Plan for the next wee while

Since yesterday evening we have been lavishing ourselves in the tourist orientated town of Shangri-La. Last night was calzone and pizza, tonight was tortillas and quesidilla (or whatever that word is). Both were followed by chocolate brownie and ice-cream at our great hostel, Noah's cafe and inn.

Shangri-La used to be called Zhongdian, but in a big marketing ploy the name was changed for a nice summary of the situation read the article here.

Today our main adventure was to hire bikes and totter out to a pretty cool Tibetan monastery, apart from the huge monastery and its associated adobe dwellings, liquid history on a hillside

the highlight of the landscape was the giant wooden chairs or easels made for drying crops. They sit in paddocks or peoples backyards uniformly facing the sun like Muslims face Mecca. Photos will follow if I left our camera at the restaurant we ate dinner at.

Our plan from here is to get up early, find the camera and suss out when the bus leaves for the crazy white water terrace place. From there we will head up onto Haba Snow Mountain maybe, or just walk around it to Tiger Leaping Gorge, then to Lijiang. Take care out there.

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...