Monday 23rd May - fly to Shangri-La. This place really lives up to its name! It's so peaceful and quiet and beautiful countryside it's just a short bike ride away. It feels like we're on holiday! Our room at Kevin's Trekker Inn is amazing - our room has views over the city on one side, and the other is all glass opening out onto our own balcony with chairs and table!

We wondered around the old town a little. This is a slightly odd place as the old town is relatively new. Instead of knocking down old buildings to build office blocks, as every else in China, they've knocked everything down to build a ye olde town. All the buildings are either restaurants, souvenir shops or hostels though so it's a complete tourist trap. Fortunately we're quite partial to such things!

Tuesday 24th May - nothing! We decided to take the day off from being travellers/tourists and did absolutely nothing. It was lovely! We mooches about in our lovely hostel, went into the old town for meals, ahhhh!

Okay, we couldn't being ourselves to waste the entire day, so we did a little sightseeing in town. From our hostel we could see all manner of temples and interesting buildings so we went to investigate. And we found the world's largest prayer wheel. It is huge!

Wednesday 25th May - bike ride around Shangri-la. We hired some bikes from a local shop and went off into the fields of Shangr-la. It was a lovely sunny day and we took some food with us for a picnic. We cycled past farms and hamlets, and meadows with sheep, goats and yaks grazing.

At our first attempt to stop for lunch we got caught out by the Naxi. The Naxi are a local minority group that live in this area. They seem very keen on ripping tourists off at any given opportunity though. Within minutes of us setting our bikes down, four Naxi women appeared from nowhere waving tickets at us and demanding we pay to carry on along the road and even to sit and look at the view! This is a public road and if we'd been in a car we'd have just driven right along and not been charged. They gave us no option but to turn around and go back the way we came. All that meant was we cycled round the next bend in the road and stopped for lunch there instead!

So we headed back towards town but weren't quite ready to end our cycle ride. There were some mountains nearby so we thought we'd head towards them along some farm tracks. As we cycled along we were cut off by a 4x4 which had come tearing across the fields towards us. It was another Naxi waving more tickets at us! These were different to the tickets we'd previously been offered, so it seems as if the Naxi have carved up the countryside between them and are all charging for access to different parts of it. So we politely declined his ticket and headed back to town.

Thursday 26th May - Tiger Leaping Gorge part 1. We packed up our day bags with a change of clothes and went off to hike the famous Tiger Leaping Gorge. It's a long trek so we decided to do it in two stages. We got a bus to Qiaotou, which is at one end of the gorge, and hiked to Tea Horse Guest House, with a stop for lunch at Naxi Family Guest House. The walk was long and exhausting! We managed to time our walk so that we walking at the hottest, sunniest time of day, with no shade whatsoever to keep us cool. Unlike other treks we've done in China so far, which have just been a concrete staircase to a summit, this was a proper walk complete with dirt tracks, loose rocks and tree roots waiting to trip you up. One section is called the 28 bends, and consists of several steep twists and turns up the mountainside. It was so difficult, we almost gave up and went back several times!

The route is marked by arrows painted onto rocks, pointing the way to various hostels en route. So we followed the arrows and finally made it to the Tea Horse Guest House. And just in time too as there was a massive thunderstorm! We don't know how we manage to get caught up in so many huge storms - we think we've had one in every place we've been since we left the UK! This one was particularly spectacular though, with the thunder rolling around the mountains and flashes of pink (yes, pink!) lightning. There was also an odd phenomenon where the setting sun had managed to peek through a chink in the clouds during the storm. It turned the lower peaks a glorious golden colour and caused a rainbow whilst the thunder rumbled all around and lightning lit up the sky. It was beautiful. That night we had one of the best nights sleep we've had so far, though we're not sure if that was due to the coziness of the beds or to sheer exhaustion!

Friday 27th May - Tiger Leaping Gorge part 2. With aching legs we set off for the second half of the walk. Nowhere near a strenuous as yesterday, it was still fraught with danger. At times we were walking on very narrow paths with a cliff face on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Other times we were clambering over slippery rocks under a waterfall. It was terribly exciting! It seems the sun in Tiger Leaping Gorge doesn't wait till midday to peak and gets nice and hot by mid-morning, so despite our getting up nice and early to beat the heat we still ended up walking in scorching sun.

