Shangri La

This was the last destination of my trip in Yunnan. Shangri La, what a great name! A name covered in mystery, the name of the town where James Hilton 'Lost Paradise' takes place. The actual name of then town is Zhongdian in Chinese, or Gyalthang in Tibetan, but apparently it was recently renamed to Shangri La to attract more tourism, given the mistique of the name. Hard to know if this is true or not. Nonetheless, this was another highlight of the trip.

Shangri La is really near Tibet, and might be the place that is as Tibetan as it can be outside Tibet, at least in the Yunnan tourists/travellers trail. It is rally high, at 3200m, on a high plateau. For miles and miles right before getting there the terrain seemed flat, with no noticeable ups and downs. I could feel the altitude the whole staying here, with short breath on every step, specially walking up stairs. The old town is really beautiful, although a bit touristy (typical in this region), but it has some beautiful houses, squares where people dance some typical coreographies at sunset, Tibetan temples, shops selling Yunnanese and Tibetan products and restaurants serving Tibetan food. One of the temples has one of those gigantic tibetan praying wheels that we successfully made it rotate, with the help of tens of other Chinese tourists. In many places one can see the typical Tibetan flags with inscriptions on it. The whole setting made this place completely different from everything I've seen in China.

The best was going to come on the second night. We heard about a Tibetan Buddhist monastery close to the town where 700 monks live and in which apparently it is possible to stay the night. We also heard that it is possible to get there without paying the ticket if we hitchhiked on a local person's car into the area of the monastery, and so we did. We passed the checkpoint without paying and reached the monastery an hour before sunset. From outside it was breathtaking! A big group of houses on a hill with the larger monastery buildings on top. Golden roofs, red, white and yellow walls gave the buildings this earthy feeling. In front of it there is a small lake and in the mountains around one can see the Tibetan (?  Ceremonial things?).

Once we got to the main door we were asked to show the ticket, that we didn't buy. We tried to convince then to let us in, but didn't budge. But one of them saw that one of the girls on our group had a trumpet with her (she was travelling with it) and asked her to play. She played a Jazzy tune, they smiled and let us in for free.

Once inside we walked around in the yards around the main buildings and asked the monks if we could stay the night there. It was not... We walked into one of the buildings where monks were praying while singing an hypnotic chant, but at the same time some of them talked to others, laughed and made jokes. We all compared it with the western religions, in which the formality is much higher! It would be unthinkable to talk and laugh at the same time other people pray in a church, synagogue or mosque, for example. We could not take pictures inside the temple... The walls are covered with very colourful Buddhist mythology scenes (some violent and almost pornographic), the columns that support the colourful ceiling are huge and red and the massive statues of Buddha and other characters are impressive... Imagine that the foot of Buddha is as big as me. A really magical experience, helped by the fact it was past the visiting time, so there were no other tourists, and by the light of sunset on the first day and sunrise on the second.

Part of the group that hitchhiked on another car met a local that offered us bed, dinner and breakfast at his place for 70 yuan. We accepted. It was not exactly a guesthouse, it was more like a big family house where other people could spend the night. They cooked us a Tibetan dinner: yak's fat, yak's cheese' yak's butter, tea with yak's milk, Tibetan bread and vfpoegetables. Everything delicious, except the fat, which is weird for our palate. In the next morning we woke up early to see the sunrise from the lake and had the breakfast: tea with yak's milk, 'tsampa' (roast barley flour that one mixes with the yak's milk), etc. We had a last view of the temple in the morning and then head back to the hostel in town. This day the group disassembled, as everyone was going into separate directions.

I understand how some westerners feel the spiritual call when they visit places like this and decide to immerse them in this religion and culture... It is more than a hippie extravagance... if this place is this magical I can imagine how Tibet must be! Unfortunately it is not easy, nor cheap, for a foreigner to go there, and a place like this is the closest I can experience to it in this trip.

Tiger Leaping Gorge

This, dear reader, was one absolute highlight of the trip so far... 

The Tiger Leaping Gorge is the second deepest gorge in the world, second only to one in Tibet. It is also an epic mountain trek in Yunnan, apparently not for the faint of heart and with fantastic vistas. This is all I knew before heading there.

