Going to North India and finding ourselves back in Israel?

Rishikesh – arouse your chakras, baby

So we traveled 5 hours in a very nice air conditioned train and we reached Haridwar, in Uttarakhand state, on the foothills of the Himalaya in northern India. The city is by itself an important pilgrimage city for Hindus little, but a little too hectic stop for us on our way to Rishikesh. So we took a one-hour local bus and a 20-minutes autorickshaw and we arrived in Rishikesh, the former retreat city for the Beatles and the first Israeli colony in the north. To give an idea of the amounts of Israelis, think that we witnessed Israeli people seeing friends from school by chance. In my case, I ran into my brother’s (Israeli) ex-girlfriend on the street!

 Every restaurant has virtually the same menu that presents first of all Indian food, but also Israeli dishes like humus, tahini, shakshuka, fatut and even ethnic Israeli food that I’ve never eaten like ziva. Those menus also include the classic Indian distortions of Chinese, Italian and Mexican dishes.

The tourist area spreads on both sides of the Ganges river around Lakshman Jhula street and on the High Bank (also called the Swiss Cottage); in those areas you’ll certainly hear Hebrew and see the local fauna: after-army-smoking-charas Israelis (for the sake of the truth I have to say that the ex doesn’t get into this category) that spend days (or weeks) drinking chai in the local restaurants and doing the same thing: talking loudly about the army, of course, and smoking charas, of course.

Anyway, the scenery was interesting, the weather was slightly cooler and the city streets were slightly quieter: we didn’t have to put pieces of toilet paper in our ears as earplugs like we did in Varanasi and Delhi to bear the noise. In fact autorickshaws aren’t allowed in large parts of the Rishikesh.

Sikh people invaded by monkeys

We took antibiotics that we happened to have there (prescribed by my doctor-mother), and finally we started feeling better from our travelers-diarrhea. So we walked around, we saw the sad water falls and many monkeys. We also did our mii-pilgrimage to the now-closed Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram, where the Beatles once got high and got inspired to do more beautiful music. I think it’s an exquisite building on the top of a quite park where sadhus (half naked guys who leave behind all material attachments) hang out and do what they excel in doing –nothing, but a mystical nothing. Sadly, the building is abandoned in the growing vegetation and even though it’s picturesque, it seems that soon will disappear into oblivion.

Sadhus doing nothing

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram

Rishikesh is a mostly vegetarian and an alcohol-free city and it supposed to be the “world capital of yoga”. Since we did yoga for the last two years, we thought it could be a good place to take some classes. We did a long walk visiting ashrams (roughly, yoga schools that provide accommodation, simple meals and of course yoga lessons) trying to find something adequate.

But they were either too serious, I mean, you had to register months in advance or you had to stay at least 2 weeks; or they were a joke: a regular hotel but with an ashram sign.

We visited the famous Parmarth Niketan Ashram at Swarg Ashram area; but the place was far from relaxing and inspiring retrospection. It was a very busy and loud place where we heard a long and loud speech in Hindi from speakers everywhere. There we met a Western girl who gave us a new-agey brochure of Trika yoga. But we resigned and preferred to try the yoga classes promoted by our hotel (which in fact was the same class promoted by every hotel in the Swiss Cottage) than going all the way to the lower bank to try that.

Iohi peeked at a class, the young teacher didn’t inspire us too much confidence but the following morning we participated anyway. It was a rather mechanical slow-paced hatha yoga class word-by-word and movement-by-movement exactly like the one she saw the previous day.  

We didn’t want to take classes there anymore and we decided to give a try to the Trika yoga, it included morning and afternoon yoga lessons and some evening discussion. So the following morning we did the 40 minute way to Swarg Ashram area and found the school. The teacher was called… Yuval! (if you didn’t get it, he was Israeli!). The class was ok, a little too much arouse your chakra stuff, and extremely slow-paced, but he was an interesting teacher. And in the shavasana state, the final relaxation, we were completely high (and only from the class).

The afternoon class was led by a Mexican girl, who didn’t even present herself. Her class took the meaning of mechanical to a whole new level: she seemed like a videotape (yes, DVDs are less mechanical than her). It was awful, she was completely disconnected from  what was happened in front of her, and, actually, she did the whole class with her eyes closed!