At the end we stopped for dinner at Tina's Guest House before heading off to the fabled Walnut Garden and Sean's Guest House. This is much hailed in all the guide books and travel forums. However, when we got there we found it costs twice as much as anywhere else we've stayed so far. And the fact that they didn't try and barter with us when we started walking around shows that, regardless of their extortionate prices, they are confident that they'll fill their rooms and can afford to turn cheapskate travellers like us away. We headed back to Tina's, where we got a room for less than half the price of Sean's.

Saturday 28th May - back to Shangri-La. We got a minibus back to Qiaotou so we could catch the bus back to Shangri-La. Qiaotou isn't actually a proper bus stop though, and we were going to have to flag a bus down and work out if it was going where we wanted! Fortunately we got approached by a man with a car offering to drive us back and we haggled him down to almost the same price as the bus so we just went with him. We just relaxed here again and had our last wander around the old town.

Sunday 29th May - Dali. This was a long, eight hour bus trip along roads that were more like building sites than actual roads. At times the roads were really narrow and traffic was brought to a standstill as we had to navigate around large flatbed lorries coming the others way. We're staying in the old town of Dali at the Jade Emu Hostel. Our room is amazing! It's like a hotel room - there's even a hairdryer! It's the most luxurious room we've stayed in so far in China.

Monday 30th May - around Dali. A group of three people we'd gotten talking to were hiring a car for the day to see some of the sights out of town and asked if we wanted to join them. It made hiring the car cheaper for them but gave us an opportunity to see some things we wouldn't have otherwise, so we said yes. And we ended up having a really good day!

First stop was a local market. It was interesting to see the vast amounts of produce on sale. Tables were piled high with cabbages, peppers, and several things we'd never seen before. They were also selling handmade baskets and brooms as well as a lot of things aimed at tourists. As this was mostly a market for local people there were lots of people in traditional clothes.

Next stop was a tie-dye shop. The Bai people in this region are known for their tie-dyed cloths, which are more impressive that they sound! The patterns are really intricate- it takes five days just to sew the cloth to form the patterns before they enter the dye!

After this was cormorant fishing. This was brilliant! We were rowed out onto the lake and given demonstration of how the local people use cormorants to fish. Cormorants would usually catch a fish and swallow it whole, but the fishermen have tied string around their necks to stop this happening. It's not as cruel as it sounds - the string is only tight enough to stop the biggest fish going down, they can still swallow any smaller fish they catch. The birds are really well trained, they quite happily follow the boat without trying to fly away, or sit on the sides of the boat without being tethered. After the demonstration we could go for lunch and eat some of the fish that had been caught. However, six more boats full of Chinese tourists had turned up and killed the atmosphere a bit so we declined. It ended up being just our boat and the cormorant boat heading back so they both pulled up to the banks on the way and gave us a private meet-and-greet with the birds! we each got a turn sitting with the birds on our arms and shoulders (and occasionally heads!). Then, as we headed back to the dock, we were serenaded by the man in charge of the cormorants with what we can only guess as being old fishing songs.

Our last stop was a tea plantation. It had been steadily drizzling all day, so when we got there we found that they weren't picking my tea that day. We got shown around the machines where they sort the leaves and dry them, which we hadn't seen before.

Tuesday 31st May - around Dali old town. It was grey and drizzling again, so we decided just to wander round the town. It was pretty much like a larger, much busier version of the old town in Shangri-La. We went up on the old town walls, but the low cloud cover meant that we couldn't see much beyond the rooftops of the town itself.

Wednesday 1st June - nothing. Another rainy day meant we just spent the day uploading photos on the blog and watching movies. Virtually everything nice to do in Dali is out of Dali, and we didn't see the point in paying for buses and taxis just to trudge round in the rain.

Thursday 2nd June - around Dali. Finally, a day without rain! We walked out to the Three Pagodas, which are in some nice grounds with various other towers and temples. The temple looked very new and it was a bit too shiny and fake looking. The statues of the Bhuddas looked like they'd been made in a mould rather than carved like older statues.

The oddest thing about Dali is the marijuana. You can't go five minutes walking about town without someone offering you some ganja. And it's always little old ladies doing it! Maybe they're subsidising their pensions..?

Now we're off the Hong Kong! We've got double-entry visas which means after sixty days we have to leave mainland China but then we can come back. Hong Kong counts as leaving China. We are now exactly halfway through our trip. The last three months have been amazing, whatever will the next three months bring?!

Bye!
Lindsay and Chris