Yunnan province: treks, buses, minibuses and other adventures

So I finally wrapped up our last experiences in China while we recover from an endless food poisoning that mixed with flu in India.

Lijiang

So from Lugu Hu we traveled to Lijiang in Yunnan province. Our friends Juan and Rebeca had booked accommodation in a hostel in Lijiang for the four of us and we were supposed to arrive there together. But we didn't. Their bus tickets were over-sold and even though the guy from the station managed to get them inside a tour bus that drove to Lijiang, we arrived in different parts of the city.

The cute rather small old city of Lijiang I knew from my previous trip seven years ago grew becoming a monster. More and more traditional buildings were built to accommodate growing masses of Chinese tourists. But of course, it wasn’t enough and walking through the crowded rambling streets of the old city with our backpacks was an excruciating task. Lijiang old city is divided in different areas with street names that repeat; and we got deeper and deeper on the wrong street with the correct name, tumbling people, listening to the different karaoke music and soloist voices from the pubs around overlapping. After one hour walking, around 8pm, we arrived to the right number of the wrong street and we were pretty desperate. By then we got a message from Juan and Rebeca with the hostel phone number and we entered to the first karaoke and begged to call the hostel. Eventually a guy from the hostel picked up us, and we walked for half an hour until we arrived there and finally met Juan and Rebeca for dinner.

That’s the whole extent of my second visit to Lijiang: on the following morning the four of us took actually the same bus up to Shangri-la (at 3200 m height).

Shangri-la (originally Zhongdian)

Chasing some of the tourism of the prosperous Lijiang (and Old Dali), officials declared the Tibetan city previously known as Zhongdian, the location of the fictional place Shangri-la (described in the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton).  It may be the case that the writer took inspiration from the writings of explorers who visited the Deqen prefecture (where Zhongdian is located), but several places in China, Tibet and even Bhutan also claim to be the real Shangri-la. But, anyway, here they went far enough to associate the city previously-known-as-Zhongdian with the fictional Shangri-la, an idyllic permanently happy land isolated from the outside world. The name of the city was changed.

And it worked. Besides, the Tibetan city became also a Western outpost: lots of expats, international initiatives to promote local handcrafts or to develop the area, and good Western food including real pizzas, pasta, yummy yak hamburgers, yak steaks, real salads. There is even a cheese shop! With excellent yak cheese! As much as we love Chinese food, it was a nice break. (And this last week in India we were craving those hamburgers!)

Even before we were close to Shangri-la we heard about Marco, an Italian guy that moved there and opened an Italian restaurant. We, of course, went there for our first meal and ordered some pizza and salad. As soon as Marco takes our order, he starts rambling in Italianspanish about fake Tibetan monks, tourists kidnapped by the Chinese army and how his restaurant isn’t in the Lonely Planet guide because he isn’t an evangelist. And then he starts to tell the history of his life: seven years ago, he married a Chinese Naxi woman, who now works with him, and opened the place. In the flow of the unclear Italianspanish that doesn’t stop, I hear something about him being a nurse. And then I remember!! I met him seven years ago in another Tibetan town called Xiahe. We even shared the room! By that time he was an eccentric 40 years old (single) backpacker, but as crazy as now, he was trying to teach English to the Tibetans to help them moving to India.

We stayed in Shangri-la some days, we wanted to do a trek “near” in Yubeng, but the weather wasn’t good and then Iohi caught the flu so we waited, hanging around with the couple we met before. They were volunteering in a school teaching English to the kids, and Iohi also eventually joined them.

Rebeca and Juan teaching English (Iohi was of course taking the pic)

Finally, we headed to our trek, and we even got an authentic Spanish chorizo colorado from Arturo who was leaving China. Thank you Arturo! We ate it with the parmesan yak cheese in toasted Tibetan bread during our trek!

