Bafangyuan Business Hotel Shangri-La

... you can cut through steel with these so it sounded like it was worth a look. When we got to the shop we were given a demonstration and the sword cut right through the nail he was using (the ones you use to hand pictures, not the one you use for scratching). With just enough energy left over we went to a street lined with bbq stalls, between for of us there was mounds of beef, chicken, squid, fish, tofu and other things I dindnt recognise, Ive never tasted tofu so good!

... the restaurants also have western menus with banana pancakes and bacon sandwiches. Couldn&#8217;t resist the bacon, I admit. Even though we enjoyed Western Sichuan very much, it&#8217;s also nice to visit this kind of an easy place after some time in the backwaters. However, our next destinations will be quite touristy, so let&#8217;s see if we&#8217;ll miss the peaceful countryside. Anyway, now heading towards the Tiger Leaping Gorge nearby for some trekking.<br>

... local busses, hire landcruisers, fly, or take the train into the province at will, but foreigners must travel as part of a tour, and be accompanied by a guide at all times. The travel restrictions were to be lifted in 2008, but political unrest in the province led to a tightening of the restrictions. At the time of publication, our most promising lead into Tibet was still running at 170 USD per day, well outside our budget. We will go to Tibet, but if we go at ...

Day 4 - Lijiang - Monday, December 1st We figure it must have been about three hours before we realized we were sleeping in a bus parking lot in Lijiang. Apparently our overnight bus from Kunming arrived at about 4am on Monday morning and we all continued to sleep until the sun came up around 7:30am. The temperature was at about four degrees when we stepped off the bus and I could feel the chill straight to my bones. Three months in 25+ degree ...

... this every day... for their own fun. The clouds clear out and I start liking Shangri-la. I'm easy to please (hopefully no ex-boyfriends read this). The horse racing festival is a true spectacle. The guys are galloping on horses without saddles, but lavishly adjourned with ribbons and scarf. The crowd is truly out of this world. Those faces, those ethnic outfits - it is all for real, non of the "for the tourist" stuff. When the girls line up on the track the ...

... the rest of the afternoon playing chess. We had a really good dinner of dumplings in place where they did not speak a word of English, so Daniella did some drawings of a pig and a carrot to convey our message that we wanted pork dumplings and vegetable dumplings. Surprisingly enough , it worked, and the food was great. This was our last night in Shangri-La, before we took the crowded bus back to Lijiang to catch our flight to Chengdu, this ...

... to frigid zone. During the World War II, pilots of American air force found that there was a beautiful paramedic silver seamark on the Route Hump. It was so clear that pilots could see it hundreds of miles away. That is the main peak of Jade Dragon, Shanzidou. There are still 19 glaciers in Jade Dragon Mountain. They are the southernmost glaciers on the Eurasia in modern time. The glaciers were formed when the influence of oceanic monsoon. Usually, glaciers can ...

... we could see that just like at the bottom of the hill there was a lot of rebuilding going on. In one of the buildings there was a very large statue of the Buddha and it was without a head and limbs and as you can see in the pictures here the limbs were strewn about waiting to be assembled. After Zhongdian we travelled back to Lijiang.

... gereisd naar Lijiang (want we hadden maar weinig tijd en veel te bezoeken), maar dat vond Veerle helemaal niet erg, want zo had zij dit shoppingparadijs helemaal voor zich!  En wat moet een vrouw anders doen om de tijd te doden zo op haar eentje in een vreemd land?  Die avond kwam ze thuis met een glimmend verzorgd gezicht (+ massage) en vlechtjes in haar haar :o) Lijiang de dag daarop, was wederom een unieke en prachtige oude stad, die na een aardbeving ...

... point and return back to Quitou by car via the lower main road. Before she left she kindly arranged for a local to carry our bags by horseback for the remainder of our trek. It cost us Y180, (more than our sleeper bus from Jinghong to Dali) but we had no complaints, we would definitely not make the next 4 hours carrying them. After a short break we continued our trek, the morning had all been uphill, but we would now make a slow decent to the lower road. The path was much rocker ...