From Kunming to Lijiang

Our second day in Kunming wasn't that productive. We planned alot of sightseeing within the city. Sights like the temples, pagoda's and museums. In the end we only visited the Yunnan Provincial Museum. This was quite interesting. The collection consists out of ancient relics, like weapons, pottery and treasures. Strangely enough, we both got very tired during the visit to the museum. So we decided to go back to the hotel and get some rest. We slept untill 8pm. I know, we are lazy bastards. I think our lazyness has something to do with the heavy raining. The bad weather made it very troublesome to visit the sights.

So we woke up and got some food at the KFC. This didn't made us feel better about the waisted day. We decided to compensate the lost day with some relaxation. This was easy because there was a massage place next to our hotel with a special offer. Sauna, back scrub, foot massage and whole body massage for 88yuan. That sounded to good to be true, so we checked it out. It turned out to be great. We spend about one and an half hour in that place and we left the place with a different state of mind.

We got pretty hungry after the spa, so we decided to get some BBQ skewers. There is a whole area with different kinds of BBQ eating places. We got some BBQ sticks and I also felt like eating some noodle soup. So we asked what kind of soup it was and guess what? It was dog meat noodle soup. I needed a short moment of silence to realize that this was something which I always wanted to try. I didn't hesitate to long and just ordered the soup. Jacky was acting like a pussy as always, so he stuck to his lamb kebabs. The noodle soup tasted like every other one and dog meat tastes quite similar as pork. So what's all the fuzz about? Just try it and you'll love it!

That was about my whole day. Pretty useless right? We got back to our room and we slept again. We had to get up at 6am to catch our plane to Lijiang. This is one of the most popular sightseeing areas of the Yunnan province. We arrived in Lijiang around 9am. The first thing which we had to do was to book an hotel and arrange some sightseeing. We tried to bargain for a taxi drive to the city, but strangely it didn't really work. We even tried the set-the-drivers-against-each-other trick, but nobody would bite. Normally, when we arrive at a chinese airport, we will get harassed by several illegal taxi drivers offering cheap prices. This wasn't the case with Lijiang. Nobody offered us a ride, we felt pretty left alone. It seemed that there is some kind of honest community in this area, where people would wait for their turn or something like this. We had no choice but to go along the rules of this community, so we paid full price to get to the Old Town area.

We asked the driver what would be the price of a whole day sightseeing with him arranging our transportation. He said it would cost 300yuan for a whole day transportation to three sightseeing areas. We compared this with the public transport prices in the lonely planet and it seemed pretty reasonable. So we decided to hire him for today. We were supposed to go to the Tiger Leaping Gorge and two other sightseeing places. I don't know the names, because he stated it in chinese. First, we got to Lijiang and arranged an hotel room in the Old Town area. Afterwards, we got some breakfast and got off to our first sightseeing spot. At this spot, you get the choice for different kinds of routes. One is some hiking, the other is looking at waterfalls and another one is riding horse and cruise on a lake. We picked the latter one. Mainly, because it was the cheapest for 160yuan a person, which is still a lot of money (in china). The scenery turned out to be very nice. There was a large grassland with grazing oxes, resting horses, sleeping cows and running dogs. The whole picture looked so peacefull.

The next sightseeing place was a small temple with something like a buddhist fortune teller. We had to spin an ancient buddhist artefact. The outcome showed us which piece of religious paper we had to pick. We had to show this piece of paper to the fortune telling monk. According to your facial characteristics and the paper, he would tell your fortune. He said something about my forehead, nose and lips. I don't remember everything, but he said that I should pursue the thing what feels right to me. This will make me succesfull in life. This visit turned out to be pretty interesting.

So with some extra enlightment, we left for the highlight of our trip. The Tiger Leaping Gorge. This is the largest gorge in the world (according to the lonely planet). Once I saw it, I lost all the doubts of that statement. It really looked amazing. The stream is very calm most of the time, but at one point it turns into a gigantic fast paced stream hitting rocks with tremendous power. The chinese have build a whole sightseeing spot around that place. It's amazing that tourists can come so near to one of nature's incredible and yet so dangerous phenomenons. The big group of chinese tourists take photos at that spot, like if it was the next accomplishment which would bring them one step further to the ultimate photo album. Very impressive sight.

We got pretty tired after all the sightseeing and sitting in the car. Once we got back to our hotel, we took a shower and went into Old Town. I didn't suspect it to be so vibrant and lively as it is. It's packed with tourists and their are singing and partying like crazy. I thought Old Town was supposed to be a cultural sightseeing spot. I guess the whole place has been commercialized, because every authentic buidling was occupied with some kind of shop. It looks alot like the Yuyuan gardens in Shanghai and the Jin Li street in Chengdu. Well, we'll check it out again tomorrow morning. When all the chinese party groups are still at sleep. I'll keep you updated shortly.