Coming back from Tiger Leaping Gorge and Shangrila, we stayed a few more days in Lijiang and Dali, two very old cities that we like very much. In Dali, we went on a long day hike again on Cangshan Mountain and we stayed at our favorite hotel, the Yinyuan. The family that runs this hotel is extremely helpful and friendly and they make us feel like family. One day, we asked the older man (about my age - we think he and his wife might be the owners but are not sure) for directions to get to one of the trailheads on the mountain. He said something in Mandarin that I interpreted as offering to give us a ride to the trailhead tomorrow morning. The next morning, when it came time to go, he and his wife accompanied us. We were expecting a ride in his tiny mini-van but instead we went on foot; they guided us to a side road leading up the hill towards the mountain that overlooks Dali. Together we walked for about 40 minutes until reaching the trailhead. There we said goodbye, paid our entrance fees to the soldiers and registered in the book, and were on our way up the steep mountain. It is hard to communicate since my Mandarin is so limited and Ana knows only a few words, but sign language does help.
From Dali we took a short flight down to the city of Jinhong in the Xishang Banna region of China. Xishang Banna is a tropical area of China known for its rainforests and many "minority peoples". It was the last day of the "water festival" when we arrived in Jinhong, and the bus from the airport let us off in the city center where pitched water battles raged up and down the streets. There were thousands of people with plastic pans of water and large squirt guns getting each other wet. There were people riding by on pick up trucks trying to douse bystanders with water. The police were there standing by bu did nothing to interfere in the fun-making. Of course, as tired foreign tourists carrying backpacks and looking for a hotel to stay, we were not too amused as we also were at times the victims of this splashing. At least the weather was really hot. April is the hottest time of the year here, right before the rainy season begins.
We stayed a couple of days in Jinhong, taking one day for an excursion to a town that seemed really dirty to us. We took the ferry across the Mekong and walked along the paved road along the river, but never found the kind of trail off into the wilds we were looking for.
Leaving Jinhong the next day, we took a 5 hour bus trip to the Laos border, crossed the border, and continued on to the Northern Laos town of Luang Nham Tha. From Jinhong to the border, it was interesting to observe the beautiful, skillfully engineered road we were on. The scenery was very green and beautiful, but all the deforestation and clear-cutting was quite disturbing, too. There was the annual spring burning going on and the air smelled smoky and our eyes stung at times. Once in Laos,you notice quite a change as the housing is poorer and the roads often in bad shape; also, the ugly deforestation was much worse with large areas of clear-cutting evident. I have read that foreign companies are responsible for this devastation. I asked a couple of Laotians on the bus about it, and one told me China was responsible and the other said that the local farmers burn down the forests to clear land for planting on the hillsides. I am sure the Laotian government gets a cut of the profits of the foreign companies for urgently needed funds, but one really has to question the wisdom of allowing this. You see many farming families left to live in areas that seem unable to sustain farming after the clear-cutting, and the inevitable erosion that follows. It is sad to see only small pockets of pristine wilderness among vast areas of charred hillsides.
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