Lijiang and Leaping Tigers

Lijiang is a nice city in nort-western Yunnan. The place to be over there is the old town, it has several features to add to its charm: traditional style houses of Naxi people, nice cobble-stone alleys, no cars allowed, lots of little waterways, and the location in a valley with mountains surrounding. It's also a Unesco World Heritage site, and full of tourists and shops selling crap to the tourists. The shops seemed to just sell all sorts of tourist crap mixed in with local handicrafts. Also the car ban didn't seem to be as strict as on Gulang Yu island in Xiamen because there was a garbage truck driving through at least once a day and the police had electric cars there. Still, far better than nothing.

A rather interesting visit in Lijiang was the centre of the Nature Conservancy, a US based organization trying to, well, figure it out from the name. They had quite a display of stunning photographs from the area, with the most interesting being the comparison pictures. They were showing pictures taken in the 1910s and 1920s and next to them modern pictures of the same places. It was really easy to see the effects of global warming, the snowlines going higher up, as well as the treelines.

An actual sight in Lijiang is the Black Dragon Pool and the park around it, including Elephant Hill. The pond and the park are quite nice, and it wasn't a bad hike up the hill, but I really don't see how it would be worth the entrance ticket of a whopping 80 yuan. Well, have to spend the money on something, as accommodation in Lijiang was pretty cheap. I paid 50 yuan per night of a single room in a really nice and comfortable traditional style guest house, which had wireless net access that made working from there excellent in the quiet settings and a cute puppy interrupting occasionally.

Oh, there's also an interesting writing system of the Dongba in this area. A little museum-like thing is set up near the Black Dragon Pool where they present things and an old man there writes people short things in Dongba script by request. It's like Egyptian hieroglyphs meet Chinese characters. Here's a picture as a sample.

Not far from Lijiang is the Tiger Leaping Gorge, and of course I have to go anywhere that mentions tigers. Besides, it's supposedly the deepest gorge in the world, or at least among the three deepest gorges, there's always conflicting information running about. Closer to 4 km from the river surface to the mountain peaks. It's a good two-day hike through the gorge, but how to get there was a bit of a question. My outdated Lonely Planet guide from 2005 knows of three bus stations in Lijiang, and it seems none of them exist nowadays. There is a brand new bus station to which I arrived, but they have no buses to Daju where I wanted to start and only one per day to Qiaotou which is at the other end, and that one leaves at 2 pm which would be too late. Naturally I wasn't the only one looking for buses so I teamed up with some other travellers and together we hired a minivan to drive us to Qiaotou for 50 yuan each.

At Qiaotou I almost got a second job as a Chinese - English interpreter, but since I don't accept any jobs that don't let me travel around freely it didn't last long. So we headed to the mountains beside the gorge, me and Mr Fan, one of the people who shared the ride over. The early part of the hike is all uphill, so sweat poured despite the weather not being too hot. Actually the weather reports had said it should be raining constantly, but there was only the occasional drops of water and I even managed to get sunburnt during the hike. Well, rather than telling you how beautiful it was I'll just post some photos. They're all phone photos, so no optical zoom, unfortunately. Should suggest making phones with that functionality. I guess N93 has something of an optical zoom but anyway, I digress.





I stayed overnight at Tina's Guest House, Mr Fan stopped an hour and a half earlier. One of the nice things about such hikes in China is that there are these places where to stop for the night and you don't have to carry tents along. These guest houses come up every 2 hours or less during the hike and they do have decent restaurants as well. Tina's is a regular youth hostel, fine and cheap but nothing to write home about really, so I'll stop writing.



In the morning I went down to the river and climbed on the thing the gorge got its name after, the Tiger Leaping Stone. Legend has it that once upon a time a tiger leaped over the river from the stone. Either the river was smaller back then or then it was one heck of a leap!





There are two ways up from the rock, one is the little path they call the "safe" way which I came down on, and the other includes a long ladder and a very shaky bridge. So I took that option, never too concerned with safety.


The hike onwards was less interesting, mostly on a proper road, albeit with practically no traffic. There was a difficulty finding the way to Daju though, the maps and guidebooks speak of a new ferry rather close to Walnut Garden, but when I got there I saw a couple of French guys climbing up who said there was no ferry. Later I also caught up with a German guy who had gone up and down only to see that there is, in fact, no ferry, despite the signs. Later I've noticed Lonely Planet calls it winter ferry, so maybe it runs in the winter only. Then the walk onwards was a bit confusing, asking all the people I saw for the way and got just pointed onwards. I got a lift for a few hundred metres from the aforementioned French people who had hitchhiked with a local guy. He left all four of us to a post where a small road took off and a sign pointed to a ferry. A woman holding a shop around the corner told me it's about 6 km to go, and perhaps it indeed was, a fair bit to walk across the corn and sunflower fields, and a totally broken down path down to the river. There was also no pier at that side of the river, but on the other side there was and indeed there was an old ferry also! They took us across the river for 20 yuan each, and on the other side two minivans were waiting, one for Daju and the other for Lijiang. We all took the Lijiang one and got the price down to 50 yuan per head.





