Lijiang

Stop two for us was Lijiang, a little further north and quite a bit higher than Dali. It was an interesting place that has a lot of history, but unfortunately is known for it. We were sort of taken aback on arrival: here was this absolutely beautiful, very well-preserved, quite extensive old city, filled with tiny winding streets lined with canals of glacial runoff, and every single building is a shop selling jewelry, old Mao memorabilia, ‘antiques’, made-to-order wood carvings, and other souvenirs ranging from the slightly tacky to the ridiculous. My favorites were the dreamcatchers. Yes, American Indian dreamcatchers like the ones you buy on the great plains, complete with bald eagles at the center. Feeding all of this were enormous amounts of people, jamming all the streets and making a constant racket. Almost all Chinese tourists, too, which surprised me a bit, though later someone suggested that perhaps most Western backpackers had been warned off, at least during National Day (which, to be fair, probably exacerbated all this considerably). The net effect was sort of an Eastern Venice: a remarkable place—it’s a world heritage site, after all—but one that’s been completely given over to tourism and no longer has anything else.

This doesn't quite capture the density, but gives you and idea of what we were dealing with.

Still, it wasn’t that bad, and we managed to see some pretty cool stuff while we were there. The first day we wandered around the town, getting quite lost in some of its streets. We ended up climbing a hill from which you could overlook the old town. Pretty good view:

Look at the size of that old town! And the pretty mountains in the distance..

Then we wandered around some more and ended up on top of another hill, since the only way to avoid the crowds seemed to be to outclimb them. This one had a temple on top, plus a pretty great view of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain:

Yulong Xueshan. It’s pretty impressive, and definitely dominates the skyline of Lijiang. And, at 5500 meters, 18,000+ feet, it’s the largest mountain I had ever seen by a fair margin. Wow.

That night we retreated to our guest house, where they were having a barbecue. This consisted of a huge number of skewers containing everything from eggplant and tofu to beef and squid. For 38元 we got to cook and eat as many of them as we could stomach. At this point in our trip we were experts on the barbecue skewer, having supplemented around 70% of our meals with them, but we had never done our own. So we proceeded to learn, and as of one week later managed to succeed in avoiding undercooked badness. It was great fun, though I was definitely nervous about the potential for raw pork. Plus we stuffed ourselves in a big way.

By day two in Lijiang, we decided we had done the city itself. So instead of hanging around some more, we went to Tiger Leaping Gorge, about 2hrs away. The gorge is a pretty amazing place: basically, the Yangtze River cuts between Yulong Xueshan and another, almost-as-tall mountain, creating a gash that at its most extreme points is thirty meters wide and thirty-nine hundred deep. That’s somewhere between twelve thousand and thirteen thousand feet. Whoa.

The approach to the gorge. Here you can get a little sense of how hugely far up into the sky these mountains go.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to do the real trek, which involves hiking the whole 20km length about 3000 feet up on one side over the course of two days. Instead we walked what is supposedly the narrowest, deepest section for about 2.5km. But the problem with that kind of height is that it’s hard to appreciate fully from the bottom, where you can see up a thousand or two but not even close to the full height. Even so, we were impressed:

Looking down the gorge.

When we had finished with the gorge, we got back to the lot to find that our ride had disappeared and apparently broken down. After a bit of frustrated conversation with our hotel (who had arranged our transport) we ended up asking a nearby minibus if we could hitch a ride back with them. That worked out well: the were a friendly family from Hangzhou, a city near Shanghai, and they were staying in a village outside of Lijiang that we’d wanted to check out on account of it’s supposedly being a little less touristy. So we took our ride with them and ended up in Shuhe, which did turn out to be quite a bit less crowded and just as interesting, if much smaller. We ate a very pleasant linner in a café literally over a canal:

After that, we decided to walk back to town, mostly because we didn’t have much better to do and thought it might give us some nice views. It didn’t really—most of the trip back was spent in what can only be described as brand-new, prefab suburbs—but it did give us the chance to see some of the new (read: real) town, which was nice. And we had a great conversation about the past and potential futures of Chinese foreign policy on the way back. This is why I like traveling with Swatties.

On our return, we dumped our stuff at the hotel and assured them that we had in fact survived, then set out to explore Lijiang by night. This was especially exciting because it was National Day proper, October 1st, and people were out celebrating everywhere. It was pretty exciting, and the crowds contributed for once. We saw tons of people wearing light up devil horns, and people floating little candle boats down the canals (and other people, a few hundred yards downstream, fishing them out with nets), and eventually, as we made our way back up the hill to our favorite coffee shop, the whole city lit up in celebration. It was a pleasant night, and a good way to end our time in Lijiang.