Getting to Yubeng

So this is how you get to the “near” trek. You take a bus to Deqin, which takes from 6 hours to any uncertain amount of time depending on the conditions of the roads and on your luck. Then you take a minibus to Felai Si which takes around 1 hour. In Felai Si, there’s nothing but a nice view, so you sleep there and you take a jeep on the morning that takes another hour to Xidang. And then you can start. Piece of cake. Should I add that is a mountainous way and there are landslides and flooding all the time?

So fearing crowded minibuses we took the 7:40am bus and after 2 hours it stopped. We were three hours there until we understood that the bus was going to continue going only at 8 or 9 pm (yes pm) when the road was going to be cleared.

The first bus on our way to Yubeng

So yet again we left the bus and, with two Chinese couples, we took a minibus which was able to go on alternative narrow and muddy roads, where we got stuck every now and then.

Then at 9pm, when we were only a couple of hours from our destination, the axis of our car broke in the middle of nothing, and we had to move again, this time to jeep crammed with Tibetan monks. We arranged a price to Felai Si, but when we arrived in Deqin, the nice driver wanted to drop us unless we paid more.

So we paid more and then we arrived to the lousiest hostel belonging to the Youth Hostel association.

The following day it rained a lot, so we didn’t start the trek. It was so cloudy that we even didn’t see that we were surrounded by snowy peaks.

Yubeng trek (under the Meili Snow Mountain)

On the next morning we had an amazingly nice day and the snowy peaks were everywhere!

We arrived in Xidang on the morning and we started to walk up the muddy trail. Five hours later we got to the peak and we started to walk down to Upper Yubeng, the upper part of the town (at 3150 m).

Both Yubengs, upper and lower, are places which seemed to be taken from a painting. Surrounded by mountains, these small Tibetan villages with wooden and mud houses lack cars and seem completely unreal. 

In Upper Yubeng we had dinner twice on an open terrace from where the rainbow was present every afternoon.

We walked all day from there to a glacier over a half frozen lake. We drank there the best water we had ever tasted, straight from the ice in the mountains to a waterfall.

Then we moved to Lower Yubeng (which was slightly lower than the other Yubeng at 3050 m), as beautiful as Upper Yubeng, where we stayed in a room with view to the woods and a stream of water. We saw yaks and mules through our balcony and we used the first day to recover ourselves.

Our view

The next day we walked to waterfalls where we drank exquisite cold water again (yes, water can be exquisite) and on the following day we left.

I'm the blue dot

The way back from Yubeng

We took another path with two Israeli girls. It was a shorter path and without going up. For a couple of hours we walked following a river between small villages. Then we walked in a single line on a narrow trail which had a stream of water on the left near a rock wall and a very high cliff on the right. We even had to put the feet in the water when the trail was narrower and muddy or grab from the wall! The view was amazing and was scaring as hell! 

This was before it gets scary (and then we didn't take pics!)

After walking another couple of hours we reached the point where we should have easily found minibuses to Felai Si. But there weren’t.

We ended up in a construction site where we called everyone working in all the hostels around using the phone of one of the workers. It seemed that there were problems with the road again and we waited halves of hour for five hours for the minibus that didn’t arrive.

Then we caught a minibus that was going down to our direction and we cancelled the last minibus we called. But we didn’t realize until late that he was supposed to pick up a group of six Chinese that were below us. They weren’t happy to be crammed and travel with us but the driver was (he really robbed us with the price). So we contemplated again an endless Chinese quarrel until we begged the only English speaker to let us go with them to Felai Si.

We arrived to the same lousy hostel, but this time even lousier, the electricity was cut. Anyway, it was worth while; I guess that all the effort that implies arriving there makes Yubeng a rather clean, quiet and beautiful place. And we stayed there four nights, because we had already plane tickets from Kunming, but we could easily have stayed much more time, just sitting there on the nature.

We went back on the following morning to Shangri-la anyway, and we met again our friends. From Shangrila to Kunming, we suffered again with the transportation.