Afterwards, she gave a class about the do’s and don’ts of the way of the yogi. There she presented pearls of Hindi wisdom like: if you do yoga half a day and the other half you torture kittens you won’t achieve balance. Or more realistic examples such as: if you do yoga six hours a day and then you’re bad with your husband and you mistreat your children and you eat ice cream, you won’t achieve balance. She kept presenting very adequate and relevant choices like either eat ice cream or do yoga, until we couldn’t take it anymore and we left.

Shimla – the toy city

The following midday we took a train from Haridwar to Chandigarh, spent the night and then traveled one hour in a crowded local bus to Kalka. There we took the cutest narrow-gauge toy train to Shimla in Himachal Pradesh state. It was a cool trip, passing through more than one hundreed tunnels and lots of retro stations as the little train creeps up through the mountain.

The city is a hill station, a cute and clean city with British buildings and it’s filled with monkeys! It was the summer capital of British India; in fact the British ruled India most of the time from there since it was cooler than Calcutta. It’s a rather expensive city (for Indian standards), but the city is very clean (for any standards): it’s forbidden to litter, to smoke in the streets, to spit and to sell plastic bags. And this works. The no-cars policy for the tourist area and the fact we were in some kind of shoulder season make it a perfect spot for relaxing.

Sadly, as the train went up I started to develop the symptoms of flu and I got there completely feeling like shit from fever. And in the following days I got the whole package: diarrhea, cough, tiredness. I spent most of the time at bed.

Iohi (besides looking after me) went in one occasion uphill to see the Jakhu Temple, dedicated to the monkey-god Hanuman. The way was packed with monkeys that learned to ransom items for food. They specialize in glasses and phones, but the locals tell that once they even robbed a baby! When Iohi was near the temple, one of the monkeys jumped over her backpack and took a bag of chips. Then some minutes later another monkey jumped over her and took her glasses, and she had to exchange it for an apple! Locals told her to take them off because the monkeys will continue to harass her. So she went on without glasses hugging her backpack and got attached to a French group that seemed a better prey for the monkeys. She finally saw the blurred temple (but she couldn’t tell me if it was nice) and went back to the hotel.

Manali –where we finally got better

When I felt slightly better we took a night “deluxe” bus to Manali. The deluxe bus was a very old bus with more or less reclining seats, it went up and did turns and more turns and I got completely dizzy. Every time we managed to fall asleep, the bus stopped for like 30 minutes and all the lights were turned on!

So we got to the noisy new Manali and we could choose between two satellite towns: the small Old Manali or the smaller Vashisht. Since we were already out of season, we opted for Old Manali. We found ourselves again in a second Israeli outpost. Everything had a translation in Hebrew or some writing assuring to Israeli compatriots that the shop had the best sandwiches or the best cakes. The clothes shops there sell a variety of hippy-colorful-shanti-rastafari clothes that people in India don’t wear at all and are tailored for, guess what, Israelis. It was cold there and I bought a long sleeved t-shirt and the store-owner assured me that the cut was exactly as Israelis want.

Right outside Manali

Old Manali is even closer to the Himalayas than Rishikesh and Shimla and it’s located on green mountains with small rivers and waterfalls. The view from there should be beautiful, but there are so many shops, guesthouses, restaurants, tourist agencies which sell exactly the same that the view is completely buried.

This time Iohi got the same virus I had before with her round of fever, cough and diarrhea. We stayed for almost a week until we both recovered: I broke a record with 20 days diarrhea, I think I almost vanished.

When we felt completely ok we started to look for a trek around, and after so many days of inactivity we prepared ourselves with a couple of days of yoga. We found the only classes in a guesthouse up in a small hill where workers of the places presented us with utter respect the guru.

So for the next couple of days, we woke up early and climbed the mountain to meet our bearded yogi guru. And we prepared our recently healed bodies with super fast-paced hatha yoga!

