Lijiang, the most beautiful place in China..

So this past weekend was the May bank holiday and we all got some time off. I had been waiting for the opportunity to visit a place in the North West of Yunnan, right next to the Tibetan borders called Lijang. It translates to ‘Beautiful River’. This is classed as a world heritage site and for good reason.

Nat, Zoe and I made our way to the capital of Yunnan, Kunming at about 6:30am. I was not happy at this point. After a 2 hour bus journey we made it to the train station. Here I was faced with the awful realisation I was going to have to use a Chinese public loo. For those of you who don’t know, they are just a hole in the ground and you squat over them, normally with no cubical door, without going into much detail, I was too desperate to care and took the plunge and went.

We got on the train to see that in China you don’t get a seat but instead sit on a bed with 5 other people. At this point I was moody, hot and not looking forward to an 8 hour train sitting on a bed. Fast forward 4 hours in and after some food I found myself making friends by using Nat’s phrase book and practising my Chinese chat up lines. Ranging from saying ‘ We should have safe sex’ to ‘I want some weed, do you have weed? We are friends right?’. After I broke the ice we were offered food, shared some laugh and found out the guy I was sitting next to was a medical student and spoke some pretty good English! It turned out to be a really fun journey.

We arrived in Lijiang, it was beautiful, it was green, it was raining. This was not any rain though. This was the hardest, biggest and fastest rain storm I have ever seen and I have been in Thailand in rainy season! This was one crazy tropical rain storm, thunder and lightning too. We were drenched yet still very happy. We got to our hostel and took our stuff up to our shared room. Where we met Joe, a guy from Argentina who had grown up in England since he was 12 years old, so he had a pretty convincing English accent! He was really cool, doing the same thing as us, teaching English out here. He offered to show us around and take us for dinner. Despite the bad weather, I was hit at how incredibly beautiful the place was. The streets were narrow and cobbled. The houses were just as you would imagine any Chinese building with curved roof edges and red lanterns hanging from every wooden beam. But perhaps the most beautiful part of this ancient town was that it had a system of cannels running through it, picturesque and perfect, this place had it all.

After a good feed and a good night sleep we were ready to explore the ancient town, luckily the sun was out too and I was more than ready to get my tan on whilst looking around. Lijiang is home to the minority of people called Na’xi . They have a famous type of flat bread called BaBa. We found a street stall cooking some traditional BaBa with eggs and spring onion, in other words, egg-y bread!! It was so delicious and with a hint of salt it was the perfect breakfast. The sun was soon beating down on our heads as we explored this labyrinth of shops and cafés.  Lijiang has the best shopping you can imagine. There are handmade garments, jewellery, house decorations and art work. Lapping up all of the incredible scenery, we decided to head to ‘Black Dragon Pool Park’ which we had read about. Pretty epic name! We stopped at a place called ‘Through the window Café’, where you literally climb through the window to get in. Here we met a native kiwi from New Zealand who cooked me a pretty mean B.L.T. He also offered us some advice into how to get into the ‘Black Dragon Pool Park’ for free, as we later found out it was 80Y just to get in! Luckily with our new friend’s advice we managed to find a cheeky gate at the side where we could stroll into the park for free! I felt like a spy, a superhero and I was finally doing what I set out to do here, conquer China.

We got into the park and the view was mind blowing. There is a huge mountain here called ‘Jade Snow Mountain’ Every name of anything in China seems to be epic. The park had lush vegetation and incredible scenery. The highlight was that there were small pools of the coldest, freshest water that had melted and made its way down from Snow Mountain. There was lots of people collecting the water and blessing the area that surrounded the rock pools. We then walked further into the park and came to a huge pagoda, traditional and beautiful, it was a perfect picture opportunity! However I was much more preoccupied feeding all of the huge Koi carp fish in the lake than to admire the view. We sat in the park for a few hours, soaking up the sun and relaxing. Zoe wrote some post cards, Nat tried to paint the landscape and dropped her water colours in to the lake, while I was approached by university students to fill out questionnaires, still doing my part for the education system! Even when I’m on holiday .

We left the park, had some dinner and rested up for the next day.  The 2^nd day was just spend being lazy on a balcony café, eating food and reading some books for hours on end, the perfect holiday! We did a little shopping and explored a little more. When we were back at our hostel we found we had a new roommate, a Chinese lady who was to climb the snow mountain the following day. Not much to say about her really apart from she was nice and got her hair caught in a hair dryer. I laughed. A lot.

On our last day Nat and Zoe thought it would be a great idea to hire bikes in the rain, I did not. So I met some guys from Sweden and a man from Singapore and spent the day with them. The great prt about staying in a hostel is that you meet some many cool people, everyone is friendly and willing to spend the day with you, hang out and just have a good time. I showed them around Lijiang, took them to Black dragon Pool for free and just relaxed. It was nice to have some ‘boy time’ and just sit around talking about classic computer games, you would not believe how happy I was reminiscing about Mario 64, Diddy Kong racing and of course 007 golden eye, all for the classic Nintendo 64! We had to be on a train at 10:30pm that evening to get home, so I met the girls and we headed on a bus to the station later on.

The train was epic! I got my own bed, shared with 3 random Chinese people and just relaxed under the air conditioning. Shame about the Chinese man, whose snore was louder than the train engines, meaning I had about 3 hours sleep. Tops.  We made it back to Kunming around 6am, got a bus back to Yuxi by 10am and then I slept all day. Words cannot describe how amazing Lijiang is. It’s has so much shopping, culture and beauty. If I was to recommend some top places in China to visit, this would be up there. An amazing weekend away in an amazing place, bliss, do I really have to come home so soon?

All good things come to an end.