Biking Lijiang

Yesterday we had a great bike ride around the outskirts of Lijiang, finding some authentic and some theme park dongaba culture. Where the road turned to cobbles then dirt we found the old village of Baisha, I played some tunes with the local orchestra. We missed Doctor Ho the famous medicine man and quickly found ourselves on the recently developed Dongba cultural theme park. What was described in the lonely planet as a 30minute walk up to an old temple is now a smooth ride up a slashing tarseal motorway to the temple and hawkers, complete with admission fee. There are also several new monuments and traditional areas which we suspect are designed for phototaking with a view of the spectacular Jade Dragon Peak in the background. Unfortunately Jade Dragon only showed us its forbidding ramparts, hiding its midriff and summit in the cloud.

As we were heading up to the former home of Joseph Rock, an Austrian botanist who became famous for his research in China (for a great great blog on Jospeh Rock see here) one of Pennys cranks fell off! 15km back one legged and with my foot elasticised to the pedal the Chinese hardly blinked an eye. But it was a great adventure and after a pleasant evening and a big sleep we set off all refreshed to...