Yunnan without Shangri-La

We had planned on visiting two other small old cities in Yunnan, Dali and Li Jiang. We tried to catch a bus out of Kunming after returning from Stone Forest but we received bad information and there was no last bus. Rather than taking the overnight bus and arriving at 5 a.m., we stayed in town. So, it was another dinner at the western style Ma Ma Fu's and a night at the Camellia Hotel. Their Chinese food was good but the apple pie was not worth ordering.

I found that my sweet tooth was not satisfied in China. Chinese chocolate doesn't use cocoa butter but a substitute so we stuck with Dove bars which was the only western style chocolate bar available in all over. We got into the habit of buying one small bar each day. We tried some of the Chinese baked goods as bakeries were pretty common but they didn't fill the bill.

Another western luxury we didn't forgo was coffee. Most western style breakfasts offered only Nescafe or charged a premium for brewed coffee. We often spent extra for the Yunnan grown coffee. Every hotel had either electric bottled water dispensers with hot and cold spigots or an electric kettle. China does tea not coffee. In addition, boiled water is necessary to be sure that the water is aseptic. So each morning we began the day with Nescafe packets of instant coffee with sugar and lightened.

So after breakfast at the Camellia we were off to Dali. The old town is a small (less than one square mile) walled, cobbled, mostly rebuilt as a medieval city. It had had a new rather than real old town feel and was busy with Chinese tourists shopping in the stalls selling goods of all variety on the main street. It had western style restaurants on "Foreigner Street" but most of tourists were Chinese. It did have some streets with local people, their stone working shops and their local markets. It was small enough that it felt comfortable and not over run. We stayed at a small hotel owned by a Bai family (the ethnic minority). Among the westerners here, we were the only older ones. We were enough of an oddity to be noticed by the Chinese hordes.

First day we visited a park of temples and three pagodas. The pagodas dated back to 800 AD while the many temples were completely destroyed during the cultural revolution and rebuilt new about 30 years ago. Dali and the region around it has an interesting history. It was on the tea route and for several hundred years was an independent country in the middle ages. It is 65 percent minority mostly Bai though everyone speaks Chinese. We stayed at an ethnic hotels run by Mr Yin and it was comfortable, quiet with a terrace on the top floor. The second day there we rented bikes and visited the small villages and farms in the area. Again we were transported back to the traditional, poor and agrarian China. The fields were irrigated well watered and the spring soy bean crop was ready for harvest.

The next morning, a bus, this time to Li Jiang, another historic city, this time of the Naxi minority. These people are closer to Tibetans and feature Yak and goat products including yogurt and their own distinctive costumes.

Another digression - I don't know Chinese culture or history enough to really understand the place of minority groups in China. The minorities are revered. However it seems that without autonomy, the minority cultures are being absorbed into the dominant Han Chinese Mandarin culture which represents over 90% of the population of China. The people dressed in colorful costumes are primarily young and work for the government in these theme park like re-creations of probably dying cultures. It is in the small outlying villages that you see the minorities, old, poor and peasant working the fields. I suspect that the intermarriage and absorption of these groups will lead to their disappearance in this century. Without real autonomy they will vanish.

Another bus, this time to Li Jiang another historic city, this time of the Naxi minority. These people are closer to Tibetans and feature Yak and goat products including yogurt.
So,there we were in Li Jiang, another Chinese city with a theme park old town. It is picturesque but inauthentic. At night, the bars and restaurants pump up the volume, have minority dance performances to compete with each other for the Chinese tourist. We were warned to not stay in the old town because of the noise level and so we checked into a hotel and hostel run by Tibetans, a few blocks outside of and with a great view of the old city. We visited the old city with its stalls selling Yak products, tea and local handicrafts and realized that we didn’t want to spend our last day there. The next stop on the Chingo (that is the Chinese Gringo Trail, obscure but email me if you want to understand the allusion) is Shangri-La. The Chinese tourists much revere this small city as well. It became famous in the west due to the 1933 novel by James Hilton titled “Lost Horizon” about a utopic valley of eternal spring lost in the mountains of Tibet or Western China. It is also a film from 1937. Wikipedia has some interesting comments about the author, the film and its effect on the public; check it out. We want to see the natural rather than the artificial so we were off to Tiger Leaping Gorge.