The mountains around the gorge

The plan was to head in the evening to the start of the 16 km trail and stay there one night at Jane's Guesthouse, hit the trail as early as possible with a smaller bag containing only the essential for one night, until the Halfway Guesthouse, where we would spend the night. The idea was to break the trek into two days, to avoid the high temperatures predicted by the weather forecast after noon. The next day we would then walk to the Tiger Leaping Stone and then take a bus back to Jane's Guesthouse to pick up our larger bags and get another bus to Shangri La. The plan was followed with success, but it was way more epic than anyone could foresee.

After the night at Jane's Guesthouse we started the trekking. First through farms and fields and then finally we started to walk up the mountain. In front of us stood the majestic Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, 5600m and the Haba Mountain, 5400m, the ones we could see in the horizon from Lijiang, and we were definitely walking towards it. It has very steep faces and pointy peaks, with a light grey bare top with snow in some parts.

Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the morning

On our way to the gorge we passed by a small village

The mountains still from far away

After a few hundred of metres up we finally realised the geography of the gorge... There was a river, Jinsha River, with brown coloured fast water flowing between the mountain we were on, Haba Mountain, and the mighty Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which plunged almost vertically from its 5600 peak all the way to the river.

The gorge

Jinsha River

Finally we reached the Halfway Guesthouse after an exhausting 5 hours walk up the mountain, in which the worst part were the infamous '28 bends', a section of the path that goes up very steeply in a zig-zag, 28 turns. It was harsh... Same type of harshness as in the most difficult parts of Huangshan one month before. During the walk I had some enlightening conversations with my Chinese friend about aspects of the Chinese culture that I either hadn't grasped so far or only partially understood. Family, marriage, language and general mindset. This will deserve a post on its own! The farther into the Gorge we talked the more spectacular the mountain looked! 

The wall of mountains on the other side of the river

Eerie shades on the mountain during the afternoon

Snow on the top of the mountain (down where we were it was around 30 degrees C)

The Halfway Guesthouse was a beautiful wooden building with a courtyard and a couple of balconies facing the gorge. Both sides of the river were steep and high, which means that from our side we could see the other side as an almost vertical wall, thousands of metres high, right in front of us. Almost everyone doing the trek stops here for the night, so the place was full of travellers, some of them we've seen and met before in Kunming and Lijiang (a very recurrent fenomenon in Yunnan). We all had a communal dinner and drank beer in one of the balconies, with that out-of-this-world view. The group inflated again.

Our view from the Halfway Guesthouse

One of the buildings of the guesthouse

The balcony where we had dinner

Next day we walked all the way until the Tiger Leaping Stone viewpoint. It was an extenuating walk down from the high point where we were all the way down to the river, where a massive rock stood. Then we had to go up again. A 45 minutes agonising climbing of stone-carved stairs and ladders. At the end everyone was completely exhausted. After a shower and a meal in the Guesthouse on this side of the trek we got a bus back to Jane's Guesthouse. Apparently during the night there was a landslide that partially destroyed the road. We were taken until the landslide, where there were already machines cleaning it, then we had to cross it by foot and on the other side we had the bus that would take us first to Jane's Guesthouse, where we picked up our bags, and then to Shangri La.

A wooden bridge next to the Tiger Leaping Stone

Tiger Leaping Stone, next to the rapids

Passing the landslide

That night in the gorge I had a dream where the gigantic mountain-wall in front of us, that almost reached the sky, mixed with the walls at the guesthouse in Macau, which almost reached the ceiling. I realised that in the gorge I had a weird feeling of almost being indoors, given the wall-like structures all around, and in the same way I felt that I was almost outdoors in the guesthouse in Macau, also because of the walls. Strange feeling that I will never forget.

The Yunnan adventure starts to take shape: Lijiang

Lijiang was the next destination after Kunming, a mere 8 hours bus ride away. It is an old town preserved (or I should rather say: rebuilt or recreated) for tourism. The Yunnan is a very touristic region where, like everywhere in China, the large majority of tourists are Chinese. The old town is cute and crowded. The hostels and guesthouses always have a cute courtyard, the one I stayed, Mama Naxi, actually has two. The guesthouse's owner, Mama, is a lively and funny old lady always with a smile and a loud voice. She is of the Naxi (pronounced 'Nashi') ethnic minority, like many people in this part of the region. The streets are full of shops, not different from the ones one can find in any touristy town in China: the tea shop, the dry mushroom and vegetable shop, the decorative weapons shop, the silk shop, etc.

