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!!