We thought the problem was the unreliable minibuses, but official buses were also uncomfortable and got stuck. We thought the problem was also being far from the big cities but the sleeper bus we took to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province wasn’t a joy either. It was roughly like sleeping with thirty more smelly guys in the same moving bed. Twelve hours later we arrived in Kunming.

Kunming

In Kunming we enjoyed our last days in China, a rather big but quite city with the perfect weather: it’s at an almost-tropical latitude but with a 2000 m altitude. We mainly got ready for our next destination, India, and of course we acted in a movie.

All the pictures are in Iohi's picasa.

Qinghai province II - how we got the hell out of there

Amnye Machen

Last time I was telling how we got stuck on the flanks of Amnye Machen Mountain between two dusty Tibetan towns for 6 hours. The Amnye Machen is a sacred Tibetan mountain and walking around it is supposed to be one of the holiest pilgrimage for Tibetan Buddhists. How they decide that a mountain is sacred, I've got no idea. I asked English-speaker Buddhists but their answers were completely vague and we kept finding holy Tibetan places where Buddhists walk clock-wise in many areas. Anyway, pilgrims make the 200 km circumambulation of the mountain while prostrating every other step and groups of tourists suppose to ride horses around half of the mountain to get to the other side. We couldn't find a guide and horses anywhere and we decided to just move on, get to Xiedawu on the other side of the mountain by jeep and try to do a short excursion with horses there.

So Iohi and Maya got inside a house that had a jeep parked outside, and persuaded the woman of the house to wake up his husband from his nap and make him take us to the other side for a normal price. (We discovered that bargaining was out of the question with Tibetans and we could be considered lucky if they don’t raise the price after it is settled).

So we jumped into his brand new jeep and when we started to go we saw a guy coming with row of saddled horses, but… fuck it! We were already leaving!

The driver happened to be a pretty cool guy and agreed to stop every other time to see the magnificent landscape. So we had 5 hours of amazing views driving on the mountain, seeing snowed peaks through the zillions of prayer flags and even a glacier!

We finally arrived to Xiedawu, a town which was even dustier and uglier and smaller than the previous ones. It even seemed poorer and there was no hotel or guesthouse around. Maya and Tomer, the Israeli couple, had a phone with a local sim card, but the cherry of the cake was the lack of phone signal! We managed to persuade some local guy to call the woman from a travel agency who had assured us that there is a hotel (and horses! And of course there were no horses there).

So she said that yes, there should be, but she’s not sure, she hasn’t been there, she doesn’t know, yada yada yada. We understood from some guy that we can sleep at the local school, which was falling apart as everything there. So we begged our driver to continue to the next town, which at least was on the main road that goes from Xining, capital of the province to the south, to Yushu. He called and asked permission from his wife and some more money from us and we continued to Huashixia.

At 10pm, exhausted, we arrived in the rainy, muddy and cold town of Huashixia and we settled in the first place we saw. After trying to swallow the Qinghai specialty, either some noodles in a kind of greasy soup or very greasy noodles fried with beef; we joined all the beds in the room to bear the cold weather.

On the morning, a little miracle happened, the dirt and the mud were gone and instead there was a magnificent layer of snow! Besides, we saw for the first time the snowed mountains that surrounded the town. I guess it’s not a miracle to see snow in summer above 4000 meters high and the mountains were all the time there (even during the night), but it was surprising for us, and the town seemed at least prettier.

So we booked by phone some beds in a guesthouse in Yushu, and we were said that there’s an afternoon bus to there and that we would arrive around 9pm. After hiking on the mountains during the morning, we tried to precise the concept of “afternoon bus to Yushu”.

I walked all the town (like 1 km) with Amori, who speaks Chinese, and we asked virtually everyone we saw at what time the bus from Xining to Yushu was supposed to stop in the town. So we heard between 2 and 3, between 4 and 5, between 7 and 8, between 8 and 9, there’s no bus, and today there’s no bus. And then we just moved all our stuff and bags to the street and waited from 2 till 8:30 pm, when the “4-5 hour” bus finally arrived. 

