Yunnan - Zhongdian

After a 2 hour bus drive that I slept through we arrived at Zhongdian, which the Chinese government renamed Shangrila to promote tourism. There's really no such place as James Hilton's Shangrila...well there is now. It's a small unimpressive city in the foothills of Tibet. We ate lunch with our new guide Jiaxi. He's a big guy in Zhongdian. Both figuratively and literally. He's a big guy with an equally big dog, a Tibetan Mastiff. You probably haven't run into too many Tibetan Mastiffs. They're really rare. I heard this dog cost as much as a luxury sports car....

But Jiaxi...He runs a hotel, a restaurant, does some government work and works with an NGO. On top of that he drives the school bus that takes the children of Napa village to and from school in Zhongdian every week. He's a pretty cool guy. I heard he worked in south China during the Vietnam war building a road to supply the Viet Cong. He was only 13 at the time...

After lunch we headed to Napa. I should mention at this point that there was snow everywhere. Another group of students was doing the same trip we were but in reverse. They flew directly from Kunming to Zhongdian and stayed at Napa first. Their flight was delayed a day because of all the snow. It had snowed a foot before they got there and another foot or so during their stay. We weren't looking forward to all the snow, especially after the coldness of Haerbin and  relative pleasantness of Kunming. 

Before we got to Napa we made a stop by a Buddhist temple. I should say monastery. It was more of a monastery. It was a village built on a hill beside a lake. At the top of the hill sat a massive temple - full of monks. We didn't waste anytime. We walked straight up to the temple to have a look around. From the balcony we saw a little island with a small dome on it. We asked what it was for. They don't bury people in Buddhist culture but they do leave them, dismembered, in  small domes on little lake islands for birds to eat.....

To be honest I'm getting a little jaded when it comes to Buddhist temples. I've seen a lot of them so far. They're usually really pretty but oftentimes if you've seen one, you've seen them all. This one had a distinct difference. Monks. Lots of them. They all wore their traditional maroon garb and Nike sneakers. They all had brand new sneakers. Fashionable shoe wearing monks. And cell phones. I would see monks, young and old, take a break from meditation or chanting to text a friend. It all seemed a little...hokey. I might go as far as to say a racket. They depend on tourists and pilgrims to survive. Ordinarily this is fine, nothing wrong with living off tourism but there was nothing special about this place. It was just some guys hanging out in maroon in a candlelit room. I think we all know my stance on religion but this one is particularly silly. No one agrees about anything in it, and no one can really explain the mechanisms of it....or why I should give them money for incense or some beads.

Plugh....At least I bought a sweet "painting" of tiger leaping gorge outside the temple. Oh, I gave into the tourist in me. I bought those colorful Tibetan  prayer flags.

The bus drove us out of town a few minutes and literally dropped us on the side of the road. The only road to Napa was too snowy. We would have to walk down a muddy, snowy track to get to Napa. We were told it was a 10 minute or 3km walk. One of those amounts is was clearly wrong. We were hoping it was the 3km. But no, it really was 3 km. Nobody, except me, had proper snow shoes. I packed them just in case, not really thinking I'd need them. It was the best decision I have made in China. Everybody else had to put plastic bags over their shoes. We only walked for 10 minutes before Jiaxi came barreling down the road in his suitably big SUV, fully equipped with a snorkel and extra gas tank at the back. How far are we going? There wasn't enough room for all of us in the car so a 6 of us sat on the top. I've never ridden an elephant but I bet it was like our ride into Napa. The road was already in poor condition and the snow made it worse. We, or at least I, held on for dear life as we tumbled along the makeshift road, in a constant state of fishtailing. At one point the road became a bridge. At first the road hugged Napa Lake but eventually it left the safety of land and wondered out into the lake. To our left and right there was water, only 4 feet from the wheels. Freezing cold, semi frozen lake water. And we were inside and on top a vehicle barely being controlled by the driver. 

Napa was going to be interesting......

Yunnan - Tiger Leaping Gorge

After a spot of lunch next to a river at the bottom of a steep valley we started our hike up through Tiger Leaping Gorge. TGL gets it's name from an old legend of some hunters chasing a tiger through the valley and it hopped across the gorge using a large rock in the center of the river as a stepping stone. I'm pretty sure there haven't been tigers in this region for a very long time.

