at between 10-30 years to master the game. That of course is if you started playing with private tutors at 5. We think we'll stick to playing people of our level!!
Tiger Leaping Gorge
Ok so having basically not researched China at all, I had no idea what to expect of the famous place. Hey at least I'd heard of it! I'm not sure that I expected our journey into the gorge though. We'd been warned that we'd have to walk in at least part of the way along the 'road' because it was blocked by landslides!? We were also told that due to these landslides the upper gorge was closed to visitors, which we were a bit gutted by no knowing what else was there.
The gorge is argued to be the deepst in the world, contested by the shallower Grand Canyon because the walls are not vertical, but composed of 2 mountain peaks which clearly
No choice but to walk.
Not included in this photo is the amount of dust in the air nor the giant machinery we had to negotiate our way past. were related a few million years ago.
Arriving at the gorge, our guide and locals seemed to ignore the large sign saying the road had been closed until later this year, so on a small bus we took into a cracked, windy and in parts definately thinner than it should have been road towards the first hostel. Unfortunately, after negotiating 3-4 cliff-faced sections where the road had melted away, our guide decided the route was too dangerous for the bus. So we got off and walked.
The road has been carved out of the gorge using a generous amount of dynamite, so the rock sitting above it is as stable as an aquarium in a bb gun testing facility. There were a few sections where I guide encouraged us to walk slightly more briskly.. THen there was the section where people had to stop working for us to go past below them without getting rocks on the head. THen there was the section where people refused to stop working, so after debating whether running through essentially a mini landslide was a good idea, we decided to take a detour climbing up the mountain to go past above them. One
No choice but to go around
This is where the moving rocks caused a 1 hour steep detour. hour later and some very tired legs, we had regained the road approx 50M further and were able to continue on our way.
The rest of the trek was glorious though, spending 2 more days trekking down to the river, then back to the top of the gorge and back out without seeing another landslide. (no dynamite up here, though the ones lower down made for good sound effects down the gorge.) On the way back from the river includes a 30M ladder climb made by the locals up a cliff face. We also saw 3 snakes, hence the title today. Some sections of the track are literally carved out of cliff faces, and a couple of vertiginous members had to be helped through these tightrope exercises whilst the rest of us took photos of the view. The pace setter (no, not the local guide we'd hired to show us the way) Ross put all the younger part of the group by marching at a steady pace throughout the walk whilst the rest of us were left behind to complain about our aches and pains.
The sad story here is that its been chosen as a new site for a
hydro dam, so most of the farmland before the gorge will flood, causing the relocation of one MILLION people.. So we're glad we got to see it before it disappears. We found out last night china ha something like 86000 dams in the country. Thats right.
The last night in the gorge we decided to try the local spirit, dubbed "firewater", at 50% it really messes with your head. Suprisingly tasty for something of that proofing, it got the better of a fewof us, including our tour leader, and we all slept soundly through the night despite some Koreans partying until the wee hours and keeping everyone else up.
The last sprint to the bus was marred only by Cat tripping on a stone with exhaustion and putting a hole in her favourite travel trousers. Due to the horrific pancakes we'd been served, we'd all had very little brekky before the last 4 hour trek and were all feeling a little sugar deprived!
On the way out of the gorge we moved towards a Tibetan concentration, which is the closest we wer going to get to the real thing this time around. Suprisingly the architecture and environment changed almost immediately.
Raging Yangtze river
Western name only, officially called the golden sand river due to the high quantity of gold in it. Didn't feel like jumping in... We visited a Tibetan house at random (would you let a group of people who knocked on your door nose around your house for less than $10?), which consists of a mini-farm on the ground floor and living quarters complete with prayer room and turnip stew on the wood-fire cooktop.
After the LONGEST hot shower in the world, and putting on CLEAN clothes (mmmm, it's like a warm hug), we investigated our new location of Zhongdian, or SHangri-la as the official line calls it these days. Weird story, due to a fictional book someone wrote they renamed it.
Zhongdian is home to one of the biggest Bhuddist monasteries going. Unfortunately, the curse of Phil and Cat found the central building with all the artifacts under reconstruction. But we did manage to visit a couple of other temples in the area that didn't have scaffolding, complete with singing monks and incessant incense. Local people would walk through and put money in front of each monk, or photo of monk, or statue, or donation box. Weird religion where you seem to have to donate constantly. Mind you, we did the same at the entrance with the fee!
In the afternoon our Duracell
The practice ladder.
Yeah, the real one was big. Real big. trekker Ross organised a trip to a nearby mountain. Not knowing anything about it, we were a little hesitant to throw away the rest of our time in Zhongdian, but we were so glad we did. After a 1000M cablecar climb we reached the summit at 4500M above sea-level, from where we could gaze at the closer peaks of the Himalayan range in the distance and throw a couple of snowballs at eachother (though only patches of snow up here at this time of year, thanks to being relatively closer to the equator than the alps for instance)
That evening we descended and ate Yak for dinner, in a chinese fondue. I loved it, though it seemed not everyone was taken by the amount of chilli or the presence of raw Yak meat on the table...
Well that's us just about caught up! I'm going to try and add some photos now, so I'll stop the text section and swear to myself as I no doubt fail again.
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Fashion Critic
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Not the trousers?!?
The fabled singapore trousers were torn? More suited to wandering round ION then? Also Yak... Not the fat type, but the edible, i'd like to qualify: who loved it...?