Around the lake - Lashi hai lake
Trip Start
Jan 30, 2007
1
39
816
Trip End
Dec 31, 2011
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Lijiang,
China
Monday, November 19, 2007
Despite its closeness to the burgeoning tourist city of Lijiang, and the main road to the first bend of the Yangtze, Tiger Leaping Gorge and Shangri-la skirting around its southern side, the lake is a hidden jewel that few local people and even fewer tourists visit.
While Lijiang gets maybe 10 million visitors a year, the lake, just 10km away, gets only a few thousand foreigners and Chinese travelers. Most are Chinese who go to a ranch for a gentle horse trek to the meadows beside the lake. And then there's the odd foreigner like me who traipse around the lake.
For some reason, there's a small village, strung out along beside the northern side of the lake, which I often visit. There, I seem to have taken on the role of village photographer. It started earlier this year when I came across some old retired gentlemen sitting in a triangle communal area, some sheltering from the sun, others warming in the spring sunshine. Every month or so I come back, bringing portraits of the old folk. And each time there's another 70+ year old grinning toothlessly, keen to have a photo taken. It's my way of giving something back.
Too often where I live in Lijiang old town tourists take, take, take.
wheat sowing
They take photos without asking. They barge into courtyards and houses - including mine. They view everything like a tourist attraction, unable to separate out the shows, performances and shop fronts from the real life communities of residents. My last visit was with some friends. We got a mini-bus around the lake to the far side where there's a temple complex. Zhiyun temple which means pointing to the clouds, is being restored after it was badly damaged during the Cultural Revolution. Only six of the original 13 structures remain in the complex which dates back to 1727. But in the courtyard there are huge cherry, plum, gingko, mulberry and another tree named the Chinese scholar tree - reckoned to be over 200 years old.
While this is a Tibetan temple, complex with crimson-robed monks and novices, the architecture is a blend of Naxi, Bai and Han styles, woven into the Tibetan buildings and carvings.
As usual, the temple is deserted apart from a few monks, a couple of builders and two novices. There's the smell of fresh paint and incense. A gentle breeze off the lake plays with the prayer flags and leaves.
In the temple at the back of the complex, we walk around in clockwise direction, admiring the statues in the darkness. There's storks and cranes in the sculptures, and the young monks have been making coloured flowers out of roasted barley and yak butter.
Out of mutual curiosity, we linger with the two novices, one very shy and withdrawn, the other more gregarious and friendly. It turns out they are from the same place in Sichuan province, and both are 10 years old.
driver
The more extraverted one teaches us some Chinese and Tibetan language.Around the lake, post-harvest activities sees every able-bodied man, woman and child out cutting down old corn stalks, hauling them out to roads for tractors to take for animal feed. We continue around the lake, through plowed fields, past a fish farm, through villages with mud-brick houses.
By the lake, some have small plots of red hot chillis growing. A young man walks past with a falcon used to rid fields of mice and other vermin. In storage areas in courtyard houses cobs of corns and lines of chillis are hung out to dry. Out on the lake a man is checking his nets, then casting them back into the placid water again.
Further along, a woman is sowing seeds of wheat in the rows newly created by a reluctant buffalo. Peasant builders are putting up new buildings, adding stories, creating stone-inset courtyards.
As the light starts to fade and the nip of autumn fills the air, we wait by a pond, and I watch the reflection of houses in the water. Small birds flit of the dusky air, finding tiny insects. The lake they say is shaped like a diamond, surrounded on all sides by mountains, including the 13 peaks of the 5500m-high Jade Dragon Snow mountain. Black bears are sometimes sighted in the rhododendron-forested hills.
Soon tens of thousands of water-birds will come hear to feast on the lake's plants - and local crops - among them endangered black-necked cranes and protected black storks. An estimated 6,000 diving birds are caught in nets each year.
We're lucky. If we survive the rough road between Lashi hai lake and Lijiang, with its hurtling trucks and over-taking on blind corners. We'll be back.
