Golfing Through China: Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge

My sister, who is studying at Tsinghua University in Beijing, flew down to meet me for my last two days in Kunming and then we flew onto Lijiang. Lijiang's Old Town, a UNESCO heritage site, is comprised of a lot of old buildings and alleyways, which have now been converted to guesthouses, restaurants, and lots of shops. We are staying at one of the guesthouses, which is a group of converted homes with a courtyard in the middle. When we arrived at Old Town, we had to get out of the taxi and walk through the town to find our guesthouse, since cabs aren't allowed in Old Town. It took us about 40 minutes of asking people and walking around to finally find our guesthouse, since it's actually in an unmarked alley.

Our first full day in Lijiang we went to Black Dragon Pool Park, which is just north of Old Town and has a view beyond the pool of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Unfortunately, it had been raining at this point for almost 24 straight hours, so the mountain was totally obscured, but the pool and the grounds surrounding it were still really nice. We then went to the southern part of Old Town, to the Mu family mansion, which is the former home of a Naxi chieftan. My guidebook says that this complex was almost completely rebuilt after the 1996 earthquake that rocked Lijiang, but the grounds were really impressive. It reminded me of a miniature version of the Forbidden City in Beijing - a walled-in compound of buildings all in a row behind one another, with surrounding gardens. The mansion didn't really give a good sense of who the Mu family was through the exhibit, but it was worth visiting just for the buildings.

For lunch that day we went to Lamu's House of Tibet, which so far is my favorite food in Lijiang. It's a small cafe which serves Tibetan, Chinese and Western food. We stuck with the Tibetan and Chinese food and ordered Tibetan dumplings filled with vegetable curry, yak cheese balls rolled in sugar and lightly fried, vegetable fried rice and tomatoes and eggs. Tibetan food and culture is prevalent here because of the Naxi, who are a minority that have been based in Lijiang for around 1400 years. The Naxi are descendants of ethnically Tibetan tribes and have matrilineal families. The Naxi women pretty much run the show - couples don't live together, and if a man spends the night with a Naxi woman he has to leave before the next morning to go back and work for his mother, any child belongs to the woman, and while the father supports the child and woman, once the relationship between the parents is over so is the support provided by the father, and finally women inherit all property. One thing I really liked was the role of gender in Naxi language, which my guidebook briefly described. The example they give is that when the word 'female' is added to the word 'stone' it becomes 'boulder' but when the word 'male' is added to 'stone' is becomes 'pebble.'

The next day we woke up early to take a 7:50 AM bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the steepest and deepest gorges in the world, measuring 16 kilometers long and rising over 3900 meters from the water to the top of the mountains next to it. We were warned that the trek was a little dangerous because of the constant rain, and that rock slides were possible, but we gave it a shot. There were almost no other people on the trail while we were hiking and we tried to keep hiking higher towards the top of the mountain, which caused us to accidentally lose the trail. We kept walking until there were almost no paths, and we ran into a farmer, who stopped his work and insisted on showing us back to the trail and a guesthouse. We walked basically through an unmarked forest with him for about an hour before reaching a Naxi Guesthouse, where we had lunch. We decided after lunch to head back to the bus stop at the base of the mountain rather than stay overnight in the gorge since the trail was pretty slippery (I wiped out once and my knee is now pretty swollen) and if it rained overnight it would be even worse the following day. It was a good decision, since it rained again all night. When we were walking back to the bus stop, there was a sign we didn't see on our way up which said that the fee everyone usually needs to pay to trek through the gorge was currently being waived because during the summer the government puts no money or resources into maintaining the paths. The gorge was pretty amazing, and we went almost up to the top of one of the mountains and got really good views of the river and the gorge. The path was a lot more treacherous than I thought it would be given how famous Tiger Leaping Gorge is. I assumed a place like this would have paved roads given how popular it is, but it was a real hike. It would definitely be worth it to return during the peak time when the path isn't slippery and trek through the whole gorge, and then continue onto Shangri-La.

Today it is pouring rain again, so it doesn't look like I will be getting a round of golf in, and tomorrow I fly to Chengdu.