We started by walking up a path led by our tour guide Jonathan. Immediately we saw large Lord of the Rings-esque mountains, snowcapped and looming. We feared we'd have to cross these mountains which are basically the foothills of the Himalayas. Luckily our plan was to just walk past them, in their shadow. The first day we walked past terraced farms and goats for about 2 hours. It wasn't too tough of a walk. There were a few steep rocky sections that I think the less physically fit among us had trouble with but I was quite comfortable. We eventually reached the Naxi Family Guest house. A beautiful, apparently brand new timber lodge at the foot hills of the gorge. Our view was fantastic. Not a bad place to spend an evening. We ate the usual meal of vague but delicious vegetables, vague but tasty meat and bland broth and leaves which I neither like nor understand. It's basically hot water, with a few spinach leaves, eight to nine noodles and sometimes an egg. There was one standout dish. Bitter Gourd. If you ever have the opportunity to eat Bitter Gourd, don't. It's awful. It's like eating earwax flavored celery. After dinner we put on a few extra layers of clothes, sat around bowls of smoldering coals and learned to play Majiang or Mahjong. It's not as complicated as it looks and a good way to pass time. We were all given a bowl of sunflower seeds which we ate furiously. Why? I don't know, they were neither filling nor tasty but when you're up in the Chinese mountains playing majiang by starlight you just don't say no to anything. Except Bitter Gourd.

After another night on top of an electric blanket we rose to head out to the main part of TLG. A few people had come down with a stomach illness since Shaxi. Aseem had to stay behind and meet us at the next hotel. The first hour of climbing was much more difficult than the previous day. We had been warned. The itinerary did warn of 18 switchbacks of hell. I think there were more like 30 but it was all uphill, direction didn't matter. Me and a few others were getting tired of the walk for ten minutes rest for five routine so we just went on without everyone else. It was hard to get lost on this path. After the hardest part of the climb the trees opened up exposing a great view of the gorge. This was the gorge of gorges. I've never seen such a dramatic changed in altitude. It was like standing on the end of the earth, and the other end had wrapped all the way around but couldn't quite reach. The weather too was odd. It would be sunny, then hail, then rain, then gail force winds, then sun again.

I think this scenic outlook was the highest point in our day. We descended to another guest house to eat lunch. We met some Brits and Argentinians here, they said they were headed where we were heading in a few hours. There was one odd thing about this guest house. In the corner two people practiced Kung Fu. Like real Kung Fu. Morpheus vs Neo, Mr Miyagi, Jackie Chan - Kung Fu. And one of them was a white guy. He was obviously the apprentice.

The rest of the hike was pretty much flat. We just hugged the side of the mountain the whole way. Literally hugged in some parts as we were basically walking a long a cliff. This made me think. How did all these guesthouses get up this high? Answer: Horses. Horses carried every single one of the objects used to build these massive guest houses. Incredible. Soon we came to a huge waterfall cutting it's way across out path, we had no choice but to walk through it. This is apparently where a lot of people die in Tiger Leaping Gorge. Sweet, Jonathan, thanks...

Shortly after the waterfall we descended down to our next hotel, Chateau de Woody. A name I'll never understand. We were served a post hike green tea and ...walnut platter? To open the walnuts we were given rocks....out of the flower garden in the courtyard.  This hotel had another great view. I think Troost stayed here in this hotel because he describes the exact view. Looking out the hotel all you see is a Mordor-esque wall of rock.

We went upstairs after showering and resting for dinner. We had another post dinner game night of majiang, poker and craps. We called it a day. Quite a day. It was about 6 hours of hiking, some of which was pretty tough. In my opinion Troost is a pansy. It wasn't that hard of a hike.

The next day, before heading to Zhongdian/ Napa we drove down the namesake rock of Tiger Leaping Gorge. It's a big rock. In the middle of a big river. Not that exciting to be honest. Maybe it was early, or maybe it was the 50 flights of stairs we had to climb down and then back up to see it. I could have done without seeing it close up. I had already seen it from the glorious top of the gorge.

Onto Zhongdian!

Video of Shaxi Hiking

Yunnan - Shaxi

We left Dali in the afternoon by small charter bus. Our muslim bus driver was a maniac. There was no vehicle too big or too small he couldn't pass at hair raising speed. I think I slept most of the way. It was apparently a 3 hour bus ride but I don't remember it being that painful.

We arrived in Shaxi in the early evening just before the sun went down. Driving into Shaxi was, up until that point, the most beautiful natural scenery I had seen in China. Shaxi is surrounded by green and yellow fields, right at the bottom of a large valley. It's a town of about 20,000 people. It's remote but not tiny. Driving in, I was worried about our hotel situation, as a lot of the buildings were very.....made of mud. Some local people helped us with our bags and walked us to the hotel. They lead us down some very "interesting" alleys to get there. After dodging the livestock, sewage and children running around, we made it to the hotel which completely defied my expectations. This hidden gem of a guest house was amazing. Every wall was decorated with ornate carvings. It was a villa style building. Rooms dotted around the surrounding wall with an open  atrium in the center. They had two computers with internet access, a flat screen tv with a wide selection of DVDs. Most importantly the beds had electric heaters in them. This proved VERY comfortable at night.

