Surprisingly, even though the events of the previous night/morning had left me with a scant amount of sleep, I felt good and ready to go this morning. Maybe it was that shower that was the first in almost a week? In any event, we got everyone up relatively early, and most of us kinda wended our ways for the day.
In case you've never seen the inside of a hostel, here's two pictures from inside our own:
Something I left out from the record of the previous night: when Jing, David and I returned from the first attempt to re-locate Jing’s phone, and met up with everyone at the noodle place, I found out that they had met up with a couple of girls that had also been here in Shanghai, by way of Canada, who were traveling in the same area as us at the time.
They had just hiked through Tiger Leaping Gorge. This had previously been on my itinerary for us all, and no one really expressed any interest. Suddenly, after being running at a breakneck pace making everything come together over the past few days, when I came back from the fiasco with Jing’s phone, I find out that everyone is suddenly interested in going to Tiger Leaping Gorge (hereafter referred to as TLG), because the Canadians said it was cool.
That had kinda stifled my enthusiasm and kept me from wanting to reattach to the group a bit in and of itself. I mean, I hadn’t been there yet, so it’s not like my recommendation was made out of personal experience, but just from reading a couple paragraphs online. At the time, though, it was just frustrating because it seemed to coincide with a general lack of faith in my research into traveling in the area. I know I shouldn’t have interpreted it that way, but hey, I’m only human, and as I was de facto leader of the group anyhow, it felt like a breach of trust in my ability to lead.
So one of the priorities for the day was to arrange for the transportation to Tiger Leaping Gorge. We had until something like 6pm to do that, so, after breakfast, my plan was to sightsee around Lijiang as much as I could manage before having to come back to make those arrangements.
So a few of us went to a nearby Euro-café to grab some semi-faithful Western breakfast. It was a cute, small place, with a patio up top. I wandered up there to join Christine, Jing, Yong, Lauren, and Ariel, if my memory serves me correctly. No, Yong joined us later. There was also an absolutely adorable puppy and kitten there. Kittens pretty much make me melt, so here’s a picture, but not of me playing with it, rather, Yong took the embarrassment off my hands:
The food was alright. Western breakfasts are an enigma in the East, mostly. One of the girls had a fruit salad, and it was heavily mixed with mayonnaise. My French toast was sans almost anything that made it tasty, just some cinnamon and a little powdered sugar. Not entirely off the mark, but still lacking, you know?
After having my fill of playing with the little critters and eating okay food, I got out, and got ready to go walking. The old town of Lijiang actually has a good number of sites to see, and in all honesty, qualifies as a sight in and of itself. The cobblestoned streets are unquestionably charming, and the same rarified air and beautiful skies in Shangri-la exist here too.
The first area we went to, rather nearby, was home to a couple of trademarks of the city. In particular, there are craftsmen EVERYWHERE in the streets of Lijiang. Lijiang is a huge tourist destination within China, and the local government knows it, so they do everything they can to boost the cottage handicraft industry there, hoping (knowing) people will buy the products. Everything from wood burnings to scarves to paintings and bone trinkets and more, you can find. Here's a picture of a guy working on some wood burning:
In addition to that, there was a specifically Lijiang traditional system of washing clothes, dishes, and yourself, this three chamber pool system, which is in travel books everywhere but isn't exactly a big deal. Nevertheless, people take pictures of it, myself included:
There's also a lot of water wheels. There's a lot of river running beneath the streets of Lijiang, and canals like the one Jing fell in are all over the place. This has also contributed to the use of a lot of water wheels for power for various purposes; most of those wheels are gone, but a few remain, with one of the bigger ones being an underwhelming UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here's a picture of the one in the area we started out at, not the UNESCO one, and another couple pictures of us hanging out in the area, eating skewers and the like:
One place that we kept looking for was Mo’s House. We never did find the damn place, but there were signs all over pointing towards it. There are signs pointing towards everything, and sometimes I think they deliberately point you in directions in these pedestrian areas that force you to walk past more shops, ideally to make you buy more crap. Next is a series of pictures from the wandering:
I'm not sure why that one guy had a hawk. Or falcon, I guess. Animals in general are much more plentiful around here, and in the province in general. What started out as a surprise in Shangri-la was mirrored in Lijiang, and ultimately in Dali as well; the old towns of each of these cities were homes to plenty of mild mannered roaming dogs, and some cats also.
