Tiger Leaping Gorge and other Yunnan adventures

Now only a 5 hour bus ride from Kunming by good roads, Dali was once the capital of an independent Yunnan state in the 17th century. This is a region where you see many of the minority people dressed in distinctive, colorful clothing. The old city is surrounded by thick walls and has several impressive gates which one must go through to enter. There are numerous old buildings, typical Asian styled structures. Inside the gates is an area cut off from vehicle traffic, so it makes it nice to walk around. There are many tourist shops selling textiles, jewelry, silver and other items, and the streets are filled with mainly Chinese or Asian tourists.

Dali is located by a beautiful Lake Tahoe sized lake and surrounded by many small villages and very high mountains (with some snow in the upper reaches) that tower over the lake. One day we walked towards the lake passing through fields of onions, lettuce, cabbage, and other types of vegetables and workers loading produce onto a truck. Finally, we came to a village that had very narrow streets, very old buildings and mainly older people relaxing or working. Another day, we took a cable car high into the snow capped mountains and walked about 10 miles passing spectacular scenery with deep gorges and waterfalls. We stopped at a little shack along the trail and ate delicious noodles and vegetables.

After three days in Dali, we took the bus a few hours north to visit Lijiang, another prime tourist destination located within 10 miles of the 18,000 foot snowy Jade Mountain. Lijiang, as many Chinese cities, has a new city and an old city. The very picturesque old city is quite large with narrow cobblestone streets, streams with clear, cold water running alongside the streets, stone bridges and houses with tiled roofs.

After a couple of days in Lijiang to wait out the rainy weather, we took a two hour early morning ride to the starting point of our planned trek through Tiger Leaping Gorge. We hooked up with a young man from Washington state who is living in northeast China studying Mandarin. The three of us hiked all day, first passing green terraced farmland along the Yangze River, passing a small Naxi village and then up over a steep pass called the 28 bends. It was very strenuous but the views of the deep gorge with snow capped glacial mountains rising almost vertically more than two miles practically straight up from the jade colored Yangze river below made it worthwhile. Sometimes we passed people shepherding many goats. In the late afternoon we arrived at a guest house perched on the steep mountain high above the river below. We spent the night there and continued our walk the next morning another until we arrived at another guest house, where we spent the second night in the gorge. In the afternoon we hiked down to the roaring river about two thousand feet below and then back up to our guest house. The following day we took a spectacular day hike and stayed another night at Tina's guest house. The following day, we took a van out of the gorge and switched to another to get up to Shangrila, a city about two hours up from the gorge.

Located at 10,700 feet elevation, Zhongdien (renamed Shangrila to attract tourists) is populated mainly by Tibetan people. It is still winter here; the nights are below freezing and the trees are bare and the ground brown colored. The old city has narrow cobblestone streets like Lijiang, but the roofs are mainly made of wood instead of stone tiles. There are several interesting Tibetan style temples in the vicinity. On the road to Shangrila we passed a small town and observed people preparing the fields for cultivation and doing other tasks. The buildings are often large Two or three storied structures with wooden tiled roofs.