Lijiang & Shangri-La
On Tuesday (21st) we went by bus to Lijiang which took just over four hours for the 160km. We thought Dali was lovely but Lijiang is even more authentic and is a UNESCO World heritage site. The old town is a maze of cobbled streets, old buildings and gushing canals. In 1996 they had an earthquake measuring over 7 on the richter scale which rocked the Lijiang area, killing more than 300 people. While much of newer Lijiang was levelled the traditional Naxi architecture held up quite well. The Chinese Government sank millions of Yuan into rebuilding most of Lijiang County with traditional Naxi architecture, replacing cement with cobblestone and wood.
Lijiang has been the base of the nearly 300,000 strong Naxi for almost 1400 years. Naxi women wear blue blouses and trousers covered by a blue or black apron. The T shaped traditional cape not only stops the basket worn on the back from chafing but also symbolises the heavens. Day and night are represented by the light and dark halves of the cape, seven embroidered circles symbolise the stars. Two larger circles, one on each shoulder are used to depict the eyes of a frog, which until 15th century was an important god to the Naxi. With the decline of animal beliefs, the frog eyes fell out of fashion, but the Naxi still call the cape by its original name - 'frog-eye sheepskin'.
On Wednesday we spent a few hours wondering around black Dragon Pool Park which was beautiful, In winter it makes a beautiful photo with Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the background and reflecting in the pool but unfortunately for us the mountain was mostly covered in low cloud.
On our way back about mid afternoon we could see a bit of activity going on in the main square so we stayed and watched the goings on. We were ushered to some seats at a table which was spread with food - moon cakes and fruit. We were then entertained by the Naxi people with dancng and they also got Joy and I up to join in. There were various guest artists who sang and all in all an enjoyable afternoon. The festivities were all in aid of it being the 'mid autumn festival' which they call the Moon Festival and is celebrated in the middle of autumn when there is a full moon. The moon cakes were a bit too rich for my liking but they are big business in China at this time of the year and we had wondered what was in these beautiful boxes that were in the shops everywhere.
Lijiang was full of tourists -99% being Chinese and young. A few westerners and we caught up with a couple of lots of people we had met in Dali.
While going to Black Dragon Pool we met up with an American who is now living in Lijiang and he said we should do a trip up to Jade Dragon Mountain so on Thursday we got a mini bus ride up to the park and then went by cable car for 20 min up to an area called Yak meadow where we were able to see the yaks. You could actually hear them before you saw them as they all had bells. We had an hour long walk around yak meadow which was a nice walk but was a bit of a let down compared to the photos we had seen of it. We were at 3500m so had taken oxygen with us just in case we needed it but we ended up all being okay. We arranged for our mini van driver to come back at 5pm to pick us up.
We had been hoping to go to Tiger Leaping Gorge but it was going to be a bit of a mission getting there and as part of the road is closed for reconstruction was going to involve quite a bit of trekking so ended up deciding against it.
Yesterday we caught a mid day bus to Shangri -La made famous in the 1930's with the movie, "Lost Horizon". It's name is also Zhongdian and is 198km north west of Lijiang and is the start of the Tibetan world. It was a great bus trip with some beautiful scenery of the Yangzi river and huge steep gorges. The bus was a 30 seater and was full with young Chinese tourists, except for us four. We arrived here at 4.30pm and found nice accommodation in the old part of town. Each night they have dancing in the square which we watched for a little while last night and again tonight - there were at least 500 hundred locals joining in with the dancing tonight in the square in front of and below the Tibetan Monastery. We thought we were visiting a museum which was in fact a Tibetan Medical Museum and we ended up being shown around by a Tibetan Medicine Doctor who spoke very good English. He then assessed our health needs and Joy, Dave and I ended up getting some natural Tibetan medicines so it will be interesting to see if they do as he says.
Shangri-La is 3300m above sea level and we are actually starting to feel the effect of the high altitude so are not doing anything in any great hurry. Tomorrow we have organised to be taken to a Tibetan village to visit a farm so that will be interesting. We have an English guide taking us.