A moment aside: this area is home to a particular Chinese ethnic minority known as the Naxi (pronounced nah-shee). They’re a relatively small group, have their own dress, customs, language, and writing. The writing is of particular interest, to me, as it’s the last living hieroglyphic writing system in the world. A hieroglyphic system of writing is one in which, not only is there one character per word, such as is the case in Chinese, but also all of these characters are still basically pictographs, whereas in Chinese there are plenty of characters that are not supposed to resemble anything. So I thought that was pretty neat. Also, a particular section of Naxi people are a matriarchal society, and one that actually allows for polyandry (women having multiple husbands) if I recall correctly. Even if I don’t recall perfectly accurately, the marriage customs and love ideas of the people are different from conservative mainstream Chinese culture. One of my goals while here was to get a swatch of their writing, but I wasn’t going to get to it that day.
So, we never did find Mo’s House, but we did eventually find ourselves at Sijiechang, which means something like “the place where four streets meet”, and is basically the hub of the town. We got there at the tail end of some little dance ensemble of cute presumably Naxi girls.
It took us probably two hours of wandering to get here, when in the beginning of the day, Mama Naxi had said it was a straight twenty minute shot from where we were. Go figure.
The maps that you can get freely around town of the old town, however, are out of scale, don’t show every street, and not exactly well drawn anyhow, so it was almost useless as a tool unless you already knew how to get around. Of course once you had learned the ways of getting around the place the map made total sense, but if you were a newcomer, well, you better hope you have time to waste, because you’re going to be wasting it.
Over these couple of hours, some people dropped out and decided to just shop. Afterwards, those who were left with me kind of dawdled. It seemed that their hearts just weren’t in it. I couldn’t totally blame them, we had been going at breakneck pace for the past few days. However, I had originally planned out having 2 full days in Lijiang, one day in TLG, and I gave up that first day of Lijiang so people could satiate their desires to frolic in Shangri-la some more, so I felt like I had to cram two days into one, and I wasn’t willing to settle for less.
After sitting down and waiting for my comrades to catch up for the third or fourth time, I figured fuck it, I should move on. By this time we had reached this one certain scenic area of Lijiang, centered around a lake called Black Dragon Pool (but with a farcical sign pointing the way).
My first goal was to hit up this cultural center where supposedly there was a display about the Naxi writing and stuff. When I got there, though, a group of young locals on top of the stairs that led to it basically told me I couldn’t go up there. I wasn’t totally clear on why, but it sounded like they said it was under construction. They laughed a bunch while telling me this, though, so I couldn’t help but feel as though as I was the butt of some joke.
That sort of just got me down some more, so I decided to work it off by booking it around the lake. I circumscribed it, taking a few photos here and there. There was a lot of different paths to take, so I had to do some backtracking. Here’s some pictures I took from a few vantage points of the place.
The main draw to this place, though, for most tourists, is the view in the distance of Snow Dragon Jade Mountain in the background, as well as being reflected in the “Black Dragon Pool”, unfortunately clouds covered the mountain for this day, and a clear shot could not be had.
Eventually I found myself at the end of the park, while strolling through this path that had Naxi hieroglyphics for pavement:
I took a look back around for another couple of photos from the north end of the lake, then kept going out of the park’s limits to the regular streets, and walked as far north as I could, past a ton of puzzled locals who had no idea why someone like me would even want to be there.
In truth, there wasn’t much of a reason, but there was a lot of ice cream. I got a bar on the way out, and I got a bar after I had to turn around because the road stopped in a random field littered with used charcoal. Here’s some pictures from the detour, though:
When I got back to the hieroglyphic pavement, I ran back into everyone, but I just said hi and kept going. They told me they had considered going up Elephant Hill, but something about needing to go up with a minimum number of people. I didn’t really understand it, but I saw a sign for Elephant hill, and a distinct path, up, and no one watching, so I went up by myself. A couple times along the way there were some signs that suggested a minimum of a couple people, not going by yourself, as if three or four people together are going to be able to do much about someone suddenly falling off the side of the path.
It was a carved rock staircase leading up the way, and from the bottom, it didn’t look so high. I lost track after around the 500th step, though. A few Chinese people crossed paths with me, everyone quite cheerful, probably because they were on the way down, the bastards.
There was a few scenic vantage points along the way, but I didn’t linger at any of them, figuring that the top would still have the best one to offer, and I still didn’t exactly know how long I had to go til the top anyhow.
All told it was actually only about a half hour to forty minutes on the way to the top, and the view really was splendid. I gave myself the present of a breather and wandered around the short apex for five minutes or so, taking a few shots here and there of Lijiang, including a picture of what old town looks like from above.