We tried to do a trek by our own, but around Manali there are huge marihuana plantations. Marihuana farmers seem not to be the kindest type of person and we read everywhere that you shouldn’t trek without a guide. The thing is that tourist agencies force you to take a cohort of a guide, a cook, a helper for the cook, a guy to take care of the horses and a guy to help the guy who takes care of the horses! And they won’t let you go with less people! So it’s expensive and we found it rather stupid to have more helpers than trekkers.

A group of Spanish guys told us about Spiti Valley, a moon-like valley 6 hours from Manali, which supposed to be safe and easy. I found out about a home stay walking trail in some forums and we decided that it was the best option. On the next morning we headed that way in a local bus…

As always more photos in Iohi's picasa.

Sweating from Calcutta to Delhi

Kolkata

Our trip in India started in Kolkata, previously known as Calcutta. We were supposed to arrive at 1am at the international airport but our 2 hours flight was delayed for more than 2 hours. People we knew that have been to Kolkata frightened us so much about the city that we did our homework: we booked a very nice and expensive inn where we could arrive at 2am (although we actually arrived at 4:30am) and we previously found out that we could take a pre-paid taxi from the airport.

So we paid our taxi before we actually took it, we went with the ticket and we took the taxi to our Best Inn. We drove for around half an hour on huge empty lanes in the middle of the night, on a city that looked like a post-apocalyptic English city without survivors. We arrived to our Inn and we rang and rang the bell until the guy that was supposed to wait for us waked up and opened the huge metallic door. And of course, our pre-paid taxi driver made something up to ask for more money even though we had already paid.

Anyway, we arrived in peace and we had our night of sleep. On the morning (after a couple of hours) we were woke up by the guy that worked there. We managed to understand that we have to fill two strange forms where you specify how you eat your eggs or if you have the bread with butter or with honey.

Then I tried to communicate with the guy and understand where we eat the breakfast. So I started simplifying and breaking the English but still what he said doesn’t make any sense. I ask “You bring the breakfast or we go somewhere to eat the breakfast?” and he answers “Yes, yes, you bring the breakfast”.

So after breakfast we went outside to move to a more central area and then we were confronted for the first time with the poverty of Kolkata. With its English constructions falling apart and all the garbage and the crowded streets, our first impression of the city is reinforced; this was really how I imagine England after the apocalypses.

It’s poverty beyond our imagination and no matter that we heard a lot about the city; we were completely shocked. So many people developing their entire life on the sidewalk: begging, sleeping, cooking, eating, shitting there. The line between food stall, toilet, sidewalk and street is completely blurred and we walked avoiding stepping into a poll of urine, bumping into people or being run over by a car. The heat, never ending honks, the traffic and the crowds created a feeling of claustrophobia even in the open spaces which were crammed with open markets selling Chinese stuff.

We tried to visit some sights, we entered to the Victoria Memorial, and walked in B.B.D. Bagh but most of the time we tried to avoid the heat and the crowds, walking a few hundred meters took too long and was too tiring.

The Victoria Memorial

I had my birthday in Kolkata!

After a couple of days we took a night train to Bodhgaya.

Bodhgaya

Bodhgaya is the place where the Prince Siddhartha sat under a tree, obtained Enlightenment and became Buddha. You can see there an offspring of the original Bodhi Tree and an interesting temple that was build close to the tree. But since it’s one of the most important places for Buddhists, there are pilgrims from all around the world and there are temples of virtually every kind of Buddhism in the world.

Because of the pilgrims, the town has also a myriad of stalls selling Buddhist souvenirs and clothes and of course an army of beggars.

A beggar at the entrance of Mahabodhi Temple

We stayed two days, having a pleasant and relaxed time there. And then we moved to the main town, Gaya, where we had to take an early train. The way to travel from Gaya to Bodhgaya is with autorickshaw: a kind of motorcycle with a closed space for two or three passengers but that actually transports an unlimited number of people. Once you’re in and you’ve arranged a price, you have to start fighting with the driver to actually get to the place you said. The driver may want to drop you as soon as possible but he might be a tout as well and might have in his agenda to leave you at the place he receives a commission.

The problem is that there are too many places with almost the same name. If, say, Raj Hotel enters in some guidebooks, you’ll see popping up like mushrooms: New Raj Hotel, Raj Guesthouse, The Raj Hotel, First Raj Hotel, and every other variation on every corner.

