Further Wanderings

Our trip up to Xi’an (my mom’s first in China) was a bit of a non-event. We went to bed almost immediately on boarding. The views out the train on waking were surprising. My initial visions of almost every region of western China had been mistaken, and this was no exception. I was expecting Shaanxi province to be flat, dry and brown. Instead it was forested hillsides with lots of tunnels.

On arriving after (finally) managing to buy train tickets for a later leg of our trip, we enlisted the help of two students in finding the bus down to our hotel (actually their help was kind of forced upon us really, but it was no less welcome for that.)

We checked into the Ibis hotel (the first international chain hotel of our trip and something of a novelty and luxury) and had a bit of a rest before going out for a walk.

Though Xi’an was an ancient city, having served as China’s capital for several centuries starting over 1500 years ago, it had long since outgrown its past. It was now a dusty, flat, hazy, busy city of several million people (pretty much exactly as I’d imagined all of Shaanxi to be come to think of it.)

An entry about Xi’an kind of has to begin with a photo of the Terracotta Warriors, doesn’t it?

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This entry is actually more about the city of Leshan, two hours away, than it is about Chengdu itself. But:
A. Many people (though not us) just visit Leshan as a day trip from Chengdu
and
B. I really like this title

We’d bought our bus tickets to Leshan the day before as it was May 2, still part of the May Day holiday and we were a bit afraid of their not being available on short notice. As it turned out this wasn’t so much not a problem as kind of irrelevant, as any ticket was usable on any of the buses that leave every fifteen or twenty minutes from the Chengdu south station for Leshan.

I must admit that I didn’t pay much attention to the trip down, but it looked mostly like uninspiring motorway anyway.

Sarah and my mom with the Leshan Grand Buddha

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Even with Kangding to warm us up, arriving in the big city of Chengdu after over a week in the small, isolated, high altitude towns of western Sichuan was a bit of a shock. Hazy, polluted skies, hot and steamy weather and traffic everywhere!

Somehow we managed to get our bearings and find our way to the hotel that we planned to stay at. It was only a twenty minute walk, but after a long day on the bus it was great to dump my pack and have a shower, especially as we hadn’t had hot water for three days.

A bit of a rest, then it was time to take care of some business. First was buying some train tickets for our departure from Chengdu. We’d originally assumed that we wouldn’t be allowed to head north from Zhongdian to western Sichuan, and so would be passing through several towns with train ticket booking offices before reaching Chengdu. The fact that we’d been up in the mountains, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest railhead meant that we’d left it a little late. Thankfully there were still sleepers available.

The second, and much more important bit of business was finding some food. Sichuan province is the epicentre of chili use and the province’s chefs regard themselves as the best in the country with a grudging acceptance that, okay, maybe some of the food in Guangdong (Cantonese) is okay as well.

I suppose that having a photo of my mom here before she appears in the narrative kind of ruins the surprise. For those who know her at least. For those who don’t I suppose my commenting on it is what ruins the surprise. Anyway to make it perfectly clear and completely eliminate any suspense, my mom joins us in the entry

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The bus trip from Litang to the village of Tagong was clearly the most epic road journey we’d undertaken in China. And not in an entirely good way. In fact, although the scenery was often jaw-dropping, not even MOSTLY in a good way. From the moment we started departed the station at 06:30 (buses leave EARLY in western Sichuan) the road was a rutted juddering mess.

We climbed up the hill behind Litang and spent the first half of the journey to the town of Xinduqiao winding our way up and over more lofty mountain passes. This section had more in common with the Zhongdian-Xiangcheng journey in that there was lots of snow around, lots of exposed rock and towering peaks all around us. Every now and then we’d pass a small settlement, most of which seemed to be construction camps for the new road that, unfortunately hadn’t quite opened yet. We bounced along the road, my elbow being banged against the window frame next to my seat every ten to twenty seconds for seven hours. Every now and then we’d hit a particularly large bump and everyone on the bus (especially the two of us in the second row from the back) would become briefly airborne. Not fun.

A monk (fellow passenger on our bus) contemplating the barren landscape during a brief stop on the road to Xinduqiao

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If Zhongdian felt like the end of the line at the edges of the frontier, Litang was more like the fur trading fort a thousand kilometres beyond it, truly in the wilds. It was bigger than I’d expected, but outside of the main street almost all of the buildings were tan coloured rammed earth Tibetan style. Yaks wandered the dusty main street, stopping to try and nibble on street trees that had clearly been specially selected for their unpalatability to yaks. Each block held four or five feral dogs lazing in the sun. People everywhere were dressed in the thick wraparound cloaks and cowboy hats that seem popular everywhere in Tibet. And everywhere you looked were old men and women spinning prayer wheels or fingering prayer beads. Litang was at the very heart of Kham, one of the traditional three provinces of Tibet (the easternmost.)