It was already getting close to 4:30, and I had to be back to Mama Naxi’s before 6. I made it down the stubby mountain in about ten minutes, and incidentally ran into the others yet again. I tarried for a few minutes to see what they were up to, then beelined to Mama Naxi’s. The time deadline partially worked as an excuse to still stay by myself for a bit, but was still truthful. Somehow, I found that while going at my pace, I made it back to Mama Naxi’s in less than fifteen minutes. I would guess that part of it is that the route we originally took to go sightseeing in the town was much less direct, but not all of it. In any event, I got there in good time, and set to work plotting out the next day with Mama Naxi, and you can imagine I was thrilled, after having already dealt with her.
This time, though, she was pretty easy to work with. Lots of travelers that come through these parts specifically go to Tiger Leaping Gorge, so this was pretty routine to her. Basically, we were going to arrange to have two vans take us to the north end of the gorge, walk through it, and call when we got to the other side.
Tiger Leaping Gore is a roughly 30 km, or 20 mile, long gorge that is home to a good chunk of the beginning of the Yangtze River, and is absolutely beautiful to behold. The next blog post will have pictures of that, though. It’s considered one of the ultimate treks in China and actually East Asia in general; many people choose to stay overnight in the Gorge, and usually its recommended to take a minimum of two days to get through it (in fact many say its necessary to allot at least two days to get through it). I estimated that it could be done in ten hours or less at a reasonable pace, though, and we didn’t really have time in our schedule to allot to two days in the place, so despite the urgings of a variety of people, I committed our group to doing it in a day, and a brisk day at that.`
Afterwards, I decide I’m going to join in for a Mama Naxi’s brand family style dinner. For two dollars, you could join in on a huge feast that the cooks there prepared, of a wide variety of different kinds of food. I think there was at least four or five different kinds of meat, a lot of rice, vegetables, peanuts, you name it. I was joined by Tyler, Julie, and a couple of other itinerant residents of the hostel, including one from Israel and one from . . . I think it was Mexico, but I could be mistaken. The food tasted fantastic, and there was a lot of it, so I felt a bit spoiled at the time, and that helped to offset my sullenness for a bit.
I didn’t want to hang around idly for too long, though, there were some things I wanted to take care of in preparation for Tiger Leaping Gorge the following day. In particular, I wanted to get some flashlights, and make sure we had at least one for every couple of people, just in case night fell before we reached the end of the trail. Stalwart readers of my blog will remember that that was something I was lacking when tackling Mt. Fuji in Japan. I also wanted to grab one other thing, some of the Naxi script. Jing joined me for both of these trips.
If I remember correctly, first I went to fetch the Naxi script. A young artisan did the honors for me; I thumbed through a variety of pre-prepared items, but decided I wanted something written just for me, just because a lot of the other stuff appeared to have come out of a printer instead of being hand crafted, and therefore lacked a bit of cultural value in my estimation. The artisan wanted me to ask for a specific message in it, however, and there was really nothing I could think of in particular. I was planning on getting two scrolls, one for myself as well as one for Tyler, who has a bit of interest in codes and scripts also. Eventually I settled on messages that said something like “stay safe” and “be healthy”, which are actually two things he could use a lot of improvement on.
The artisan consulted his manual of characters; apparently he was an apprentice, and wasn’t really skilled in the writing of his script yet, and it was pretty obvious from his brush strokes and the grace they lacked. That’s okay, though, it’s the idea that counts, after all.
Once he finished writing the note to Tyler, he wanted to know what I wanted on my own, and I didn’t really have any ideas in mind. I stammered for a while, grasping at straws to find something that I thought would be okay, when, finally, Jing suggested that he write “Happy Birthday” and “I hope all your dreams come true” as an early birthday present to me, and have it be signed from Jing, which was kind of nice.
The artisan was kind of interesting looking in his own right, in a traditional green silk robe, he also donned a hat with what looked like a giant peacock feather sticking out of it, but upon further inspection, as actually supposed to be a bird as a hat. Pretty weird. I don’t know the culture all that well, but it seems as though birds are supposed to be some sort of important symbol to them.
Scrolls in hand, we headed back to the hostel, and I tracked down Tyler to give him his. He was hanging out in his room with Christine and Jill, listening to music. I remember Jill was mixing up some trail mix in preparation for the hike, and she made sure to include some M&Ms or some similar sort of candy, which I thought was kind of cute.
I didn’t really feel like lounging there listening to music, though, so I headed back out to go get those flashlights. I didn’t really have a great idea about where to get flashlights, and Mama Naxi insisted I wouldn’t need them; I also thought they wouldn’t be necessary, but I just had to be prepared.