Waiting the bus - taken by Amori

We called the guy from the guesthouse, and asked him to pick us up at 12 am instead. At 12 am we were still on the bus, 2 hours more, they said, and so we called again to postpone the pick up. Around 4 am we arrived in Yushu.

Muddy and rainy Yushu

I should say that China is huge and it spans across five different time zones, from +5:00 in the west to +9:00 in the east. However, as many things in China, time is centralized. There’s a unified time zone +8 for all its territories which of course was set according to Beijing longitude.

Being Yushu 2000 km west from Beijing, 4:00 am was more like 1 or 2 am and it was pitch black, muddy and raining.

Yushu is a fairly populated place relative to Qinghai province: 300.000 inhabitants. What was once a big and pretty city (or it was supposed to be), it’s now ruins with most of their population living in temporary blue tents over the mud and many without any kind of toilets. On April 2010, the city was completely destroyed by an earthquake and today, more than year later,  the reconstruction is still a work in progress. We were in the rainy season and the city was a complete mess. We knew that it would be like this but the main road ended there and we hoped to sleep and then move south to Nangchen. However, the guy from the guesthouse didn’t come and didn’t answer the phone when we arrived in Yushu and we had no idea where his place was. So we were wet and freezing on the mud with the only light coming from the bus that was going to return to somewhere and with no idea what to do, when a Chinese couple told us to come over (When I say Chinese, I mean Han Chinese or I don’t know the ethnic group, but at least Tibetans and Hui Chineses are easily distinguished from Han Chineses). They were a very well educated electric engineer and his wife and had stopped a minivan-taxi and asked us in English if we wanted to go to Nangchen now. It was a 5 hours drive and we would arrive there on the morning (and we had the address of a hotel there.)

One day in Nangchen (was enough)

The driver of the minivan-taxi was a 21 year old guy who was completely asleep and drove us in a zombie state nodding every fifteen minutes in the complete darkness. He refused to stop and take a nap and instead he played loud dance music in the stereo which included hits from the ’90 like Salta sin parar (salta y salta y salta salta salta salta salta sin pararrrr) and Lambada. He kept nodding his head and around 7 am at dawn, fearing for our lives we told him to stop in some place to get us hot water and we forced him to drink a super strong black coffee.

Our driver drinking a super strong coffee

And again after driving through an amazing landscape, we arrived in a dusty and muddy and ugly one street Tibetan town. The “lonely planet hotel”, San Jiang Yuan Binguan,  had a thin layer of dust everywhere and it stank, literary. On the top of that, it was expensive. I think that our daily budget was at least 3 higher in Qinghai province than anywhere else in China including Beijing. Anyway, Amori and I went to check for others places while the others bargained the price, fearing that if this was the only hotel that accepts foreigners the owner will even increase the price if we go and return. We checked some dirtier options which included a place with dog shit in the hallway where I almost throw up from the smell. On our way we understood from a local guy that our San Jiang Yuan was the poshest hotel in town.

We bore only one day there; the amazing surroundings didn’t make up for the ugly and expensive place, the bad food and the hostile people. We had some pleasant surprises like a guy who knew English and took us to see a nearby monastery but mostly we wanted to get the hell out of the province.

Nice surroundings, ugly city

Yushu again

Next morning we traveled back to Yushu, where the group split. The Israeli couple couldn’t take it any more and decided to go back to the capital in order to take a flight to more tourist and normal places. Amori traveled back to see the Qinghai lake and  Iohi and I went to find another bus because we still wanted to get to Chengdu through Sichuan province’s Tibetan Highway on the flanks of the Tibet.

We drove in a taxi for 15 minutes across tents and scattered buildings until we get to some kind of bank neighborhood and then to the appropriate bus station. (There were many). This bus station was closed until 3 pm, but some guy there offered to help us and asked the stallkeeper from the kiosk of the station about buses to somewhere in Sichuan province. Our translator, as many Chinese people, studied English but had a hard time understanding and speaking the language and after some seconds of frustration he wrote in a piece “no tickets to foreigners”.

