Yunnan Pt. 3: Close to the Edge

On Day 3, we journeyed north towards Shangri-La. On the way we had decided to stop and see the famous Tiger Leaping Gorge before they decided to build a dam there and destroy the whole thing. Originally I had thought that we could hike the length of the Gorge, spending the night in a guesthouse along the path, but soon I realized that A. We had limited time and B. We were not good hikers. So the plan was to stop at the Gorge, take a mini-bus to a scenic point, and then get on our way again to "Poor Man's Tibet."

After weaving through the mountains north of Lijiang, our bus dropped us off in the miserable little town of Qiaotou. The only industry in the town, it seemed, was the "Tourist" (-scam) industry. At this point LP failed us completely: There weren't any buses, the sketchy people told us, because of road work. But we could take a gypsy cab for about 300 RMB. I thought it was a scam at first, but it was obvious that we had no other choice if we wanted to see the damn thing. We paid a driver and then roared off down a gravel road.

Immediately we had to stop and wait for fifteen minutes for them to finish doing something to the road--clearly there was construction, but still 300? But then we were off again passing several other gypsy cabs along the way. Good, at least we weren't the only ones foolish enough to do this.

But we were foolish, or foolhardy at least. It turned out that it cost 300 because it was so ridiculously dangerous. The "road" was in a horrible condition due to the construction, and was littered with construction equipment that our crazy driver had to navigate in our top-heavy vehicle. For most of the journey we had a sheer 100-meter drop to our right. Oh, and we passed several waterfalls to our left. Caution: You May Get Wet.

But despite the danger, it was well worth the trip. The Gorge was stunningly beautiful--much more spectacular than the Three Gorges Area (and cleaner). Opposite us was the massive face of Snow Mountain, the other side of which we had ascended the day before.

We stopped about halfway through at a little "toll" area. You paid some money to the people who controlled that portion of the trail and then you could walk down to the river. While our driver waited up top we climbed down, passing bored-looking Naxi youths selling sports drinks and colas to passers-by. It was a pretty trail that took us through bamboo and through blasted-out rock, but tricky and steep--safety is interpreted much more loosely in China, if you can't already tell.

At the bottom it leveled out and we followed the river up to some rapids. The trail passed into someone else's jurisdiction, so we had to pay more money to walk out onto a boulder in the middle of the river. But still, worth it:

But climbing out of it really sucked.
Leb Wohl.

Yunnan Pt. 2: Playing with Fire

The night after our ascent up Snow Mountain, we visited Shuhe, another "old village" north of Lijiang, for their annual torch festival in honor of some Dongba deity (Dongba being the traditional Naxi faith). Shuhe was a lot like Lijiang, but smaller and cozier.

In the town square there was a large circle of people dancing around a giant torch. Peddlers sold personal torches of bundled-wood that you could stick flowers into. Yu Yun bought one and personalized it with her own vegetation:



At first I thought we were supposed to wait for the fire to reach the bottom of the central torch, and then light our torches from it, Olympic-style. But each time I though it the thing was going to burst into a bonfire, I was sadly disappointed--the flames just very slowly burned downward like a candle. Regardless of whether we were supposed to wait or not, people began lighting their own and then sharing. It was difficult at first to catch Yun's on fire, but later we discovered we had been going about it all wrong:


After we spent about half and hour appreciating the fact that we were in a tight crowd of people (including many children) playing with fire, we decided to leave. Yun's torch took forever to burn out so we had to douse it in one of the little canals next to the street. I donated the leftover tinder to a group of poor pyromaniacs:

Leb Wohl.

Yunnan Pt. I

Northwest Yunnan province, a high, mountainous region close to Tibet, would be my last trip this semester. The landscape around Lijiang, the area's biggest city and our first stop, turned out to be not much different than my beloved Appalachia, but it was still the cleanest, most beautiful place I had yet been in China. Yu Yun was amazed by how blue the sky was. Our hostel was nestled in the Lijiang Gu Cheng, or old town, which we explored that evening after we arrived. I had been to several old towns in China, one of which was featured in a well-known action movie.


But in Mission Impossible III Tom Cruise wasn't really running through the streets of Shanghai, but through the little water village of Xitang, and hour and a half away. This is because Shanghai doesn't look that Chinese anymore. Or anywhere in China for that matter. The "old towns" are architecturally authentic but have been so commercialized they are hardly "ancient" anymore. Xitang may have looked exotic on film but that's because most of the denizens (tourists and merchants taking tourists' money) where removed to make it look what like what Americans expect China to look like. Unfortunately this includes Old Town Lijiang as well, though on a much bigger scale. But despite how tourism and capitalism has fundamentally changed old China, new old China, and the Euro-backpackers that infest it, still has a lot of charm in a different sort of way, especially in remote Yunnan where industrial pollution doesn't obscure it. Epcot it ain't.

A very authentically Chinese sight

A outside Lijiang city the old life still holds sway. The fields and roads are sparsely populated, save for the Naxi villagers growing their corn and potatoes. I often saw Naxi women, in their eclectic modern-traditional dress, carrying huge baskets of crops on their backs to a fro. As part of their traditional matriarchal culture, Women were, and to some extent still are, the literal backbone of the Naxi workforce. Mini-buses carting tourists between the area villages often speed by, but it is nothing compared to the thousands of green, honking taxis clogging Changzhou's cement arteries.


Natural beauty also surrounds Lijiang. Though the immediate mountains were not so imposing, Yulong Xueshan (Jade Dragon Snow Mountain) looms, perpetually cloud-covered, in the distance.

Natural Beauty

Yu Yun and I rode horses part of the way up its slope on the second day. Our guides were of course Naxi women, the sames ones who told us how hard-working Naxi women are, from which I inferred how lazy their husbands must then be. (Apparently only in Southwestern China do they openly admit a truth that other world cultures deny). We did not get very far up the mountain. After two hours our guides started leading our horses up a tight, steep path and the animals started to slip on the loose rocks--we had not taken the way up Lonely Planet advised, but had seemed reasonable--but by then it was apparent that we were the only tourists going up that far along this particular route.





Apparently our guides were just waiting for us to tell them when to turn around. Or maybe they were curious just how reckless a dumb foreigner and naive Han Chinese would be in the wilderness. After all, they weren't the ones on horses. To be more specific, one geezer horse that only had one more season before retirement, and a stubborn junvenile that attempted to eat everything green in sight. Not the party you wanted to take up on the "adventurous" side of the mountain, unless perhaps you were the Donners. Eventually Yu Yun decided that we had gone beyond our insurable limit and so we told our guides to turn the horses around--but not before we had gone far up a dangerous path, making it all the more difficult to get back down.

Leb Wohl.