We ate a delicious meal shortly after getting settled in our rooms.It was a standard chinese meal - vegetables, toufu, meat....and chicken nuggets? Hmmm. I forgot how much I like chicken nuggets.

At night we learned and practiced a song that we were expected to sing and dance to the next night in front of the people of the town. Nobody was really interested in learning it despite the teacher's efforts. We decided to just watch Ratatouille. It's cute, but I think Pixar has lost it's touch. It's too cartoony now.

Like I said, the night was cold, but the bed was warm. We woke up early the next day to walk around town and hike around the mountains.  Our first stop was an old temple in the center of town, then onto the market. It was all hustle and bustle. People selling rice....people buying ric. There was just about everything you could think of at this market. Every form of chicken, duck and goose. Pig legs strewn about on tables. The usual.

For lunch we drove, through stomach turning winding roads, to a buddhist temple in the mountains. I'd estimate we climbed about 20 floors worth of stairs to get to it. Which wasn't that much compared the the following days. Being a buddhist temple they didn't serve meat. Which was alright because 1) I'm always dubious of the meat in China 2) this was the best vegetarian food I've ever had. One dish is particularly memorable. It was some sort of cheese or curd. It was a white paste, the consistency of the goat cheese at Uchi (Ariel know's what I'm talking about) covered in hot chili peppers. But the paste was the saltiest thing I've ever had. It was saltier than pure salt, yet delicious.

After lunch we saved the peanuts and cashews from the meal and fed the local monkeys. Monkeys are picky. We were giving them shelled peanuts but they insisted on removing that papery thin layer on the outside of the actual nut. It was actually really cool to see. They would roll the nut in their hands removing the shell. Monkeys move their hands exactly like humans. It's freaky.

We hiked around the mountains some more, stopping at various temples along the way, one of which was the "Temple to the Femal Reproductive Organ". Naturally it was in a cave.

On the ride back to Shaxi we told each other riddles, all in Chinese. It was fun to see people edit the riddles so they could explain them. In the evening we had another delicious meal (this time the chicken nuggets were cold) and went out to the town square to watch the locals do various singing/dancing acts. They would perform something for us, then we'd retaliate with some song or dance we knew. We performed our awkward chinese song and dance we'd learned the night before first. Everybody just looked at us with a expressionless face.  It was a poor opening move. Later we moved onto just singing English songs, Sublime's What I Got, Jingle Bells, The Lion Sleeps Tonight and the  coup de grace Bohemian Rhapsody.

After being shamed by 10 year old girls singing and performing better than us we retired to our hotel for another cosy sleep. 

We got up early again and prepared to depart for Tiger Leaping Gorge. We were told to pack enough stuff for one night because we wouldn't see the bus or our big bags again for 2 days. After breakfast we hit the road. The first 20 minutes leaving Shaxi were horribly winding. I quickly became car sick and closed my eyes hoping to relieve the sickness. Eventually we hit straighter roads and I regained my strength. After about an hour of driving we hit a small town, who's name I never found out. Initially there was a little traffic trying to get through this town but eventually we came to a complete stand still. No one was moving. Every car was in complete gridlock. There was no sign that it was going to start moving so we all descended the bus and walked around the market. It seemed that the market was the cause of all this traffic. It was a saturday, market day, so everyone had converged on this tiny road. And because it is China people parked their cars/carts/construction equipment with no regard for other people trying to get through. The police if they had cared/existed wouldn't have been able to get through to tell people to move. It was chaos. It was an illustration of everything I dislike about China.

After about 2 hours we eventually got moving again, but because we were all wandering around outside the bus just left without some people for fear that if he didn't start moving he wouldn't be able to move again. We drove out of town a little bit and everyone who was missing just had to walk to catch up. It made sense.

On to Tiger Leaping Gorge!!

Yunnan - Beijing to Dali

All the LI kids got on a bus to head to the airport at 6am. I did my packing 20 minutes before we left. I didn't need that much, just a few changes of clothes, the odd book and some power cables. I only have my backpack and huge duffel bag, so I brought both.

The flight was pretty scary. There was a lot of turbulence in the air - that I didn't mind. It was hair raising when we came in for landing. We would drop seemingly hundreds of feet at a time. Everyone clapped and cheered when we we finally on the ground. I had to agree, I was happy to be on solid ground.