By that time, we had already heard so many times different things from different people that we didn’t believe anything so we just waited until the place opened.

Then I asked for buses to Ganzi in Sichuan – meyou (there isn’t) for tomorrow, meyou for the day after tomorrow. There was only for July 16^th, 4 days later. I asked for buses to Serxu, which was nearest town in Sichuan, but meyou, meyou, meyou…

So we either had to go north back to Xining by a 15 hours bus and then try to book a train or several trains south to Sichuan, or find a minibus there to Sichuan. (To wait four days there was out of the question.) Many times, minibuses are the only possible option when either there are no buses or they are full or they cannot go through a road because of landslides. Armed with a phrasebook and our 20 words vocabulary, we started to ask people around.

Then after several failed attempts, a 20-something-years old girl who spoke a bit of English explained us that her lama (kind of her Buddhist guru) happened to go to Sichuan and could drop us in Serxu…

And our luck began to change.

To see all the pics of Qinghai, you should check, as usual, Iohi's picasa.

Qinghai province I -stuck on the edge of the Amnye Machen mountain

So after a night trip on the train we arrived to Xining, Qinghai province capital. Qinghai is located on the north east of the Tibet (Tibetan Autonomous Region), and has more Tibetan population than the Tibet. Besides Tibetan people, there are also a lot of Hui and Salar people (Muslim Chinese), Mongols, and of course Han (what we would call just “Chinese” and they constitute the majority in China). We traveled the east and the south of the province which is on the Tibetan plateau, filled with grassy plateaus and elevations from 2500 to 5000m high!

Xining 

Xining is on the edge of the plateau and it's an unremarkable city, not too pretty, not too ugly, but has the only normal hostel in the province. Our plan was to travel south until we got to the province of Sichuan and take a route called the Tibet Highway that passes through Tibetan towns (in Sichuan) and leads to Chengdu (capital of the province). However, from the time we arrived to Xining, we kept hearing contradictory information regarding an area that was closed to foreigners because of demonstrations against the goverment. So we made our minds regarding an itinerary that leads to Yushu, the border with Sichuan, but could be circular if we find out that Sichuan border is closed. So in the worst case we would go back to Xining and take a train to Chengdu.

Xining à Tongren à some towns à Machen à Xueshan à Amnye Machen mountain à Xiedawu à Yushu àNangchen à Yushu à Sershu (Sichuan)

Qinghai Itinerary

A couple of Israelis, Maya and Tomer, had more a less the same idea and joined our itinerary and then we met a French guy and Chinese speaker, Amori, who was interested in joining us for the Qinghai part.

Tongren (Repkong)

Our first destination was Tongren (called Repkong in Tibetan), a Tibetan area famous for its Thangka paintings. It was a 5 hour bus drive from the capital, and we actually stayed the first night in a small village called Wuton, a few kilometers from the city. Already in Xining, we had contacted a Tibetan monk who painted Thangkas and, in Wuton, we stayed at his brother house. Actually I think we stayed in the son's room. That day we met the monk who showed us his studio and some of the paintings, and then we saw the lower monastery of the village.

The monk explaining about the thangkas

A thangka

On the next morning after seeing the upper monastery, we felt there was nothing else to do there and we moved to the city. It was a pretty ugly and big city with a nice big monastery (that I didn't see because I had a cold).

Originally, we decided to pass through a series of towns until we get to Machen, a big town next to a mountain sacred to Tibetans, Amnye Machen. But then, we got the chance to take a minibus straight to Machen, and we decided to skip the smaller towns.

A stop on the way to Machen

Machen (or Maqin or Dawu or Tawo)

So after a rough 7 hours drive we arrived at Machen also called Maqin, and Dawu or Tawo in Tibetan depending on who you asked. Here the confusion of multiple names starts, one in Mandarin (the official dialect of Chinese), the others in different romanizations of different dialects of Chinese or of Tibetan.

