Dali to Lijiang

At last, the bus to Lijiang. We had to hike our bags up the hill to the bus station and got on our express bus (2 ½ hours). This bus had an on-board bathroom and about half way into the trip, the smell was horrendous. The poor people across from the door looked pained. Even though nature was calling, I opted to avoid the bus box toilet and waited until we got to Lijiang. What a mistake! The local bus terminal toilet was the typical 6 holer with short concrete blocks between the holes in the floor. This toilet had obviously not been cleaned in a long time. The smell was atrocious, but even worse were the small white maggots crawling everywhere…on the walls, on the floor, in the toilet hole.
We headed to a hotel recommended by some Americans and found ourselves in front of this palace-like building. They told us that they had paid 260 yuan even though the published rate was 580 so we bluffed our way into the same rate. It took about 20 minutes of discussion among the reception staff (who was more interested in our story and who these American’s were than in trying to solve our problem) and several layers of management. Finally, we got to our room and dumped our bags and headed into town.
We got a bit lost (since our hotel was new and not on any map) so we had a taxi driver drop us off in town. We ended up in the residential section of the old town and got a flavor of the city.

It was a charming maze of cobbled streets, old wooden buildings, gushing canals….a true taste of old rural China. Then, we hit the marketplace and we saw that the Chinese have also managed to “theme” Lijiang. Once again, the hordes of vacationing Chinese tourists were being led around by minority guides (and having their pictures taken with costumed minorities with pained looks on their faces).

Lijiang itself was actually quite lucky. In 1996, an earthquake of over 7 on the Richter scale hit the city and leveled most of the new construction buildings. Amazingly, the older structures survived and Unesco placed it on the World Heritage sights. The Chinese are now building new construction in the old style (with indoor plumbing and modern conveniences, of course).

The city is home to the Naxi minority group. They are descended from Tibetan nomads and lived in matriarchal families. Women still seem to be in control. Everywhere you look, the women are running the show- from shop owners to construction workers. The men, on the other hand, spend their days walking their birds, taking their birds to the river to bathe and occasionally taking care of the children. Even the language has matriarchal influences. Nouns enlarge the meaning of a word when the word for female is added and decrease when the word for male is added (i.e. stone plus female = boulder, stone plus male = pebble). The Naxi also created a written language over 1000 years ago using a series of pictographs.
After exploring the alleyways and side streets and getting a sense of the town layout, we found a little café to sit and watch the scene. We watched the locals bring their wash down to the canals and wash their clothes. Then we saw people washing their hair and throwing the remains from the plates at the restaurant….and then after seeing a few “brown trouts” floating along with the clothes, we saw the people from the restaurants washing their vegetables in the same water (oftentimes right next to the people washing their clothes. We started to seriously question our decision to be vegetarians in this particular town.
We were starting to see the same Caucasian tourists as we all made the tourist loop through the same sights. We met an interesting Swiss couple (who told us horror stories of getting sick on their long distance train-your worst nightmare). While sitting with a cold beer, we ran into a bald French man travelling with his bright red haired Aussie girlfriend. He gave us his unbiased views of China, Japan, and the sights we should see, in typical French arrogant style. Then we ran into a wonderful couple from NY. He was Tibetan and she was American. They were trying to get into Tibet and having a difficult time since the Chinese don’t want overseas Tibetans back in the country. They also shed a lot of light on the construction in China. According to them, the funding for all the construction is coming from the Chinese government and they are building with no demand. We still don’t understand it. There will be bill coming due….
We had dinner at a cute little place- with no cold wine and not much on the menu, but a great dog that kept us amused through dinner.