Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge
Trip Start
Nov 26, 2007
1
31
44
Trip End
Apr 17, 2008
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Lijiang,
China
Sunday, April 13, 2008
- The people are really friendly and keen to help you despite the language barrier.
- I have not really felt anyone has wanted to rip me off as yet. It is quite refreshing to go into shops and find things priced up or be quoted prices which sound perfectly reasonable.
- China is really advanced compared to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and even advanced compared to home in some respects. The buses often contain TV's and have electronic tickets, free wifi seems to be available everywhere. However, in contrast to that there is a very unsophisticated side of China where you see 100'd of people manually working on the roads etc.
- China is in no way a communist country in anything but name. Pure consumerism drives everything and you constantly see Coca Cola and Mc Donald's etc. You won't see any trendier malls in the world than you see in China, all with dance music blasting from their doors. There is also definitely a middle and upper class, those are the people you see making up the majority of tourists in places like Lijiang.
- The bad things about China appear to be spitting everywhere, including on the bus floor etc, and the state of the toilets. Typically public toilets stink and have no doors etc.
Lijiang is a quaint little town; at least the bits most tourists see are. There is an old town with lots of little cobbled streets with streams running through them that used to provide water supplies back in the day.
Locals dancing in Lijiang
Legend has it that you were not allowed to wash anything in the streams until after 11am to give the residents time to collect their drinking water for the day. Nowadays the streams just make a nice noise and have goldfish swimming around in them. Lijiang old town is full of tourists unless you get up at 9am for a wander around, this seems to bother other travelers but I find it kind of novel as the tourists are nearly all Chinese so observing them is a good cultural experience in itself. It his odd for me to walk down the street without people either trying to sneak photos of me or blatantly coming up to me and asking to have their picture taken with me. When they do that I have taken to getting my picture taken with them as well with a view to building up a nice montage one day when I am stuck at home with loads of money and no work to go to...Compared to all the other touristy places I have been in SE Asia you see almost no Western tourists. If you venture out of the old town you can see modern buildings and shopping malls everywhere that I am told is typical of modern day China. After my 1st nights mega sleep after my 30 hour journey to Lijiang I did my washing in the morning in the guest house utility room and then set off to meet Nicola and Sammy whom I had met a few times in Vietnam. After them waiting by the wrong waterwheel for a bit we eventually hooked up; it was nice to see some familiar faces again. We went for a walk around the old town and to some nice gardens; fortunately Sammy had read the guide book and had sussed out that by going in any gate other than the main gate we saved ourselves the 5 quid entry fee as they certainly weren't worth that. They were a mixture of Buddhist temples and shrines to some local communist geyser that died last year apparently. In the evening we went for tea at a bbq place down by the river. In theory this probably should be the most expensive place in town but in reality it cost us one pound fifty for all our food (loads of meat and vegetables on a stick, including, black pudding on a stick which was brilliant) and a drink each. The food in Lijiang seems quite nice. There is a large emphasis around flat bread things that are a bit like nan breads. You can have these as part of any meal. They are a refreshing change after the rice diets of SE Asia. The other thing that struck me instantly was that the noodles here are all made of wheat rather than rice. This is a nice change but makes noodle soup more akin to spaghetti soup. This is borne out in the fields as well where the 'rice terraces' all seem to be growing wheat rather than rice as I would have expected.
As we were going to Tiger Leaping Gorge the next day we had to find out how to get to the bus station etc. I got a woman to show me the 'Lijiang New Bus Station' for me on the Chinese map and then I set about copying it. It took 4 attempts but in the end I managed to get it to a state where random Chinese people knew what it meant. As Tiger Leaping Gorge was going to be a 2 day excursion I was hoping to leave most of my stuff in the guesthouse. When I asked they just told me to leave the stuff in my room but I wouldn't have to pay for the room while I was away!! How nice is that!! And they were just such nice people that you just knew you would never have your stuff touched.
So the next morning we had some flat bread and noodle soup and set off to Qiaotou on the local bus. The bus was excellent and the ride would have been great was it not for the state of the road. The road looked fine and was tarmaced the whole way but there were these incredible bumps that would throw you a foot into the air when we went over them. This stopped any kind of book reading in its tracks so I was forced to watch the countryside going by. In some parts the countryside could have been in the UK, complete with polytunnels for strawberries. Most of the villages we past through looked pretty poor but unlike Laos or Cambodia there was power and phone lines everywhere and very little garbage piled up.
The bus took 3.5 hours and then it pulled over at the Tiger Leaping Gorge park headquarters where a woman jumped on to get out admission fee off us. No one had told me beforehand but a student card gets you 50% discount for anything in China; had I known this I would have got one made in Bangkok. Anyway, Sammy was confident that they can't even read roman characters so I tried it on with my driving license but this woman had obviously been round the block a few times as she spotted it immediately and I had to pay full price. Then we just got off the bus and started walking randomly, a man who was trying to rent us a donkey kept pointing us in the right direction...in the end men with donkeys followed us the entire way up the gorge hoping for you to tire and falter so you will hire them to carry you or your bags. The walking wasn't too bad, there was one pretty steep part towards the top of the pass which was quite hard going. It was especially hard for Nicola as she had never done any trekking before and was in real danger of getting heat exhaustion so I carried her bag over the steep bits. In the end she made it; she only once asked the price of a donkey but mind over matter won in the end. We stopped at one little guesthouse for a cup of tea, we didn't want any food but the woman still refused to let us pay for the tea as tea was free. That summed up the friendliness I have seen thus far from the Chinese people, I left a couple of Yuan under my cup anyway.
We stopped to lay up for the night at Tree Horse Guesthouse which seemed to be the most popular overnight spot. There were plenty of people there but I still managed to get a room with a massive window looking straight out onto the gorge. The food was really nice and the beer the same price as down in Lijiang; somewhat surprising when you compare it to huts in the Alps or similar out of the way places in the UK. There was a good group of people there including some Thai's and Korean's who were very friendly and spoke excellent English. The most bizarre person I met though was a retired professor from Southampton Oceanography Centre who had bout instruments from GVI and Micromass so we reminisced over a beer discussing people we both knew...this even got as far as Christina whom I used to go out with...very bizarre indeed. After 2 beers however, everyone was shattered and it was time for bed. I slept brilliantly and awoke to see the sun rising over the gorge from my bed.
The second days walking was much easier than the 1st days. There were some nice waterfalls and I busied myself looking at rocks along the way...its amazing how all that study of geology means I can never actually walk past a rock without looking at it and thinking about how it might have formed. It seemed that the gorge itself was massive fault plain with lots of little faults running perpendicular and these tended to be where the waterfalls were. After a nice lunch at the end of the gorge we had to get a taxi down to the bus stop; we tried to negotiate the fare but were told we couldn't as the road was very dangerous...and indeed it was...we must have gone through 5km where the tarmac was gone because of rockslides...I assured myself that these would only happen during the rainy season and that we were not at any risk. After fighting off some minibus drivers a local bus turned up to take us back to Lijiang. Most people who were doing the trek were going on up to Shrang-li-la; another half manufactured tourist hotspot near the Tibetan border...if I had known this existed before I had set off I would probably have included it in my outing...next time. Anyway, I had to get back down to Lijiang for a couple of days rest and to get my hands on a pair of tweezers to remove the stitches in my hand before they closed over.
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