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14 August: Lijiang

Another late morning, we awoke after 10h00, the other two still sound asleep. We went down to the only computer available to look at the weather and enjoy our complementary green tea. It was still raining and didn't look good for the walk at Tiger Leaping gorge, seeing as with rains came landslides and TLG was known for its dangerous landslides causing more than a few deaths in the past few years. We had been unsuccessful trying to find out what the weather was like nor had we become much the wiser regarding visa extensions. The other two awoke just after 11h30 and were able to help us with a Chinese weather site, t7online, due to Antone's fluent Mandarin skills.

We went in search of a nice restaurant for breakfast, which didn't take long to find. The food was nice and cheep, only Y5 for a bowl of beef noodles and at least it didn't have the pork fat we had grown so accustomed to. Antone advised we try one of the chicken eggs, boiled in tea and salt and then left a while. Why not, we are in a country where we try anything, even I tried it, actually very nice. We tried some wantons to accompany our noodle and egg breakfast, he showed us how to prepare a sauce of soya, vinegar and chili with it. Nice to be shown the specialties and how to eat them by a local!

We decided to utilize the day even though it rained nonstop, we walked most of the time through the narrow winding streets, umbrellas in hand. The streets were beautiful, cobblestone, small shops on both sides of the roads, canals everywhere with small bridges. At one spot we saw a multitude of small golden fish swimming up stream in one of the canals, although they seemed to hang in space not going anywhere. Either that or the rains that had drained into the canal caused it to flow so fast they just swam to keep from being washed downstream. They actually looked as though they were preparing for a race and were all waiting for the gun to go off before exerting themselves for the race ahead! One of the stalls sold some kind of walnut cake made by a strange machine which we tried just to sustain us during our walk around the old town.

The shops had a variety of goods, from woodwork that had been engraved to batic, dyed material, stonework etc. We walked through the streets up to the top of the hill, where we found a restaurant overlooking all of the old city. The view was filled with a sea of brown/grey roof tiles, unfortunately due to the rain the upper part of the mountains surrounding the city was covered. We continued on up to a section where we could walk up to a temple, except here we had to pay Y80 each, ridiculous! At least we had an obscured view of the new Lijiang city, much larger than we would have thought. We walked further finding a dirt road leading down into some restaurant's back yard and back into the old city.

Back at the square some of the traditionally dressed elderly men and women started dancing around in a circle with a radio playing some old cultural song. It was raining a little and some of them were wielding their umbrellas while hopping around. It was a wonderful experience to watch them smiling and laughing together. We walked further down another street where they found the goose eggs they had been looking for, obviously we had to try, it was a lot saltier, but nicer for me. Leanne had bad luck, her first one had mold in and she left and took another one which was nice. The eggs would be best if accompanied with rice or some other food due to their salty nature. The best ones according to Antone, have a layer of oil around the yoke, but ours unfortunately didn't have this.

We walked around the rest of the afternoon until dinner, again at Mama's. This time we weren't as lucky - we were placed with another group, all together we were 11 around the table, the food was great again but could have been a little more. The table had mostly French around it and on many occasions the conversations were conducted in French which made communication a little difficult and frustrating for us but then again English is their second language also, for some their 5th! We heard from a lot of people that the road from Shangri-La to Chengdu was a 5 - 6 day trip with local buses, hmm, looks like we had better come back to Lijiang and then head to Chengdu from there.

After supper we went in search of cheaper beer at one of the small shops, buying a box of 8, 660ml we headed back to our dorm. The four of us spent the rest of the evening playing rummy and drinking a few beers before hitting the sack at 01h00! We had decided we would get up early the next morning and attempt the Tiger leaping Gorge with some of the other guests of Mama's. We would leave our big bags in storage and after TLG go to Shangri-La after which we would return to Lijiang for a few more days and then head to Chengdu. It would be an experience to say the least to live with only one pair of casual and another set of walking clothes for a week!