A crow perched on top of the Litang monastery

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Let me begin by saying that this entry is about Tibet. It’s not actually in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) as defined by the government of China. The area I’m talking about is actually all in the western part of Sichuan province. But the area where we spent the days chronicled here is on the Tibetan Plateau and culturally is almost all Tibetan. Indeed, I’ve read that because the Chinese central government is making such a point of trying to assimilate the Tibetan residents of the TAR/overwhelm them with Han Chinese migrants, the most culturally Tibetan parts of China are actually those outside of what is officially called “Tibet.” I’ve never been to the TAR but from what we saw in western Sichuan there may well be some truth to this.

There. Now with that dealt with I can get on with telling you what a fantastic place it was.

The view out the front windscreen on our northbound bus from Zhongdian

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Let me begin by saying that this entry is about the town of Zhongdian, also known as Gyalthang in Tibetan. It’s also known as Shangri-La (Shang-Ge-Li-La in Chinese, since you can’t even really say “Shangri-La” in Mandarin.) It was re-christened this by tourism authorities in 2001 after some study or other suggested that the area was the basis for the fictitious place of the same name in John Hilton’s Lost Horizon. There. Now with that dealt with I hope we can agree to never call it by that name again. That’s what I’ll be doing for the rest of this entry anyhow. What you choose is up to you, I guess.

A hilltop view out over the countryside around Zhongdian
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Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the deepest in the world. It’s over 4000m from the summits of Yulong Shan and Haba Shan that flank the gorge down to the river below. And while some other gorges may eclipse it in overall height, few can rival the size of the walls that actually enclose the Yangtze in Tiger Leaping Gorge, with cliffs of over 2000m appearing at several points along its length.

We took a Zhongdian bound bus from Lijiang. The road was in bad shape for most of the journey until it miraculously improved, just after we made a stop to buy some fresh mountain strawberries (I’m sure this wasn’t ACTUALLY the point of the stop, but many of us on the bus used the chance to purchase some from the vendors nearby [NZ$1.80/kg, and they were ripe, fresh berries.]) And shortly after that, we got our first glimpse of the gorge, coming round a bend in a wide valley (carved by a tributary of the Yangtze) we were suddenly confronted with the mighty river itself, as well as with the towering grey stone ramparts of 5596m Yulong Shan rising above it.

Our first view of the entrance to Tiger Leaping Gorge
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The next stop on the list was Dali, west of Kunming. Dali, sitting between the Cangshan mountains and Lake Erhai (China’s sixth largest) was one of the original Chinese backpacker towns, and was supposed to have a charming old town.

Our arrival didn’t bode well. We alighted from the train in Xiaguan, 30km away from Dali at the south end of the lake. Following the instructions from the hostel we’d booked at we took a bus from there to old Dali. Unfortunately the stop we were looking for never appeared. At the end of the line we disembarked and saw a queue of hundreds waiting for the return bus back to Xiaguan. We walked the whole 1km of the main street, then 2km further along the Yunnan-Tibet highway, then 2km back. All this time we were asking directions of people, getting inconclusive answers and looking for the name of the bus stop we should have got off at, which was no more helpful. As dark drew in we gave up and found a room at another place not far from the old town.

Deep fried drumsticks for sale at Dali’s San Yue Jie festival
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One thing that’s really struck me about train travel in China is how friendly everyone is. People who’ve never met before in their lives are instantly chatting away like old friends if they’re sitting next to one another. Our trip from Guilin to Kunming was no exception to this.

We had hard sleeper beds, which means they’re stacked three high, with a pair of stacks making a little cubby-hole off the aisle of the train. To our surprise, our cubby-mates all (save one) spoke good English. There were two young men from Guilin on their way to a public speaking competition (in English), and a mother and daughter from Kunming on their way home from a holiday together (the mother was the one who didn’t really speak English, though we and she did pretty well with sign language and her daughter translated when necessary. And she also spoke a tiny bit of Dai. The Dai are an ethnic minority in China who are descended from Thais. Their language is very similar, so everyone was very entertained when I joined right in as mom was counting from 1 to 10 in Dai.)

We spent the afternoon and evening chatting and sharing the variety of snacks we’d brought along (we had oranges and sunflower seeds, they had pomelos and an odd fruit that was very like a slightly sweet, orange avocado.) We’d brought our typical train dinner of instant noodles, but as it turned out we didn’t really need them. Sarah had mentioned that she was fond of mogu (mushrooms.) When Yiqun and her mother returned from dinner, they surprised us with a container full of yummy mogu and rice!

The famous Luohan of Kunming’s Bamboo Temple
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