This will be my penultimate China post--probably a good thing seeing as I've been away from China for several months now. Finally I can get to talking about Chicago and being a student again. Or maybe not...I still haven't decided yet if I want to blog about something not quite as blog-able as travel.
But anyway on to Shangri-La (the village formerly known as Zhongdian)--quite possibly the greatest tourist gimmick ever pulled off. You take a largely-Tibetan village, located on the edge of the real Tibetan plateau (but not actually in Tibet so it's easy to go to) and you rename after a mystical place in a work of fiction. Voila! The magical place of Shangri-La. Not exactly. It was certainly different. The landscape was eerily bare, the Old Town wonderfully quaint and less-touristy, and the air was very, very thin. Yu Yun, as well of the vast majority of Han tourists there, had trouble breathing. I suppose it was a little easier for having been raised in Appalachia. And maybe my infantile asthma had the odd side-effect of making my lungs more efficient.
I will let the pictures speak for me, but there were some interesting things of note that I learned there. First the famous Shangri-La liquor tastes the exact same as any other Baijiu I've ever tasted. Second, there apparently is no current Dalai Lama, according to the monks I spoke to at the local. monastery. Strange, I could've sworn there was one. Enjoy:
Leb Wohl
