Lijiang
CHINA
Gateway to Tiger Leaping Gorge
By AARON
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
I have some travel advice for you. In Beijing, where describing the traffic as “bad” is the understatement of the decade, take the subway. Lyndi, Cal and I awoke early morning on the 26th, and while the sun was still rising, headed to the subway. There we were whisked away to the train that ran to the airport, in which were treated to an air conditioned car with modern seats that seemed to pass traffic as if it was standing still. Oh, wait. The traffic was standing still.
The next segment of our trip to get to Lijiang went like this:
- Subway to train (awesome)
- Train to airport (still awesome)
- Cal being interrogated by security at the airport for packing a headlamp (totally awesome)
- Crazy bumpy flight/stopover in Louzhou (not awesome at all)
I would like to interject here for a sec- not about the bumpy flight, although that sucked for anyone who doesn’t like flying (see: me), but in regards to the size and population of China.
Did you know that pretty much 1 in every 5 people in the world is Chinese? And that there are over 45 cities that have populations over 1 million? So populous is this country that when we arrived at our stopover in the sleepy town of Louzhou, which didn’t even earn but a tiny point on our map of China, it turned out to be a bustling metropolis of 4.5 million people. Wow. Okay, continuing on:
- 5 hour layover in the city of Kunming; drinks at a fancy hotel (really bad Old Fashioned)
- Overnight train ride from Kunming to Lijiang (actually a pretty pleasant ride!)
We arrived in Lijiang at 7am and walked out of the train station and were greeted by a wall of touts. “Okay, here we go guys” I said as we started forward, preparing to fend off the relentless attacks of local salespeople all flashing brochures of hostels and rides, all with the intent of procuring some of that sweet laowai money. And so we trudged forward… aaand walked right through them all as if we weren’t even there. “Whaaaa?” was basically the looks on all our faces as we found a cab, and headed in to Lijiang. Turns out they were after the domestic travelers, who outnumbered us 10-1 on this trip. In a way I felt relieved, but weirdly rejected at the same time.
After we checked in to the Garden Inn Hotel (fantastic by the way) and ventured out to explore Old Town, it struck us – just like my rejection at the train station, almost all of the tourists were domestic. In the crowded main plaza of Old Town, where karaoke and live music singers seemed to hang out in every 2nd story window, we could pick out maybe one other foreign person in a sea of domestic Chinese travelers.
Now did that stop those domestic tourists from secretly trying to snap pictures of the three laowai that lumbered through the lantern lit streets? Of course not! And did the three laowai tourists do everything in their powers to photobomb these sneaky picture attempts? You betcha!
Next we decided to splurge on a good dinner at a hot pot restaurant, and after they found a nice lady who spoke English, she basically ordered a meal for us that consisted of this: One kilo of chicken, some vegetables, greens, and some white mushrooms. Sounds good, right? Well little did we know that the chicken would be chopped up bone and grey skin as well. What is this? Two black chicken feet? Fantastic!
So as we sifted through the bone and grey skin, all while Lyndi pets my cheek with black chicken foot quoting “grab my strong hand!” flashes of “EPIC FAIL” memes continued to pop up in my mind.
Now although the touts at the train station could care less about three international travelers and the flashpacking money they had to spend, the touts on Bar Street were all about it. Bar street is exactly as its name conveys – it is a street of bars that open up in the late afternoon and host a series of live entertainment ranging from music to stand up comedy.
We settled on a bar that had some live music consisting of a dude on an electric guitar and what we could only describe as Chinese Axl Rose. Yep, right down to the over-sized bandanna on the head. And boy could he sing, in fact, he was so good that to sit at a table to watch and drink 6 beers worked out to the equivalency of $12 a beer.
Now this is called the “Flashpacker’s Guide to China”, but in no way were we going to spend that kind of money on crappy beer. After negotiating, we got them down to $2.50/beer for some amazingly bad, warm, sour lemon water beer, and drank the night away to the sweet sounds of many a Chinese song that we didn’t know.
The next day was our final day before Tiger Leaping Gorge, and it was mostly spent getting horribly lost trying to walk to Black Dragon Pool park and finding a great restaurant called NE Yunnan. I’m pretty sure during the “lost” portion of that day we walked over 20,000 steps (courtesy of Cal’s step counter app on his phone), but hey, I see that as just prepping for our trek the next couple days in TLG.
