Tibet Hotel Chengdu

After a few days of being over-exposed to the bad side of the Chinese, today didn't start too well. I arrived at my booked minibus for the five hour ride to Zhongdian to find that thee were 10 passengers and there were only 9 seats. Rather than give the tallest member of the touring party (ie. me) the seat with some legroom, the driver decided that I would have to be the one crammed into a small seat with a young chinese woman virtually on my lap. Once I got my money back (including some swea...

Nice Beijing architect: "Are you going to Shangri-La?" Me: "Umm, Shangri-La is a location invented by James Hilton...but I am trying to get to Zhongdian" Architect: "Oh so you ARE going to Shangri-La! Come with us for 60 Yuan please!" Me: "Ok." And so I hopped into a micro-bus with a Beijing architect, his lawyer girlfriend and two science students from Kunming. The original plan was to stop at Qiaotou and try to get a look at Tiger Leaping Gorge before heading to Zhongdian. Sadly, it turned ...

2004.11.21 (ÈÕ) ☀ We spent last night in Lijiang, and took the 8:30am bus to Zhongdian (Öеé). We saw more and more signs in Tibetan as we got closer, and finally arrived in Zhongdian at around 12:30pm, and walked to Tibet Hotel. The walk was not as smooth as we thought since there were construction in on the road. After we got our room, we went out for lunch, then took bus number 3 to Songzanlinsi (ËÉɽÁÖËÂ), a Tibetan lamasery. We leisurely toured the many temples in the lamasery, pau...

HeyHeyanda Big G'Day Toya We rose, ate a beautiful breakfast and said our sad good byes to the staff. It was such a warm and friendly place and Haba was such a beautiful little town. But it was cold and time to move on as we had to collect our bags from Sean in Zhongdian or better known as Shangrila. We caught the 8:30am bus and sat in silence most of the way and just stared out the window at the beautiful scenery. We all waved a big good bye to Flip as he sat with his new found girlfriend. ...

Richard We'd come to Chengdu to visit the Pandas and see some of the cultural sites around the city. We arrived late in the afternoon and headed into town from the swish new airport (every city in China has a swish new airport with an airport expressway linking it to the city). The first thing I noticed was the haze hanging over everything - the pollution in Chinese cities is terrible and makes London air seem positively clean by comparison. We were staying in the a hotel owned by the Tibetan...

We arrived in Zhongdian, named Shangri-la by the Chinese, on Wednesday afternoon, tired after our trekking in the Gorge. Lonley Planet lead us to the Tibet Hotel - oh dear! Zhongdian old twn is in the process of being re-built so there was lots of dust and rubble around, but the Main Square was in-tact and lovely. Local people gathered there every evening to dance the night away to traditional Naxi music - of course we joined in! We were in need of the stretching after the trek! After steppin...