the old town (and the crap town)

So we finished up in Tiger Leaping Gorge and took a minibus back to our starting point, Lijiang, which is a small city about 2 hours away from the Gorge. Lijiang’s old town has been world heritage listed by UNESCO and we went back to the same hostel we stored our luggage at, which is located on the very edge of the old town, away from all the touristy stuff, but still within walking distance.

Honestly, we were both exhausted from the trek and there’s not a lot to do in the old town, so this won’t be an exciting update, until right near the end, which takes place in a different city, and features a cute cat.

Anyway we spent the morning strolling through the old town, which is really quite cool. We both loved the rivers and aqueducts that run through all the streets, along with the uneven cobblestones and dead end alleys that give the old town it’s unique personality.

The old town is full of hostels, hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops, and is aimed squarely at foreign tourists. The locals don’t seem to shop here but the prices are perfectly reasonable and as with everywhere else in China, the food is amazing and great value for money.

We ate some lunch at the market square, selecting a variety of dishes from the street vendors including a Naxi Cake (which was like a pasty), a weird sticky rice covered almost sweet thing (not great) and a couple of skewers of mushrooms and beans (which were awesome).

 

We returned to the room and Penny got a 1 hour… that’s right… a full 60 minute massage, for about $13 AUD. I have a photo of her lying on the bed relaxing while some poor Chinese guy rubs her feet, but she wouldn’t let me put it up.

We updated the blog (with the posts about the gorge) and then went out for dinner. At night the old town really comes alive and the streets are lit up with beautiful red lanterns which make the whole place really inviting and exciting.

Then we headed to the train station and got on an overnight train to our next stop, Kunming.

I really don’t have anything good to say about the next 24 hours. There was a guy in our cabin on the train who snored like a hacksaw, do we didn’t get any sleep.

Then we arrived in Kunming, which is uglier, smoggier and rowdier than Chengdu, and spent 2 hours in the train ticket line trying to buy our tickets to Avatar mountain, only to find out that EVERYTHING (multiple trains, multiple days, hard/soft sleeper and the hard seats) was sold out.

So we headed to the bus station and tried to get to Kunming’s only attraction, the world heritage listed Stone Forest, which is 2 hours away by bus.

There are 3 bus stations in Kunming and none of them could tell us where to get tickets to the Stone Forest. The hags at the ticket counter in the last station we tried were so unhelpful that we gave up… also, it’s 2 hours there, 2 hours back, and it was 11:30 by that point, so the trip was no longer worthwhile.

Remember how I said there was a bit with a cute cat? That’s this bit here. We asked a few locals and eventually located an Internet cafe inside a decrepit, boarded up building, up 3 flights of (unlit, uneven) stairs. We jumped on a computer and noticed there were a couple of cats around.

They were very cute…. until one of them pissed on Penny’s day pack.

Yeah… go ahead and re-read that sentence.

(P – if anyone has any tips for getting the smell of cat pee out of material…I scrubbed with a toothbrush and detergent but it’s still pretty bad…)

We left the Internet cafe… the whole city was making our skin crawl. People were screaming at each other, there were cops and touts with megaphones blaring at everyone and we had 9 hours to kill.

We got in a cab, went to a hostel and booked a room for half a day. We read… we slept, and I typed this blog.

We still have no idea how we’re getting to Avatar Mountain or back to Hong Kong to fly back home, but we’ll work something out.

Next update should be in two days, when we get to Yangshou.