We were pretty high already, 3760 meters, with a harsh mountain climate: either cold or a strong sun. The town was plainly ugly, one long main street with buildings of concrete without nothing picturesque about them, but the landscape surroundings the town was beautiful, mountains all around and tons of prayer flags on them forming spider-web shapes.

Outside Machen

Machen taken by Amori

We arrived to a hotel recommended by our hostel in Xining and it was quite expensive by China's standards. No one spoke English (of course), and Amori tried to bargain without success. Then he tried to persuade the lady in charge to let us stay three in a twin bed room but she didn’t agree.

 So we left Maya in the hotel to look after our bags and we started to look for other hotels around. The other hotels were either more expensive or were awful or both. So we went back to the first hotel, and we found policeman there waiting for us. It seemed that the woman tipped the police about us and since her place was the only one with a permit to accept foreigners, we were obliged to stay there!

We tried to gather information about the Amnye Machen mountain that we wanted to cross with horses and reach the main route that leads to Yushu on the south. But there was no travel agency there, the lady of the hotel didn't know anything (of course), and even though we heard and read that it was possible to ride horses through mountain, nobody knew anything. We start calling travel agencies of the capital Xining, but this didn't help us much either, they only told us that we either go back to Xining and travel with them or we can try our luck in Xueshan at the edge of the mountain. We should be able to find horses and a guide there, they said, (according to them their company just goes there and ask around).

So we hired a mini van for the next morning and we bumped our 5 hours way to Xueshan

Xueshan, on the edge of Amnye Machen

 So we got to Xueshan, a shitty and dusty Tibetan town with maybe 20 houses. And we started to ask around for a guide with horses -meyou (there isn't in Chinese), for a guide -meyou, for horses -meyou, for someone who may know someone with horses -meyou, for some place where we might find a guy who may know something about horses -meyou. Eventually we got to someone who told us that in the town 3 km away that’s right at the beginning of the mountain, there might be horses. So we asked for a ride to the town, but the guy said that he didn’t have time, even when we offered to pay. There were a couple of jeeps and some guys there, and no one seemed to be doing anything at all, just hanging around, doing circles with the motorbikes. But they really didn't want to help us.

Xueshan taken by Maya/Tomer

One of the guys with a jeep who was obviously doing nothing, after insisting for a while, said OK, but later. We waited for a while but it was getting late, and then we just got near with all the bags, and asked for a price. He asked 30 yuan for a 2 minutes ride so we tried to bargain, which was impossible. But when we agreed for his price, he suddenly raised it to 50 yuan!

So we just took our stuff and started walking! On the way we saw one of the Tibetan guys who didn't agree to take us, going and coming back twice to the town! Luckily, a Chinese with a tuk-tuk (three-wheel truck) picked us up on the way and drove us to the village.

Walking!

Picked up by a tuk-tuk

This village was even smaller than the other with maybe five houses and we suddenly saw two horses! So Amori asked him about getting other three horses. Meyou

According to what he said no one had more horses, we couldn’t believe it and we kept asking everyone in town including a nomad family living around (supposedly the guides with horses are usually nomads).

So we called again to one of the agencies from Xining telling them that we can’t find horses or a guide, and we begged them for a phone number. The woman from the agency evaded the question by saying that they always start from the other side of the mountain, Xiedawu, where there is also a guesthouse. The road that passes through the mountains can only be traveled by vehicles with four-wheel drive if you don’t ride horses or walk 4 days. Being kind of late and feeling stuck, we decided to find a jeep to go to the other side, sleep there and maybe do a short horse riding from the other side.

One Tibetan seeing us trapped asked an exorbitant price for taking us, and didn’t agree to bargain. In the meanwhile, Iohi and Maya got inside a house that had a jeep parked outside, and somehow convinced the woman of the house to wake up his husband from his nap and ask him take us to the other side…