Man Man Zou

I left off my last post in ‘Shangrila’- which I prefer to call by its original name, Zhongdian. Even the buses that go to Zhongdian don’t say ‘Zhongdian’, they say ‘Shangrila’. The town was kind of a nothing town with nothing special except an old town, and a nice monastery.

We enjoyed the monstery, even with its hundreds of Chinese tour groups plowing through- quite a change to what we were used to in the previous Tibetan towns. Zhongdian is the town where tourists go to in Yunnan province if they can’t make it to the remote Tibetan towns in Sichuan province.

Now that we’ve left the boonies, the locals no longer ask me to take their photo, instead they usually reject me when I ask. At the monastery in Zhongdian, we still managed to find two young and unspoiled monks who let us follow them up through a construction site and onto the roof of an unfinished monastery building. It was quite a strange experience being four storeys up on an unfinished roof with a couple of 12 year old monks, I’m just glad we got to get away from the tourists.

From Zhongdian, we took a four hour bus to the wonderful town of Lijiang. I didn’t think I’d like Lijiang as much as I did, but things just worked out well there. Lijiang is an extremely touristy town that even sees its fair share of whities along with the thousands of Chinese tour groups. People go there for its ‘old town’, which was mostly rebuilt after an earthquake in the late 90s. Whoever rebuilt it did a good job though because I couldn’t really tell that it was new. The cobblestone pedestrian-only streets were so confusing to get around that I never figured it out in the four nights that I spent there.

On our first night in Lijiang, we went to see the Naxi Orchestra. Naxi are the minority people of the area, and the orchestra is famous because they are able to play traditional Chinese music with rare instruments that were hidden and kept secret during the Cultural Revolution to prevent them from being destroyed. The performance was interesting, but the most amusing part was watching the 80 year old musicians try to stay awake while the verbose presenter talked to the audience about the next piece.

We went to a few more places in and around Lijiang, including a photogenic lake called Black Dragon Pond. I had been looking forward to photographing this place since I saw a photo of it on TrekEarth. However, when we walked up to the entrance, we saw that admission was 60 Yuan per person- almost 10 dollars. We always pay a lot for various entrance fees in China, and it sucks, but it sucks even more when it’s just a small place that takes only 20 minutes or so to visit before we’ve seen and done everything there. Visiting places like that once or twice a day really adds up on this trip, so we’ve actually had to pass on some places. This time Mark insisted that only I went in, since it was just for the purpose of photographing it anyway. I used my old student card and got in for half price. It was a very nice lake, but small. It was another one of those 20-minute places that cost a fortune to see. Such a disappointing thing about China, admission costs are totally out of whack- much more than even Europe or North America since nothing is free here.

After spending a few days in Lijiang, we decided to hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge, which was a couple of hours away. I couldn’t figure out what was so great about the place, since it’s just a gorge, so we had originally decided not to go. But then I just kept hearing such great things about it over and over from people, and Mark was attracted to it because it likely won’t be there in the future because of damming, so we decided to add it back to our route.

Tiger Leaping Gorge takes 2-3 days to hike. We were lazy and didn’t show up at the beginning of the trail until one in the afternoon. Since we were so late, a lady recommended to us that we just hike a couple of hours to a Naxi family guesthouse and spend the night there. So we hiked for a couple of hours to the guesthouse and ate a late lunch. While sitting there, we decided that we weren’t at all tired, and we were bored because we didn’t bring any books and we don’t know any good card games (we’ve even forgotten how to play rummy!) So after considering it, we decided to continue our hike to the next guesthouse which was three hours away.

The next leg of our hike brought us over the ‘28 bends’. When I saw this on the map, I figured it was going to be 28 nice bends along a windy trail in the gorge- instead it was actually 28 (felt like 280) switchbacks and a 900m ascent up a mountain to a 2800m summit! Even though I’m out of shape, it wasn’t that bad and we made it up with only one rest along the way. That’s the thing about the famous multi-day hike along the gorge, it’s quite easy. We didn’t know what to expect since no books talk about the difficulty level.

But I don’t think the easiness of the hike is the real draw to the thousands of foreigner backpackers who hike Tiger Leaping Gorge (by the way, it was only foreigners on the trail, not a single Chinese tourist the entire time). I think it’s the marijuana. In many spots along the trail, we saw pot plants growing- with buds and all. Foreigners just help themselves to it along the way. Before this, I hadn’t heard or seen anything about marijuana in China- in my opinion, China is the last place I’d ever partake in that because of how crazy this country is. But it was abundant on the hike, even the little teahouses and guesthouses along the way sell it or add it to the food (just ask for your food made ‘happy’).

After the 28 bends, it was easy walking and we made it to a guesthouse just after dark. We met one crazy farmer along the way who picked up a rock and threatened to throw it at us if I didn’t give him my camera. He was crazy though, we just looked at him like ‘yeah right’, and walked on.

The next day we were the first to wake up and the first to start walking- very unlike us. There were tons of other foreigners there- the most I’ve seen in months- but most of them partied late and slept in. We never saw them after that.

The scenery after the halfway point was the best- we walked over a waterfall that spilled onto the trail, and hundreds of meters below was the famous Yangtzi River (the same river that we cruised on months ago). Likely in the future the whole area will be flooded because of dams being built, and people will be displaced elsewhere.

We made it to the end of the hike by one in the afternoon- exactly 24 hours after we started. It wasn’t officially the end, but it is said that the rest of the trail is boring and not worth walking because it’s along a road the whole way. We ate lunch at Sean’s, who serves ‘happy pancakes’ for breakfast. And for those inquiring minds, we didn’t try any.