Long time since my last Indian news. No excuses: only laziness.

I moved to another small Asian country: China, for a three parts journey: Chongqing, Beijing and Lijiang.

I first stopped in Chongqing for 10 days, to meet my Chinese friend who joined me in Thailand at the beginning of my travel.
I have been to Chongqing a few times before, for my work, but was always in the summer months, and I remembered an extremely crowded and hot city.
Chongqing is considered one of the biggest metropolitan areas on earth, with a total population of 30 millions...about 4 times Switzerland!

This time it was much colder, about 10-15 °C, and rainy weather was prevalent. I spent most of my time roaming around the maze of streets, shopping malls, street markets and riverside boulevards.
In the evening I was joined by my friend to try different restaurants: from pretty good Italian pizza and pasta, to Indian food, and of course terrible Chongqing's hot-pot!

It consists in a big pot of full of boiling oil and Sichuan pepper which numbs tongue and lips within a few minutes. Every kind of food is dropped inside the pot: meat, fish, seafood, vegetables, and some yummy innards, such as stomach and brain. Most of food is actually tasteless, because of the loss of feel in mouth due to the extremely spicy oil.

During one of my walking days, I found a western supermarket selling Swiss cheese fondue! I couldn't resist, so I cooked it the same night. We had to eat it with Chinese chop-sticks...which maybe made me one of the first Swiss citizen in history to eat cheese fondue with chopsticks!

I moved to Beijing then, this time only for work, where I had to face cooler weather: below 5 °C in the morning. I stayed only 3 days here, basically working 8 hours a day and heating in my hotel room during the remaining time. Unfortunately, my body didn't resist to the temperature difference between southern India and northern China: so a nice flue joined me to make my Beijing stay more pleasant.

The next day I flew to Lijiang with my friend, a very pretty city with a spectacular old town. This was actually first time I was able to see rural China, having only been in big industrial cities so far.
Lijiang is a very popular destination for tourists, and despite the low season old town's streets were jammed by thousands of Chinese tourists walking in group and following a guide with a flag.
I have maybe seen 5 non-chinese people over our one week stay in the area.
We spent our first day walking around the old town of Suhue and in its neighborhood where I found similar feeling as during one of my past travel to Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan): very pure and untouched nature, simple but very functional way of living with no superfluous. Definitely the kind of places where I feel good.

We moved towards Lugu lake, 2500m: traveling there was kind of a nightmare: it took 6 hours by bus from Lijiang (200km), and the road consisted in a long queue of buses full of tourist groups stopping every 5 km to eat and/or take pictures. 3 km before arriving to our final destination, driver stopped and started talking for 30 minutes about the history of the area, which was certainly very interesting, but a little difficult for me to understand. Then, of course, he started selling us organized tours, hotels, restaurants and so on for another 40 minutes.

We finally arrived to the lake, and after having to pay an additional fee which of course was not mentioned at the time I purchased the bus ride, I found an amazing mountain lake, completely transparent surrounded by wonderful mountains and lovely small villages. Really a very beautiful and very peaceful place.

Here temperature was even colder, probably below 0°C overnight, and the hotels had no heater, and only very limited hot water. Fortunately all of them provided electrical blankets, which consists in a normal blanket to plug into an electrical outlet to prevent the bed and its occupant from freezing. I had to empty my backpack for the first time to wear almost all of my clothes!
We rented a small electrical motorbike and started a 3 days tour around the lake, stopping from time to time to eat, relax, enjoy the landscapes and sleep.
Everyday's challenge, was to reach a place to sleep without having to walk for the last 5 km: battery's lifetime was very hard to predict, and sometimes charge level suddenly dropped without notice in the middle of a climb... A few times we had to stop for 1 hour for cup of tea to charge motorbike's battery in order to reach the next village.

In some villages, hotels are literally on the lake, with incredible views from bedroom for very reasonable prices.
Nightlife is practically non-existent around the lake, so after dinner there was nothing much to do beside noting that hot water was not working and plugging the blanket.

During our tour du lac, we decided to buy local food in some markets to cook it ourselves. So we lit fire, and cooked lake's fish, local sausage (very similar to Lüganiga from Ticino) and some vegetables. Sometimes lunch lasted 3 hours because of poor fire. So usually dinners were much more consistent!

One night, we were invited to attend a party organized in a local hotel in the middle of nowhere. Being the only non-chinese, I quickly became a big attraction, with people taking pictures with me and talking to me in their Chinese dialect. Even my friend was unable to understand what they were saying...probably because of the quantity of beer and local alcohol they were drinking.

I was finally pushed and pulled on stage where I joined some dancers in their traditional Chinese clothes, and I had to sing the only English song on their Karaoke program (Country roads by John Denver).

After those 3 weeks in China I flew back to Colombo to apply for another Indian visa, flight to Trivandrum is scheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 3, where I will be joined by a friend from Switzerland to travel across India.

Sunday, Nov 24th: second month on the road.
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