Lijiang and Shuhe, Yunnan Province

I was in Lijiang for almost 2 weeks all up, hanging out and enjoying the cooler weather before heading to SE Asia! Here’s a blog about what I got up to..

I left Guilin on a 20 hour overnight train via Nanning to Kunming. Because it was a night train I didn’t get to see a lot of the countryside leaving Guilin. At one stage I did pass through a couple of cities that the train stopped at. They weren’t mentioned at all in the Lonely Planet, but I looked on Wikipedia (thanks to my 3G Kindle), and it turns out they have a population of over a million people! Shows how big this place is, and how concentrated the tourism really is!

I took a hard-sleeper this time. This has bunks 3 high, and is open compared to the soft-sleeper. In my group of 6 bunks (and most of the carriage) it was all full of families with little kids. Whilst this was cute during the evening it was far from fun when I woke at 3am to the screams of one ~4 year old screaming for his mother! No-one did anything about it though and left it screaming for a good 20-30 minutes!!!

I had a day to kill (about 8 hours) in Kunming, the biggest city in Yunnan Province. I just wandered around town for a while and managed to find somewhere to buy a map of Yunnan (which doesn’t have the Pinyin (roman) characters, but I get the gist and can transfer the names over from my other map).

Here are a couple of photos of Kunming railway station at dusk. Good to see that the Chinese build railway stations that are as impressive as the west!


Another sleeper train (only ~9 hours this time) took me to Lijiang, where I arrived at 6am, in the cold pre-dawn. This time the carriage was full of Chinese people in their 20s and 30s, and I slept really well!

I searched around for a while for the freight office so I could get my bicycle, but there wasn’t one. So I walked the 10km into town and my hostel, it was nice, and I got to see the sun come up.. Here are some people doing Tai Chi outside the train station (see- more big buildings!)..

After checking into my hostel I set about finding my bike and bags. The receipt I had listed an address and armed with that and some other addresses from Google I set off to wander the town! After 2-3 hours of walking I couldn’t find it, so returned to the hostel. I asked the person on the front desk to phone the number on the receipt, and found out that for ¥20 ($NZ4) I could have it delivered to the hostel in 20 minutes! I wish I’d rung them before walking the town looking for it!

Here are some photos from walking the town that day..



The next day I headed up to the Tiger Leaping Gorge, which you can read about here.

As mentioned in that post, I left my rather pricey headtorch at a guesthouse on the gorge. So while I waited in Lijiang hoping it would turn up, I explored the city taking some photos.

Towards the end of my stay there was a bit of a group of us at the hostel who hung out together for a few days. I really enjoyed it and it was a good break from the solitude of the trip, especially the next few weeks to come.
Here are some photos from one night when we went to a food market.

I love the guys face in the background:

Not bad for $NZ3 eh?!

The next day 6 of us took a minivan to the nearby village of Shuhe for a look. Unfortunately the minivan driver took us to the wrong entrance and we got charged an entrance fee! It was only $NZ8 but still.. Shuhe was a town on the Ancient Tea route from southern China to Tibet and on to India. I’m pretty much following this trail south towards Laos. It was a nice change from the old town in Lijiang whose narrow streets were packed with tourists.

Possible wedding photos?

A man doing some awesome etching, would love some of his work on my wall!

3 pools- One for drinking, one for washing dishes, one for washing clothes..

Making shawls

Sunflower seeds

Waterwheel

Cool door-knobs!

Looking over Shuhe from a temple.

So that’s my time in Lijiang. I’ve left there now, but I’ll save that for another blog post!
I’ve got an album of photos of photos of dogs I’ve seen around Yunnan- something of a pet project you might say! He he he. Anyway, you can see it here.

And to wrap up, here’s a photo of my beard and new ($NZ4) cap! I reckon from certain angles it makes me look like Fidel Castro! :-D