The main thing we did in Lìjiāng was visit Yùlóngxuěshān (Jade Dragon Snow Mountain). We looked into doing it ourselves, but with the lack of input from the hostel and other complications, we decided it was easiest to book onto a package tour.
It cost about 540 Yuan, so not a cheap day out, but worth it for the lack of stress and all the extras it included. The ticket paid for transport, park entry tickets, cable cars, in-park busses, the 80 Yuan Lìjiāng tourism entry ticket, water, thermal coats, oxygen… yeah, not a bad deal.
The day started as all early morning start for me – with a bad stomach and a long time spent on the toilet, which is just what you don’t want when you’re about to get on a coach that doesn’t have a loo. Luckily the bus ride only took an hour or so. The weather was great – we picked the perfect day (the day before there was a threat of rain, and the day after was grey and cloudy). Once in the park we were first set loose with our minibus tickets and could visit two scenic areas at our leisure. These were both centred around a lake, with forests and mountains as a picturesque backdrop. Indeed, a group of four giggling, middle ages women couldn’t resist having their photo taken with me, one by one… and there was me thinking they’d come to see the mountain!
There were cows, pigs and goats that, while seemingly wild, were very used to human company and were rather good-natured about posing for photos. After an hour of snapping away at the scenery and walking around the idyllic area we got to the bus at the foot of the cable car. We queued for about 20/30 minutes, in which time we ate some of the picnic lunch we’d brought with us (knowing that food on the mountain would be very pricey). It was at this time that we first encountered ‘the ugly pigs’ as we affectionately called them. A Chinese couple about Sasha’s age who were endlessly moronic, disgusting and just plain nasty. He was an overweight, grotesque fellow with a face literally like a pigs, clad in a thin t-shirt stretched over his mind-bogglingly giant stomach (just a t-shirt… at the top of a snowy mountain) and she, while not entirely ugly, was the epitome of stupid, dressed in hot pants and a short denim jacket… in the snow, where it was 5 degrees. I saw lots of Chinese people staring at them and tutting, shaking their heads, so I felt no shame at doing the same.
As well as offending me by their lack of sensible clothing, they also annoyed me by: pushing and shoving, smoking incessantly whist standing in a queue, the woman (who was standing in front of me) flicking her hair in my face, their endless squawking, spitting all over the place whist making noises like strangled geese… and at the top of the mountain, what did they do? Did they walk to the top? Did they take photos of the beautiful scenery? No, they sat in the snow and played games on their smartphones… gah! Some people shouldn’t be allowed into areas of natural beauty.
Ok, ugly pigs rant over now. So… we took the cable car to the top of the mountain, which was a little bit terrifying, even more so because of the wind which was rocking us back and forth and which whistled through the gaps in the door.
The views were breath-taking. You could look out to the countless other peaks and see all the rolling fields and valley’s in-between. The further away you looked, the lighter the silhouettes cast by the shadowy giants. Getting off the cable car we were at 4,506 meters. We walked out onto the ledge and looked down, past the discarded rubbish that was lodged in the snow, to the sheer drop below us. A few hundred meters away was the glacier, which the Chinese tourists weren’t paying much attention to.
Zig-zagging through the ice and snow, the footpath took us up to the highest point you can climb to – 4,600 meters, which was about 1,000 meters shy of the summit. Up at that point we used our oxygen canisters to ward off our approaching headaches, and my vision grew clearer in the dazzling brightness after a few gasps of the strange tasting air. It was a magnificent day out. Best of all was looking up to the highest peak and seeing the mist and clouds rolling over the top and down towards us like water cascading over a waterfall.
That was the main event of our time in Lìjiāng. We went to Hei Long Tan (Black Dragon Spring) which was a quiet little park with lots of tranquil water and good views of the mountain through clumps of trees parted like curtains. The old city of Lìjiāng was ok – much of it had been destroyed in the 1995 earthquake so it’s all been rebuilt and definitely feels new; that sort of tacky touristy architecture where it’s supposed to look old but actually isn’t. The whole city felt like a bit of a rip off. Every little shop and alleyway was jammed with people trying to sell tourist tat. The streets were crowded, and it was easy to get lost as everything looked the same and the signposts were less than helpful.
We preferred shopping in the local market, mingling with people going about their daily business rather than the people on holiday who were frantically cramming into every stall and shop available, each one selling the same old rubbish. In the market we picked up a few bits and pieces but on the whole we didn’t do much shopping. I love just walking around in Chinese markets and seeing what's there - you can buy all sorts of stuff. There are always some interesting foods to try too.
Lìjiāng redeemed itself a little in the food department. We went to a speciality Nàxī restaurant (the local minority) and ate fried rice, pork that was sweet and moist but with an edge of crackling cooked in mint and ginger and garlic, aubergine, mushrooms…all excellent. On our last night we ate at a small roadside place that had Mongolian Funnel hot pot with Yak meat. Yak is delicious – like beef but with a milder, creamier taste. We tried Yak milk yoghurt which was great too. There is a local type of bread called a Baba, which is circular like a burger bun and has different flavours.
Thinking about it, we had another big day trip in Lìjiāng which I didn’t write about in my travel diary, but which just sprung to my mind now (I guess I blocked out the memories – Sasha loved it, but for me, it was one of the worst days ever.) We were keen to visit the home of Joseph Rock, who we’d read about in one of my favourite travel books (Simon Winchesters The River at the Centre of the World.) Joseph Rock (1884 – 1962) was an Austrian-American botanist, linguist, explorer and geographer who lived for about 27 years in a village near Lìjiāng called Yuhu. He wrote many articles for the national geographic and sounded like a very interesting guy, so we decided to visit his former home which has been turned into a small museum.
Only trouble was how to get there. The village of Yuhu didn’t have much in it so there weren’t any public busses, and hiring a vehicle was expensive, especially if we wanted them to bring us back. So we hired bikes. I’ll tell you now; I can barely ride a bicycle, at all. I hate cycling and I’m super slow. But the guy at the bike store said it would be a 45 minute/ 1hour journey, which I convinced myself I could handle. It was actually a lot longer than that, and on the way there it was all, ever so slightly, uphill. So after two hours of cycling along this main road, which was really monotonous and boring…you can imagine. I was in so much pain. Bikes and I are just not meant to be together. So yeah, a few hours of cycling up this road, not really knowing where we were going because the signage was rubbish, me crying because I hate cycling so much… oh, what a day! We did eventually find the place and had a little look around. The museum was small, no photos allowed, all quite dusty and run down. It looked like such a small, no-where kind of place that I doubted whether it had frequent visitors at all, then as we were leaving, a bus-load of Americans got out on the cobbled pathway and tramped through the gate, so there you go! We had a small lunch and then cycled back. Downhill was easier – I freewheeled pretty much all the way back because my bum was hurting so much from the cycle ride there that I couldn’t even sit down on the seat without wincing in pain. What a looser, eh? Well, lesson learnt – I won’t be getting on a bike again without actual evidence that my cycle ride will be over in 10 minutes, max!
So that sums up Lìjiāng. Not somewhere I’d want to go back to – a lot of it just felt like a tourist trap, and outside of the city it just felt and looked like a wasteland – everything was old and grey. But after Lìjiāng we headed on to our last destination on our tour of epic travels, Dàlǐ, which turned out to be one of the best places in the world… ever. So look forward to that blog post! Zàijiàn x
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