Here's also a video at the rock to get more of the atmosphere and an idea of how far the tiger supposedly leaped...

A temple, pandas and bus rides

Beside the bears, Chengdu also has a pretty nice temple right in the city centre, the Wenshu temple. It has a fully reasonable entrance fee too, 5 yuan, unlike the 40 or so you'd expect in Beijing. The nicest thing about this temple was the garden, well, maybe I'm biased towards gardens but to me anyway. It's not very large compared to lots of other temples in China but still has a relaxing feel to it, despite the large number of people going about. This is one of the main temples of Zen or rather Chang Buddhism, and it's completely self-financing, running a vegetarian restaurant and a guest house.

Right, so I saw a vegetarian restaurant and I started thinking that since Sichuan food is rather famous it wouldn't be quite right if I had none while there, would it? So I gave my fruitarianism a miss for the day and had an oversized lunch at the restaurant. Sichuan food is supposed to be spicy, I picked one dish that they marked with one chili pepper on the menu, meaning slightly spicy, and another with three, for very spicy. But to my surprise even the spicier one wasn't all that spicy. They also bring rice with all orders, which I didn't expect as that is not the norm in China, so I really shouldn't have ordered dumplings... although those were possibly the best part of the meal. Feeling stuffed after my first warm meal since leaving Beijing and I was more convinced on the goodness of fruitarianism than before.

One more thing about the temple actually, they had quite interesting cartoons on the wall, in English to my surprise. It was quite easy for me to associate with these.


On to the pandas then. At an animal welfare dinner in Beijing a few weeks ago I happened to meet someone working at the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base in Chengdu and she promised a tour of the place. But unfortunately she missed her train to the city and wasn't in town to give me the tour, she called her colleagues to do that though. Panda breeding centre really doesn't sound nice in my ears, breeding another species kept in captivity, but I came to the place with an open mind. It's a large area about 10 km from central Chengdu, to get there take bus number 1 all the way to the terminal in the north, then change to 532 and don't jump off the bus as soon as you see the words "panda base" and notice you have turned to Panda Road! I did that and had to walk for about 4 km along the Panda Road to reach the centre.

The panda base has a large garden-style area with a lake and waterbirds, as well as lots of bamboo of course. But actually they don't feed the pandas with the bamboo grown there as the pandas are very picky about food and want certain types of bamboo that grow in an altitude of 2 - 2.5 km. Chengdu is only around 500 m from the sealevel. That also means it's often too hot for the pandas, and that's why they tend to be inside in the hot summer days... and inside they don't have a lot of space to stay in. It's not absolute abuse like the moon bears and the staff clearly care about them, but it still feels so wrong to me to see innocent animals in cages.

I was lucky as I often am and there were pandas born just the day before! Now I'd love to put here some pictures but there was a sign saying no pictures, and as a Finn I tend to bide by the rules... although the others didn't. However, I can tell you that newborn pandas look much like rats. Some white hair but none of that distinctive black and white stuff, that comes at 20 days of age, I was told. I was also told that the official number of pandas in the wild is 1,600, but the reality is something much fewer as local officials are given incentives of having large numbers of pandas in their area so if they see panda droppings in two places it must mean two pandas, not one panda going around.

The panda base hosts 71 giant pandas at the moment, and they're all offspring of 6 pandas taken there in the 1980s. Beside giant pandas, they also host 30 or so red pandas, who actually don't look much at all like giant pandas but more like foxes. The big idea of the base is indeed to breed pandas, and they also hope to eventually release the pandas in the wild, which makes it more of a reasonable conservation effort and less like a zoo. They released one panda a couple of years ago, but she got into a fight with a wild panda, fell off a cliff and died.

Otherwise the time in Chengdu went with work. I was planning on continuing to Emei mountain, but you know how I am with plans, so that didn't actually happen. Instead I took a bus to Lijiang, in Yunnan province. The only thing was that the bus ride would take 24 hours, which was a bit off-putting. Never mind though. The bus was one of those Chinese sleeper buses that have three rows of bunk beds, 5 in each row, making up 30 beds. But make that 30 beds made for Chinese people. For me they are too low for sitting, too short for lying, and so narrow they squeeze the shoulders in a nasty way once you do manage to settle there somehow. And of course Chinese people always smoke on the long distance buses, drivers included, despite that being forbidden. So make sure you have an openable window next to you for fresh air.

But the scenes were awesome. The mountains of Sichuan and of Yunnan made the trip almost worth the pain. If you're 175cm or shorter I think I could even recommend that to some degree, but for us taller than that... not sure. Maybe bicycles.