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.