A Birthday Side Trip

Thursday, July 10, 2008--Shangri La (Continued)

I went to the big Ganden Sumtseling Monastery in the late afternoon. It is outside of town and on top of a small hill with a look that is much like that of the monastery in Lhasa. It's hard to find a photo that does it justice, however. It is much more dramatic to see it in person than the photos seem to show. There are at least 9 temples with the oldest being from the 1600s. The rooflines of the temples have lots of golden ornaments on them. I wandered through each temple and found back doors that allowed me to go up to rooftop walkways with prayer wheels, to other rooftops that gave views of the valley, to the kitchen for the monks (filthy!), etc. Although the temple has 600 monks, I only saw a few. One interesting sight was of a monk going to get water. They have to take a pole with buckets on the end and go outside the monastery to get water probably has they have done there for 100s of years. But as the monk walked along with this pole and buckets, he was chatting on his mobile phone which was color coordinated with his robe he was wearing!

I finished reading The House of Blue Mangoes by David Davidar. I gave the book 2 1/2 stars out of 4. I enjoyed reading it, but the story gets weak at points. The author tried to write a GRAND novel about 3 generations of a family, and he really just wrote 3 stories and put them in one book. There is nothing really tying them together except the fact that they are about succesive generations of the same family.

Denis, a Brazilian professor at a university in Macau, came to my room in the evening. We had been visiting during the afternoon and had talked about some possible plans. He came to propose that we take a bus tomorrow to Deqin. That's a town as far as you can go from here without offically entering Tibet. We decided to take the bus tomorrow and have a 2-day outing to see the scenery along the route.

Friday, July 11, 2008--Birthday Trip from Shangri La to Deqin

We had hoped to get the bus that leaves at 9:20, but we didn't get to the bus station in time. I had been told it was necessary to buy tickets about 2 hours before a bus departure to assure getting seats, and it was 8:20 before we got to the station. We had to wait for the noon bus and take it. Just before then, we ate fried rice with pork in a small restaurant nearby. The rice was delicious with nice pieces of fresh vegetables and seasoned to be very spicy.

It was a beautiful trip. The scenery changes several times. First, around Shangri La, it is green with pine trees on the mountains. Then there is a stretch of brown, desert-like mountains. Finally, it turns a lush green again with rocky tops that have snow and a glacier on them near Deqin. The road itself has many twists and winds. Denis is a bit of a fatalist and kept pointing out where there would be no hope if the bus went over the side. The trip is 6-hours long, and 1 1/4 hours of that it is cobblestone rather than asphalt; therefore, it was a bit tiring but very exciting and enjoyable.

Deqin itself is not a special town at all. We found a room in a small guesthouse and wandered up and down the streets. We found a temple where the women were walking around the clockwise route for praying with the prayer wheels, but they seemed to be doing it more as exercise somewhat like walking for exercise in the malls at home. Denis and I joined them for 3 rounds, since we had been sitting so long.

The altitude in Deqin is even higher than in Shangri La, so the air is thin. We found ourselves having to go slowly and having to breathe through our mouths to get enough oxygen. But we continued to explore the town. We stopped at a restaurant to eat local food and had a spicy mutton dish with vegetables and rice. Then we found the town square where the locals were all dancing. That's a common occurance in this part of China. In the evenings, there is music at the square and the local people form circles and do Chinese-style line dances. It's a mixture of both young and old, but the old get most of the attention due to the fact that they are often wearing native costumes. Many of the older men were also playing a local stringed instrument as they danced. It is the same as the dancing I had seen in Shangri La earlier in the week which can also be seen in this video.

Saturday, July 12, 2008--Deqin and Return to Shangri La

We went straight to the bus station and bought tickets to return to Shangri La on the noon bus. Then we went out to explore Deqin and the area. First, we stopped to buy some flat bread for breakfast. When we tried to buy some local yak or goat cheese to go with it, however, the yak cheese was not yet ready (they prepare it daily), and the goat cheese sold out to others as we stood in line. But we walked on through the rest of the market which was filled with lots of fresh food.

We then headed out into the countryside. It was a tough walk, however. Everything is uphill and at a rather steep grade. Eventually we broke free of the town and were walking in the hills, however. There were small wildflowers everywhere, a beautiful field of rape in bloom, etc. Eventually, we realized, however, that it was 11:00 and that we had to return to town to check out of our guesthouse and catch the bus.

We had perfectly clear skies for the return trip. Some of the tops of the mountains were shrouded in clouds, but the day was gorgeous. That, combined with the fact that we were going in the opposite direction, made the trip seem almost like a different trip. Denis kept opening the window to lean out and take photos. And the local men sitting behind us on the bus kept tapping him on the shoulder to point out nice scenes so he could shoot them.

Back in Shangri La, we went into Old Town and got a room at a different guesthouse from where we had stayed before. Then we went to the square for the dancing again (see the links at the end of the posts for July 11). Denis took lots of photos, including some short videos using his photo camera. Then we just watched and enjoyed them. We kept pointing out interesting people.

Around 21:00, we went to a restaurant I had found earlier and had dinner. It was a spicy dish of yak filet with tomatoes, onions, and peppers and came with rice. It was both delicious and inexpensive, yet the restaurant had lots of atmosphere. Then as we walked out, we were greeted by the lighted view of the golden temple that is on a hill in Old Town and its giant prayer wheel.

We stopped for a beer across the street from our guesthouse, and the young man operating the place was one of the dancers we had observed on the square earlier. We told him we recognized him. He was both shy about it and excited. He told us he would teach us to do the dances if we would be here for 5 days. Then he gave us our first beer as his treat and sat and visited with us.

Sunday, July 13, 2008--Shangri La to Lijiang

As soon as we got back to town yesterday, Denis and I both bought our tickets for departing today. I got one for the 9:30 luxury bus to Lijiang, and he got his for the 20:00 sleeper bus for Kunming. This morning, therefore, I was up and ready to go while he was still in bed. We said good-bye, then I headed for the bus station.

The bus was such a pleasure to ride. It was huge with lots of leg room and a clean toilet on board. I sat next to a well-dressed local young man. I actually slept much of the way because I was still tired. Just 30 minutes outside of Lijiang, there was a road accident involving 3 vehicles just in front of us. Fortunately, the bus driver stopped quickly so that we weren't involved. It was caused by two vehicles in opposite directions trying to pass vehicles (one of them passing our bus) and not having room to get back into their correct lanes. An unfortunate driver of a car got caught in the middle of their efforts to miss each other and got hit both in the front and the back as her vehicle spun around. That added a whole hour to our trip, since the accident blocked the narrow two-lane roadway completely.

I am now in Lijiang. It is one of the most popular Old Towns in China and is often the setting for films in old times. It was also the setting of a modern Japanese film entitled Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles that my sister and I saw just before I left for my travels this year. Here is the website for the film, and here is the Rotten Tomatoes page for it. I stopped here at a cyber cafe on my way from the bus station to the Old Town because I had not been online for so long. I will now go find myself a place to stay here for 2-3 nights.