Traveling Adventures

So on the heels of more blogs is more pictures! Here are a big chunk of our chinese pictures courtesy of Yao.

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After seeing Gordon off in Dali, we headed to Li Jian on another 3 hour trek. The bus ride itself was quite interesting. We ended up winding up the mountain than down the valley and 3 hours later and many sketchy maneuvers by the bus driver itself we landed in one of Li Jian’s bus stations. Somewhere along the trip, my ipod lost the number of the hostel we had planned to stay at. Luckily, Janahlee was able to recommend another hostel on a very short notice. K2 (the hostel we ended up staying at) turned out to be in Su He, a city very close to Li Jian, and in my opinion an even better city than Li Jian itself. By the time we got to K2, we were hungry and tired and my butt was particularly sore from all that jostling in the bus (I ended up in the very back of the bus dead center, where if the bus stopped abruptly  I’d surely have went straight through the van). So once we dropped off our stuff, we went off in search of food. We came across this restaurant called little paris that was selling 16 yuan spaghetti, and thought: “hey! A not expensive western restaurant. SWEET!” went in and promptly found out that the 16 yuan spaghetti was in fact the only thing that didn’t cost an arm and a leg on the item. The prices were on par with european prices!!!! But since we were still very hungry and tired we decided might as well just try their stuff. Brit got a sandwich, Yao got some fried rice and I got the cheap spaghetti. Unfortunately for us, the food was super super salted, in fact it was pretty much inedible in terms of how horrific it turned out to be. 

Despite our poor choice of lunch venues, our Su He experience was in fact quite nice. The most memorable thing about the town was the streams/rivers that run through that town. It was very very clear and not only that, people put beers/yogurts into the stream to cool it down instead putting it into fridges. There was a lot of places selling knick knacks but it still maintained an air of old town charm, and you didn’t feel like people were trying to rip you off around every corner. In fact I was able to get some really nice earrings and bracelet there. The next day, we headed off to Tiger Leaping Gorge.

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With my friend Gordon coming over from Thailand and Linda’s cousin Yao coming over from Guangzhou we decided to go travelling to the famous places in Yunan province. The four of us headed to Dali. The town itself is very much a tourist town. We walked one street for twenty minutes and all we found we’re nicknack shops. Well that and some beautiful caramel candies shaped like a phoenix. Those were rather cool looking although a little too sweet for my liking. Our hostel was very pretty with comfy beds, good coffee and over friendly dogs. We actually spent very little time in the town. Our first day we spent on a trek to the lake. We opted to walk through the fields to get there and ended up really enjoying it. We walked through tons of rice and corn fields and asked the farmers for directions. I enjoyed being able to see a real chinese country side. How else would I get to see women wearing rice hats and what appeared to be ghost buster backpacks spraying pesticide on their crops? We got a little tired and opted for a horse carriage trip to the lake. This turned out to be a highlight. We went to what appeared to be a fishing area in the middle of nowhere. Along the way we got to see Chinese farmers going about their daily lives. Somehow this was much more interesting than tourist sites. Gordon and I agreed that if it weren’t for our chinese speaking travelling partners we would have been to afraid to get on that horse buggy. As it was, sometimes sketchy things are the most interestings.

The next day we went up the local mountain. After taking the chairlift up we went for some chinese hiking. This involves walking on a flat stone path past beautiful scenery. In this case it was mountains peeking out of the clouds and fog. Throw in the odd waterfall and phoenix looking rock face that we saw and you get an idea of what chinese landscape art is depicting. We were going to go into some phoenix cave but the fact that rocks from a landslide blocked the entrance made us reconsider. There are some things that are in fact too sketchy to do. [Linda's sidenote: Gordon had wanted to go up despite the fact it was raining and the rocks were slippery and no way to save oneself if he were to slip. So telling him: "I don't want to explain your parents how stupid a way you died" worked in nipping that in the butt. Yao has claimed that was the best quote on this trip]

All in all I enjoyed Dali very much. Hey, maybe I’ll even get to writing the Lijiang post sometime soon.

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