When we were in Gaya, we asked for the Vishnu International, and we found ourselves in front of Vishnu Resthouse. We managed to get to the right Vishnu but the driver tried to ask for more money claiming that it was our fault.

On the following morning we waited our 4-hours-train to Varanasi that was 7 hours late…

Varanasi

So we arrived late evening instead of at midday. Varanasi is situated on the banks of the river Ganges and it’s one of the holiest cities for the Hindus. They believe that bathing in the Ganges frees from sins and that dying there ensures release of a person's soul from the cycle of its transmigrations. So all kind of ceremonies, including bathing and cremations are conducted on the ghats: kind of open spaces with steps that sink in the Ganges.

So as soon as we arrived at the guesthouse, we got a nice map and explanations from Rahul, the owner of the place. However, instead of walking around and see the ceremonies at the ghats, I stayed in bed for 2 days with fever and a terrible diarrhea.

On the meanwhile Iohi walked the city, entered to Kashi Vishwanath Temple or the Golden Temple and attended to an evening ceremony in Manikarnika Ghat. Then she tried to go the Brown Bread Bakery, a bakery that supports a local school and where you can volunteer to help in that school. And it’s the number 2 of the things to do in Varanasi according to Lonely Planet site. But, there are two Brown Bread Bakery one in front of the other, like the place and its reflection. It’s just that you don’t know which one is the real one. And they both claim they are the real thing. Iohi even checked the schools that they support; each one has a different school! Later, she heard the story: the owner of the original bakery had some problems with the place he was renting, so he decided to move the bakery. Then the guy who had the property decided not to remove even the sign and maintain the Brown Bread Bakery exactly as it was creating two places with the same name and blurring the copy from the original.  

Next day when I more or less came back to life, I visited the Golden Temple. I had to pass a strict security check to go inside, where I was asked about Israel and its relations with the Philippines! The guard was completely puzzled when I told him that I had no idea. I thought maybe the Indians have some issues with the Philippines and I didn’t want to screw it up and being kicked out of the temple. Anyway when he started talking about the Muslims I understood he was referring to Palestine.

I still wasn’t feeling so good so we spent some hours seeing the city on a cycle-rickshaw. The advantage is that when you’re on a rickshaw they can’t drive you crazy about taking a rickshaw!

Agra

Later we took the short four-hour train to Agra.

We stayed for only one day: we saw the famous Taj Mahal (and there's a reason why it's so famous) and the not so famous but pretty cool Agra’s fort. And then the heat, the souvenir sellers and rickshaw drivers drove us completely crazy and we were more than happy to leave the city.

Taj Mahal!

Agra's Fort

Delhi

In Delhi, it was Iohi’s turn to be sick. Now she had exactly the same I had (only that I was still not entirely ok). And we didn't  do much; we just tried to recover. And then we fought with the guys of the same company that sold us the Reliance internet net-stick. We bought it in Kolkata and we were very happy with our portable internet. But it stopped working after a week, and no one knew anything there. They even had the great idea that we should go back to Kolkata to the store where we bought it! Then we went to the Reliance main store where the system was down and then… just fuck it, it was too noisy and too hot in Delhi and we traveled anyway to Rishikesh, which was slightly higher and cooler.

All the pics in Iohi's picasa!

Itinerary online in google maps

I've added our itinerary online in google maps, and I've added a link on the right. We're already in Manali, India but I've added only the places that have a post: places in Russia, Mongolia and China. I'm actually not sure how close  the places we visited in Mongolia are from the places I've marked in the map, but I did my best.
Notice that since we visited too many places (as if you can visit too many places!), google doesn't let me to show everything at the same time and you have "2 pages" in the map.


View Itinerary in a larger map




That's it for today, soon a post about our first week or so in India...

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.

Spicy Sichuan province

From Kanding to Moxi

So I was saying before that we decided to go to Chengdu through Moxi. In our hotel, we were offered to join an excursion to Moxi for roughly the same price than a minibus ticket. So we joined a group of young people from all over China.

The trip started with soup for breakfast that we politely declined, so the guide (which was also the owner of the hostel) got immediately everyone out and led us to take hot soy milk with fried dough instead, which Iohi even liked.

