Youjia Hostel Shangri-La

Left the Guesthouse at 8.30am to trek to Tina's guesthouse 2 hours away. This had some scary moments where we had to walk through waterfalls that spilled onto the track & then dropped a 1000 metres. Pretty scary & you couldn't put 1 foot wrong!!













Shangri-La, Yunnan, China hilaryramsey

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... either, but we at least got a lot of good pictures in the evening light. Back in old town we ate dinner at Potala Restaurant, there we tried the Tibetian momos, a kind of dumpling stuffed with potato and yakmilk - it was really tasty!

The next day we took it easy and strolled around in the old town and bought some tibetan stuff from the old ladies in the town square. It was really hard to bargain with them since their starting price was so cheap, it feels a bit strange to ...

... the trail. stayed in awesome hostel not finished last day with amazing view of the gorge. girls were a little slower on the trail - spaniard assumed to wait. girls were military service grads - standard for all isreal. gorge was ridiculous (4000 ft drop). first night tried to see stars amazing! pictures did not work out- even though we tried really hard. last day we split up ...

... shop and a Buddhist temple open to visitors - along with a warehouse-size Tibetan bazaar, selling a host of items including yak jerky and expensive silver jewelry encrusted with semiprecious gems. A recent report issued by the Pacific Asia Travel Assn. encouraged China to develop just this kind of tourism. Both cultural and "green" tourism, the report said, "have the potential to help lift the rural population out of poverty." http://news.future-of-travel.org/?p=154 8

... main living space is. The attic space is for storage and drying crops, and this lies under a wooden or slate roof insulated by turf. The ground floor and courtyard are for animals. Shangri-La town itself is mostly modern - there's clearly been alot of expansion since tourism exploded after the chinese authorities declared it to be the mythical Shangri-la, and of course in an effort to make it more Chinese than Tibetan. The old town is a small, charming maze ...

Having heard that Shangri-la has reopened to foreigners following the Tibet riots, we decided to make good use of our hangovers by getting on the bus to check it out. The bus raced pasted Tiger Leaping Gorge and then up, up, up to the 3500m Tibetan Plateau, breaking through the spine of peaks that ring it's outer edge. The change in scenery was sudden and dramatic. This region, like all of the Tibetan Plateau ...

... de colortes con los rezos adornan la plaza y las calles. Esta plaza es una fiesta a la hora de amorzar, con montanas de tenderetes en los que eliges el pincho que quieras para asarlo. La comida sigue siendo fantastica (aparte de la carne de yak, el plato tipico!). Es un sitio donde la vida es verdaderamente simple. En nuestro viaje en bus a Zhongdian paramos en mitad de una aldea y los ninos del lugar, ataviados con sus trajes tipicos ...

... necks so you always knew when they were following you, the men tried all the time to get you to rest your legs and get on their mules but they always got the same answer yet still they followed!!! It wasnt long before hte group started to split as everyone had differnt paces. I was upfront with peite, antonio and nadia, rob and martha were in the middle and arjan and audrey were bringing up the rear. As we climbed round the bottom side of the Haba Range the views strted to ...

... stopping a bit further up at another guesthouse (Kevin's Trekker Inn). Our driver seemed surprised when we said it was wrong again, but this time we decided to walk it and find it ourselves. We wandered around the old town, using the guidebook map (turns out to be not a very good map) and after failing to find the guesthouse, we stopped at a few guesthouses along the way to check them out. We found one that had been recommended by Mama, but it seemed a bit too basic and ...