Rongju Hostel Shangri-La

... up at Tina's with Jung & Delfina who left from there to go back to Lijiang. Hiked down into the gorge with Wolfgang & Alison. This was stunning & so much harder than the first days walk. We paid 10 yuan each to walk down Teacher Zhangs path. It was so steep & was ******* the knees & took 40 ...

Hallo zusammen,<br><br>ja, Sascha uns mich gibt es noch und es geht uns gut. Die letzten Tage waren wir in Shangri-La, einer Stadt auf 3200m Hoehe (und entsprechend schlechtem Schlaf) inmitten von traumhaft schoener Landschaft.<br><br>Ich wuerde gern mehr schreiben, muss aber gleich zum Bus Richtung Kunming. Hoffentlich komme ich dort dazu. Passiert ist naemlich einiges, z. B. "tolle" Busfahrten, chinesische Krankenhaeuser, ...<br><br>Bis bald<br>Jochen

... on five yuan..<br>In the afternoon we walked up to a small temple close to the old town, where we ran in to the Taiwanese guy from the mini-van. He had been in Shangri-la several times before and he told us that there never had been any enterance fee to the gompa before and we all agreed that making one of the holiest places in Yunnan into a flimsy tourist attraction was really sad. Just outside the small temple there was a huge prayer wheel which was so heavy that it took ...

... tried to walk down a new trail. afriad we would not make it around the loop in time for the bus we had to backtrack all the way back to the hostel. we were going to another gorge? girls did not make it tot he bus in time. we were worried especially since spaniard paid for their seat. dutch guy ditched em. they made it just in time. they paid 20 rmb to climb down tot he trail. <br>

A real guide to a mythical place? You decide . . . or at least look at this interview with a Shangri-la seeker/myth-buster: Interview with Michael Buckley: Searching for Shangri-La Travel Interviews: Frank Bures talks to the author of a guide to a place that may or may not exist http://www.worldhum.com/print/item/feat ures/michael-buckley-shangri-la-2008123 1/ Few places have gripped the world's imagination like Shangri-La, the setting of James Hilton's 1933 novel ...

... lanes and wooden buildings leading off a central square. We're staying in Ge Sang Garden hostel in the midst of the old town, a lovely wooden building built round a courtyard, with ducks and terrapings wandering about. We visit the famed monastery to the north of the town - it's a huge site high on a hill with room for 600 monks, and has several impressive temples. The next day we took a tour to Bei Sea lake, a hot springs, a temple and lunch in a tibetan house ...

... Tibetan depsite what borders are drawn on the map. Fields and factories give way to a barren plain dotted with Yaks and Tibetan villages. Shangri-la, actually called ZhongDian, was renamed by the Chinese government after they decided it was the location of the utopia described in James Hilton's (fictional) book The Lost Horizon. The ruse seems to be working as tourism here has taken off, literally, as there ...

... vinieron corriendo a pedirnos dinero a cambio de fotos con ellos. La pena es que estos ninos no son mendigos pero los turistas les deben haber acostumbrado a recibir dinero por fotos. Y uno se pregunta, que es lo que estos ninos hacen con el dinero aqui? En un lugar tan rural y con minimas comodidades para los occidentales, saben o han tenido alguna vez oportunidad de usar esas monedas? Por que algunos turistas tienen que estropearlo todo?

... and set off (followed by local horseless men)!! There are a few ways to view tiger leaping gorge, i wanted to take the high path which snakes along the Haba Mountains to the west of the Yangtzi;luckily so did everyone else as it is not advised to do the walk on your own as it is in a landslide area!!! As we left the road we followed a thin dirt track up onto the Haba range, it was here that the local men had their horses/mules tied up ready to go. The mules had bells round ...

... wasn't as common here as we had been used to, and with no name or address in Chinese we were on our own. We organised a taxi to take us to the Tibetan Restaurant (our guidebook had the chinese characters for it), but we were dropped instead at the Tibet Cafe (a few blocks away). We went inside and asked them for directions (with our taxi driver) and although they didn't know the place, they seemed to know the street, so our taxi driver set off, and turned the corner (wrong ...