This guy really knew very special places to see on the way to Moxi: there were no Chinese tourists in July! (which was amazing), and the places were clean (astounding as well) and in every place we ate something different.

We went to hot springs where we boiled eggs in 90 C degrees water and warmed up our legs –but that water wasn’t 90 degrees... And our guide had some laughs asking me and Iohi to pick up the cooked eggs with two wooden sticks from the hot water. At this point we felt to have completely mastered the chopsticks, but the task wasn’t easy at all! Then we were driven to a field from where we reached a beautiful lake that I assume it was the cleanest place in whole China. And there we sat and had yak yogurt.

Possibly the cleanest lake in China

Later we drove over 3800m and we saw the snowy peaks of the Gongga mountains all around us before we reached the Yanzi Gou red stones, rocks covered by some kind of red microorganism. Before we arrived in our final destination, we stopped to eat cold noodles with a super spicy sauce prepared on the moment and served with bread to extinguish the fire. We ate the noodles with some real bamboo sticks that he had cut to use as chopsticks!

Spicy cold noodles

And then we finally got to Moxi that surprisingly was hardly the highlight of the excursion. They were kind of building the town when we got there! Virtually every person of the city was repairing either the facades or the streets. Even it seemed that the main attraction that day was to see how they pour asphalt on the main road.

We originally wanted to see there a national park where you can walk over a glacier, but the place didn’t make a good impression on us. Having bad experience with national parks we decided to skip it and we just traveled to Chengdu, capital of the spicy Sichuan province.

Chengdu, warning hot!            

We finally arrived in Chengdu and I have to say that it was hot, very hot. We were finally on the sea level, and we had a too warm reunion with the summer we were avoiding for the last weeks. We also met again the high season, everything was crowded. Even the hostels were pretty much full of Western people.

In Chengdu, we finally stopped asking for shaola (less spicy): it didn’t help, we either received the same (I think that sometimes even spicier) or we get plain food without spices or salt. And of course we got used to the mala, the lethal combination of chili and Sichuan peppercorn that I described in the last post. We discovered that dan dan noodles have to be eaten spicy.

The famous Dan dan noodles

We visited the Jin Li night market and we ate everything we saw there. Well, we didn’t eat rabbit heads, but we did try, some other day, sliced spicy rabbit together with a dish of eggplant on fish sauce and of course, as always, rice.

But we did more stuff than just eating in Chengdu, we also went to tea houses!

After these experiences, we decided that we had to take cooking classes in that city. We found out about the existence of the Chengdu Museum of Sichuan Cuisine, which had a restaurant and cooking classes. It was actually in outer Chengdu, it took us half day just to get there, we first went to the wrong bus station, and then we had to take 3 different intermediate distance buses. We arrived there starving, so we first enter to a kind of fancy restaurant inside the museum and the food was … not special at all, only expensive. In any place on the streets of Chengdu you could have something better for half the price. The kitchen was a big industrial place and the cooks looked sad and bored. The lessons consisted of learning how to prepare one dish, and it was kind of expensive. We didn’t want to have cooking lessons there, even the food wasn’t that good and the actual museum… was also only one room.

Leshan and Emei Shan

From Chengdu, we did two side trips before coming back to take the train. We went to Leshan and from there to Emei Shan.

Leshan has an amazing park from where you can contemplate both the Grand Buddha, a 71 meters high buddy, and also millions of Chinese people contemplating the Buddha. The Buddha, which is the largest one in the world, is quite impressive but the whole park has many different Buddhist carvings and it’s pretty interesting, and importantly it’s big enough to dilute the quantity of Chinese tourists.

From Leshan we traveled to Emei Shan, yet again a sacred Buddhist mountain (this time not only Tibetan). Climbing Mount Emei is a pilgrimage that Buddhists have done for a long time and in the last decade became very popular among tourists.

You can climb up to the top and down in from 3 days to a couple of hours and it depends not really on your stamina but on how many of the available transportations you take: there are several buses that can get you to upper places and several cable cars.

We realized there that the foot climbing path is actually stairs. So the adventurous hiking trek is basically a huge stairway with expensive tea houses and snack shops on the sides.