Street in Lijiang

Public laundry

Weird dog

Lijiang is a high place (around 2400m) and I immediately felt that when I walked out of the bus and walked with my backpack to the centre: short breath and feeling tired. The weather is similar to Kunming, dry, clear skies and warm, although it was supposed to be the beginning of the raining season. People's faces start to look different here, more like the Tibetan... Good looking people... In the horizon one can see a majestic mountain, that I was not aware that I would explore a couple of days later, with snow on top. This is definitely not the first time I see snow on the top of a mountain when it is hot where I am, but it always impresses me.

The mountains seen from the streets

The group of travellers grew again in Lijiang. A traveller that we met on the bus was going to do Couchsurfing in a courtyard house somewhere in the centre. We all met in my guesthouse's courtyard to plan what to do in the next days. The Chinese couchsurfing host and another Chinese couchsurfer joined too. Both spoke an excellent English and were quite travelled, specially the couchsurfer, who would join the group and become probably my closest Chinese friend in this trip so far. We all had a fantastic Yunnanese hot pot meal together and decided to spend the next two nights in the Tiger Leaping Gorge and then go to Shangri La.

Pork ribs hot pot

An epic adventure was starting to take shape. At night we were invited by the couchsurfing host to a small private club, a cute room with sofas and lots of photos and paintings in the centre, where more of his friends gathered to play guitar, sing, chat and drink. Few English was spoken, but smiles and hand gestures were enough to bond and a nice and friendly atmosphere was created. Some of the musicians were really good and beer flowed the whole night...

The Yunnan group, as it was when departing from Lijiang 

The next day we chilled until the evening, when we headed to the Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Finally in Yunnan: Kunming.

After the Dragon Backbone Rice Terraces I had to go back to Yangshuo to pick up my passport that I had left in the hostel (oops). After a couple of days I flew from Guilin (the larger city next to Yangshuo) to Kunming, in the Yunnan province. The Yunnan is the region in China with the largest number of ethnic minorities and with the best weather all-year-around (never too hot nor too cold).

Kunming is the capital and the main travel hub in Yunnan, where all the buses, trains and flights seem to converge. When I got there I felt a warm, dry weather that reminded me the summer in Portugal. Even the smell in the air was similar. The city itself doesn't have much to see, but the laid-back pace of life there contrasts with the frantic and noisy life in other parts of China.

In Yunnan it is not difficult to meet the same travellers over and over again in different places, and as a consequence groups are formed and grow every day. In Kunming the beginning of a group of travellers started to form, ready to explore this region.

Longsheng - Dragon Backbone Rice Terraces

A few hours from Yangshuo there is an amazing place where entire mountains were domesticated by Man. Imagine several mountains completely covered with rice terraces, until the eye can reach. Imagine these rice terraces flooded with water with newly planted rice (I was lucky with the time of the year), showing you different tones and reflections as the sun moves during the day. This place is the mighty Dragon Backbone Rice Terraces.

I stayed in a cute guesthouse in a small mountain village with two nice dogs and an extremely nice family (mother and daughter). The food was great, some of the best dumplings I had so far, and right in front there was a full mountain slope wit rice terraces. 

The guesthouse's restaurant

The view from the guesthouse

During the night I saw the largest nocturnal insects I've ever seen! During the day we sat in front of the guesthouse, just looking at the terraces , while the 'village's grandfather' (a 102 years old wrinkly man) looked at us, while squatting in a higher location. This was probably the 102th time he saw these reflections in the terraces.

A moth and a fly-looking bug (my hand is there to give you an idea of the scale)

My travel mates, the guesthouse dogs and the village's grandfather in the background

We did a trek for a few hours where we realised the scale of the enterprise... There were several mountains around also with the rice paddies. With the amount of rice eaten in this gigantic country no wonder that such huge enterprises exist...