Travels in Asia: 2005

Anyone need a guide or porter in Nepal?  Mukti is your man.  He will serve as your guide, he will even be your porter.  He will sing and dance.  He will be a waiter.  He will be a friend.  What more can you desire.  Not only is he knowledgable in Nepali culture and tradition, he also knows the mountains and will entertain you throughout your entire trip.  If you need a guide Mukti is your man.  ...  He was our man, but we recently found out that he has been let go by his agency hence is jobless and although we tried, there is nothing we could do to change this.  So if you need a guide - please make Mutki your choice.  Contact us for his info.

But yeah... we're in Lijiang

Our trip to the airport in Lhasa took nearly 3 hours.  Hard to say that it's the Lhasa airport since its 95km away.  The flight wasn't much better - the landing especially.  Do you remember the good old days of sitting on a see-saw and swinging back and forth as it teeter-tottered.  Well, that's how the landing felt like.  First circle a bunch of times.  Then rapidly descending and realizing that you've done that too fast hence correcting for it by ascending.  During all this time swaying back and forth and praying that you don't miss the landing strip.  Well, if you can picture all this then you will have a vague idea of what our Zhondian landing felt like.  We were very glad to leave the plane.

Zhongdian was just a brief stop-over for us on the way to Tiger Leaping Gorge.  We stayed there just one night and took a stroll through the countryside sneaking into a monastery without paying (inadvertantly we walked in through the back).  The rolling mountains and slanted roofs with huge wooden columns supporting them reminded me of the German Alps - or at least that Blackforest region.  However, aside for that there was absolutely nothing to do there so we packed up and headed off for a 3 day hike through the gorge.

Unfortunately, as much as everyone praises this hike and the magnificents of the gorge, it  made very little impression on us - especially - Paulina is really annoying me right now, telling me to hurry up with this email after she spent over an hour emailing some useless stuff to her friends individually rather than in a mass email like this - where they still get all the info they require (sorry Paulina's friends, nothing against you - just time constraints)  --- so yeah, where was I, espcially after having done treks in Nepal and seen Everest this gorge seemed quite small.

Our only fun came on the last day when we trekked down to the bottom of the gorge, had a fight with a troll guarding the path (nasty little Chinese man who illegaly demanded money from us for using his trail and his ladders and who would plant himself in all the narrow parts refusing to let us pass). We were half ready to throw him off, but he was more of a lunatic than anything else and whereas we would have had a guilty conscience throwing him off, he probably would not, hence in the end we paid him some miserable amount and walked on.

But the real fun came when we came across a tributary river.  First we decided to dunk our feet and highly regretted the fact that there were so many people around and that we couldn't strip of our cothes and jump in.  After some consideration and the endless call of the increadibly clear and cold water we could not resist tempation and emptied all our pockets into our smelly shoes and climbed in in all our cothes.  (as the Chinese took pictures of us).  It was the most refreshing thing we have done and a complete blast.  Later on we put all our belongings (money, passports, kleenex etc.) into one of my smelly socks and finished our trek back out of the gorge and to our hostel.

From TLG we hopped a bus down to Lijiang - the worlds most touristy place - sort of a super crowded Whistler village filled with only tourist stores and probably nearly a million chinese package tourists following their little flagged leaders and hiding from the sun under umbrellas.  It's truly a sea of umbrellas with no room to maneauvre.  Otherwise this would be quite a quaint little town (surrounded by a huge sprawling modern city).

Leaving here tonight by a night bus - hopefully a sleeper - meaning with bunk beds - to Kunming were we plan on spending 2 or 3 days and then take a 29 hour bus to the Lao border.  We'll see how that goes and might post more new pictures from there.

Take care,

Kasia & Paulina