So Jing tagged along again as I headed out to the outskirts of old town looking for some shop that might sell flashlights; indeed there was such a shop, and I asked if I could test out the flashlight first; the owner of course agreed, and opened a pack of batteries to power it. When I turned it on outside, I was dismayed to see it shone only a straight rod of dim light, as opposed to being a cone of bright light. It was pretty useless. So I tried to give it back to the owner and say thanks but no thanks, but he wasn’t having any of that. Having opened a pack of batteries for it, he insisted that I pay on the batteries. Now, the pack of batteries was chump change, but I didn’t like the principle of it, being forced to pay for deficient goods, so I argued against him. Finally, I gave him his money, which was less than a dollar, and threw away the batteries in the trash can he was standing next to, yelling at him all the while.
I stormed out of the store, with a frightened Jing in tow, who wasn’t so accustomed to these kinds of exchanges between people, but I told her to forget about it, and we’ll just go out and find another place.
Moments after, we found ourselves on the outer perimeter of Old Town, faced with new town all around us. I figured a supermarket must be nearby, and sure enough, not more than a block away we found one. After going inside, we found them no prob, with batteries already inside, and could test them easily, and found they were exactly what we were looking for, so I bought four of them, and a corkscrew for a bottle of wine I had bought while in Shangri-la and had been toting since on my backpack.
We got back to the hostel, and I passed out flashlights to a few people. Somewhere along the way, Jonathon had mentioned that he wanted to go to this one bar in particular, called the Stone Crow, or something like that.
I hadn’t spent much time with Jonathon up to this point, but over the past couple days it had seemed like he was a bit down, as though he had been shunted off from the main activities somehow. I worried he was feeling kind of isolated, so I wanted to try and cheer him up a bit. I tracked him down about the place, and he was kind of surprised to see I had even remembered; he had suggested it to some other people as well, and none of them seemed to be all that enthusiastic, I guess. The previous night, while I was dealing with Jing’s phone, I guess he wandered over there on his own, and thought it was pretty cool.
It’s not as though I had anything better to do anyhow, so I told him I’d like to check it out, and I insisted we go. Eventually we really did go, and Jing and David and I think maybe Mindy and Julie came with. Wandering around a couple corners and heading up a couple of staircases, eventually Jonathon was able to point the place out to us in the distance. It was in the third story of a building, and it looked like it probably had a nice view, which is point Jonathon had made in hyping it up in particular.
The staircase up was pretty narrow, and, as is so often the case in China, the ceilings were really low. The lower floors also looked like cool places actually, having some sort of live music bars.
As another side note, I just want to mention there really was a lot of music in this place, this Lijiang. While walking through the streets, you were apt to see a half dozen djembe shops with some dude idly thumping along to some music or another, and that music probably wasn’t going to be Chinese pop, for a change. Most of them were pretty amateurish, not like the musician we had known in Shangri-la. It was still a nice change of pace though, to see so much music and so much musicianship. Plenty of restaurants also had live musicians, also not of the highest caliber, but still proficient enough to be enjoyable.
From time to time I felt the desire to bump in and show them how it’s done, but I figured that wouldn’t do much to dislodge the image in the world of the rude American tourist, so I figuratively bit my tongue instead.
So we got up to the top of Stone Crow, and it was a pretty cozy little bar, not much space. There were a few people already there, but only a few. Jonathon was stoked to get some absinthe in particular, one of the few places in the area where you could get some, I guess. I just got some Dali beer, a brand endemic to Yunnan, given that Dali is one of the more famous cities of the province, and headed to the window to check out the view.
It really was a nice view. I didn’t bring my camera with me, so I couldn’t show you, but it showed clear over the rooftops to that hill in the distance that had some sort of palace or big temple complex on it; and at nighttime, just as usual, the Chinese tourism industry kept it all pretty well lit up at night, and to good, if perhaps a bit corny, effect.
The six of us hung out, a couple were playing darts and such. I chilled with David and Jonathon, mostly. David impressed us with his dancing all on his own without being the slightest bit drunk, though some called that much into question.
A few other people eventually showed up; I really hadn’t worked out my own frustrations that had been building with parts of the trip, though, so the more people that showed up, the less I felt like I would or could interface with them all. At some point, I decided to just go back and get some Z’s in preparation for the next day, and I think maybe Jing and a couple others did the same.
I cleaned up a bit and hit the sack, and for once in my life, fell asleep pretty fast, which was a damned good thing.
The next day, we’d be running the gorge.
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