The Home Tibetan Home Shangri-La

... each ( 280 for the car). It was 6.30pm by the time we set off & there was only 30 minutes of daylight left. The roads wre steep, we only averaged 30 km an hour, so the 100km journey to Shangri La took us over 3 hours. We passed a landslide & drove over washed out sections from a waterfall - pretty ...

... ey? I like to live simply and not buy much. Food, a room and occasionally other stuff. But capitalism drives people to buy, buy, buy. It motivates everyone to try to persuade everyone else to buy. It motivates marketing to make status about money because that makes people buy.

I read about "socially responsible capitalism" here. They have these 2 eco-lodges in remote villages. One is a co-operative to promote sustainable farming, and eco-tourism. They let tourists stay in a ...

... in large numbers, in quite extraordinary large villa-syle houses.
The second venture out of the town was to see a Tibetan Monastery. Taking the bus only so far, we walked a great deal of the way through marshy fields following a hill, until we reached it and the citadel-like town which surrounds it. It had much grandeur for a working monastery, but being so remote, one could see why there were so many of the robed monks living and practising here.

... spent a few minutes making a half decent snow man. Despite our enthuisiasm, our efforts were clearly amatuerish compared the experienced monks, who had crafted snowman masterpieces with impressive Buddha/Bugs Bunny etc faces... How they must have laughed at the clumsy foriegners. With a successful day of sightseeing under our belts, we hit the bus station so Deniz and I (we're leaving Dmitri here, the Russian is in his element) could ...

... believe there is a place where all this is possible. Humans are utopia-seekers, and Shangri-La presents a crystal vision of a Himalayan utopia. I understand the Chinese actually renamed an area "Shangri-La County" in 2002? Yes, Shangri-La County is shown on a map in the guidebook, and that's what got this guidebook started-the fact that Chinese authorities laid claim to the real location for Shangri-La. The claim is spurious at best. I wanted to present a wider ...

Our travels within the Yunnan province finally landed us in Shangri-la, a small Tibetan town near the border with Tibet. It used to be called Zhongdian (and still is by some people), but in 2001 the government declared that it was the town described in the book about Shangri-la and changed the name to attract more tourists. For this reason we thought it would be kitschy and touristy but in fact it was one of the most pleasant ...

... Die Landschaft hier ist sehr schoen: Der Ort ist umgeben von hohen, schneebedeckten Gipfeln und man kann, wenn man auf einem Huegel steht, weit ueber die Ebenen hinweg schauen. Gestern abend habe ich etwas faszinierendes gesehen: Mitten auf dem Marktplatz waren etwa 150 Menschen, von jung bis ganz alt, versammelt um dort Gemeinsam zu tanzen. War wirklich interessant zu sehen, wie die alten Menschen in Trachten mit den Jungen tanzen. Wobei die ...

... we do, heading in the wrong direction, but we come accross an Olympic Staduim being constructed. A strange thing to find amongst the rice paddy fields. After 4 hours we are burnt to a cinder and tired....still blaming the altitude for the thin air :-). We catch a bus to the tibetan moanastery up in the hills overlooking the town. Its lovely, the sun is setting so it catches nice light. We wander around the temples and I am ...

... decided to just take the 30 minute walk along the road to Seans Guest house (Walnut Garden). The route down to the yangtzi was not for the faint hearted as you had to climb down shear cliffs via man made ladders, i absolutly loved it as i really like that sort of trek. We had a few problems at the top as a local family say they own this section of path as they maintain it etc etc so they wanted a total of about 30 yuan of we wanted to continue.. We wernt having any of it so ...

... to sit down with them. He tried to communicate with them a bit - one of the monks knew a litte English, but the topics remained quite simple due to the language difficulties. One thing that had impressed us so far with Zhongdian, was the friendliness of the people, and their curiousity with foriegners. It appeared that although Zhongdian was well on the tourist map, it was not yet quite so changed from all the tourism, and from meeting the curious stares of the people with a ...