Kunming's weather was beautiful. 80 degrees with a slight wind. Perfect compared to Beijing. Kunming is pretty for China. I'm afraid a lot of Kunmings income comes from tourism, but I hear a new international highway is being built. Kunming is expected to be a household name in the U.S. in a few years. A1, the group I was in, had a train to catch at 10pm. All the other groups got to spend a night in kunming before departing for their destinations. We dropped our bags off at the hotel and left on foot to explore the city for a few hours. It's nice to walk around with a vague goal in mind. Ours was the large central park. We walked through some streets buying last minute necessities like sunglasses, bottle openers and Snickers (a real life saver). We eventually made it to the park. As I expected it was teeming with people. C'mon. A verdant park, on Saturday, perfect weather...in China.

After just wasting time walking around and eating at a xiaochi, we eventually returned to the hotel and then onto the train station. Like my previous train station experience, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of people there. After boarding the train everyone just wanted to sleep. We had fun and partied on the Harbin train, but we were all tired from traveling. For some reason they were playing a certain Chinese love song on loop from 10pm to about 11:30 or 12. It wasn't even a good song. The only line I can remember was in English "To kiss someone, to hold someone". Trains are my new favorite way to travel.

Dali (and the rest of this trip) is not like anywhere else in China. The skies are green and the people are not Han Chinese. 92% of Chinese people are of the Han ethnicity. Dali is primarily Bai. But they mostly still speak Mandarin, and can certainly understand Chinese characters. after arriving we went to breakfast with our new tour guide Jonathan from Kunming. Just as we were getting off the bus at the inn where we were eating Jonathan introduced the bus driver. Jonathan told us two things about him. His name and the fact he was a Muslim. I'm not sure why he mentioned his religion. Was it a warning? A funny quirk? I'm not sure, but if he had never told me I would have never known. 

The breakfast was the best breakfast I've had in China. This was because it was as western as it gets. Scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, orange juice and crappy coffee. I had to use the bathroom but like a lot of things in China this was an adventure. First, I forgot toilet paper. Chinese bathrooms often don't have toilet paper. BYOTP. After I got someone to bring me some, I went to flush. Uh oh....no water? But there's water in the toilet. Where did it come from? My rudimentary plumbing knowledge directed me to the cistern. Phewf. The ball that floats up stopping the flow of water was just stuck.  My toilet problems for this trip were only beginning.

After breakfast some of us went on a bike ride with Jonathan. At the bike rental shop we were told to pick out, from a selection of crappy mountain bikes, a bike that looked like it might fit us. As I was adjusting my saddle for my potential ride everyone just took off. I quickly jumped on my bike to catch them. I should point out that I was wearing my TOMS. Worst traveling shoes ever. They're basically slippers. My shoes were in the bus. After riding for about a minute I noticed my right foot hurt a lot more than the left one. They both hurt because the shoes were paper thin, but the right one just didn't feel ...right. I looked down to see half a pedal. Not even half. It was just a pole where the pedal should be. This sucked. Oh well. This wasn't my first rodeo. I've ridden a severely broken bike for much longer.

We rode through town, which isn't very big, through some fields, past some pagodas and down to Erhai lake. It's a pretty large lake, like Tahoe. It's what keeps Dali so humid and pleasant. We tried to walk out on a pier but we were told it would cost us. We didn't feel like paying so we walked away. As we were riding away a guy came up to us and offered to take us out on a fishing boat for a minimal charge. We haggled is down to 15 kuai per person. I'm glad we took the offer because it was a good story.

This fisherman was the most unique fisherman I have ever seen in my broad study of fishermen. We thought we were going to go on a large, diesel-powered, net-towing, fishing boat and taste the life of a seaman. But no. 8 of us piled into a glorified  rickety canoe. As we were waiting to depart the fisherman was getting birds out of what looked like upside down laundry baskets. He and his friend were tying reeds tightly around these birds (called yuying, fish-eagles). He threw 5 or 6 into the boat with us and pushed off. He rowed a few hundred feet from the dock and pushed the birds into the water. They swam around for a bit occasionally diving to get fish. I then realized why the birds had string/reeds around their necks. The birds couldn't swallow the fish. The fisherman would call the birds back to the boat when they had a fish and then empty their throat by force. It was actually a very successful way of fishing, albeit a disgusting and mean way.

After our brief foray into the world of bird fishing we cycled back to central Dali which is a web of touristy stores and hippie paraphernalia. Dali is full of dreadlocked white people. It's a big hippie town.  Occasionally we would have old women in traditional clothes come up to us and offer us marijuana...repeatedly. They really had no fear. 

For lunch we felt like eating hamburgers. We made our way up an alley with a little river running down the middle and sat down at an outside table. I flipped to the hamburger section and picked out what I thought sounded delicious -  and egg and cheese hamburger. After 20 minutes I was served my egg and cheese sandwich. It was just bread,cucumber, cheese and a fried egg. Bummer.

Shortly after we departed Dali by bus. On to Shaxi!