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.