We “did” Emei Shan in 4 hours. We obviously didn’t get to the top but we couldn’t stand more time the light but persistent rain that didn’t allow us to see any landscape but stairs and especially we couldn’t bear the crowds of Chinese tourists.

The only memorable part of the “trek” was the fine specimens of Chinglish. There were signs asking for “One step closer to civilization” over the urinals in the male toilet, and “Don’t joke the monkeys” in areas where the monkeys can behave aggressively.

The best of Emei Shan: the signs

Back to Chengdu

Back in Chengdu we decided to eat in the most prestigious restaurant in the city, Ginko. This was our failed logic: if the food everywhere is so incredible tasty, in a prestigious restaurant should be super incredible tasty! But, surprisingly or not, the only incredible thing was the bill.

We ate the famous tea-smoked duck, which wasn’t so different from the Beijing duck for our Western palatals; a dish of Kung Pao chicken, which wasn’t even worth of a picture, and some shrimp which were shrimp.

They did excel in changing our plates five times during the meal, and in keeping my beer apart only to pour me (sometimes) when my glass was empty. From then on, we stuck to the street food…

Xichang – a nice stop over

To get trains out of Chengdu or any other means of transportation came out to be pretty hard. We managed to book a train to Xichang, a nice and small city outside the realm of the guidebooks.

It was a nice experience; we were received by over-friendly volunteer teenagers which gave leaflets (in Chinese of course) about the celebrations they were holding in the city that week. One of them, the only English speaking teenager, felt her moral duty to help us. She not only came with us on the bus, but she also paid (and we fought to pay the tickets!), and walked with us 20 minutes till the hotel. On the meanwhile she practiced also all her English repertoire: from presenting herself to asking where we are from, etc.

The city has a small old area between walls and a nice market, and it’s the home of the Yi_people. By the time we arrived, they had started a series of celebrations that ended with a parade with torches around the city. We were 4 days ahead of the torch parade but we managed to see some kind of rehearsal (but no fire).

Iohi trying an Yi skirt

Lake Lugu

We spent one day in Xichang and then we took a bus to Lugu Hu. Lugu Hu is a quiet lake between mountains on the border between Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. There are several villages around the lake where Mosuo people live. They suppose to be organized in a matriarchal society, but as far as I know, they just don’t get officially married and children are mostly raised by the mother’s family. Their leaders are still men and not women. Anyway, the matriarchal thing serves to publicize the place, and the place is beautiful.

We were in a small village called Wazhiluo, in Wind’s Guesthouse, in front of the lake and with fields of corns, sunflowers and pumpkins everywhere. We planed to stay one or two nights, just to go to other parts of Yunnan province, and we ended up staying 5 nights.

We kept eating amazing food; after all we were still in Sichuan! There were a lot of barbeques and I even ate a frog on the grill! And one occasion we ate in an open kitchen where they served us soup of fresh fish that I choose from a bowl of swimming fish. There, we finally had the chance to see how they prepare real Sichuanese food!

How to prepare a Sichuanese Fish Soup:

You need:

1 handful of Sichuan pepper corn

4 dry red hot pepper

1-1.5 kg Fish

1 small cup of ginger

1 small cup of garlic

4 zucchini

Tons of oil

You do:

1. Clean the fish, leaving the skin and cut it in big pieces.

2. Fry fish with ginger, garlic and Sichuan peppercorn for a couple of minutes in a wok.

3. Add some boiling water just to cover the fish, some salt, stock and the sliced zucchinis.

4. Cover the wok and cook for 20 minutes.

5. Add more boiling water to make it a soup and boil it a couple of minutes more.

6. Serve! (You can add parsley and cilantro at the end; we saw it that way in some other places. You can also replace the zucchini for any other vegetable)

After we walked a lot and we biked almost the whole lake (60 km), and when we decided to just hang out for some more days, we happened to find in our hostel a Spanish-Argentinean couple we met in Mongolia two months before! So we enjoyed the scenery and their company and some days later we traveled together to Lijiang in Yunnan province.

But we didn't ride 60 km in that bike

 More pics in Iohi's picasa.