Hiking Lasha and Wen Hai, and Tiger Leaping Gorge

After leaving the Er Hai area we headed for Lijiang, a rebuilt ancient Chinese city very popular with the Chinese tourists. A little too many tourists for us - they travel in big buses, wearing the same color hats, and all follow a guide with a flag. There are some beautiful sights though, such as old town Lijiang.

The most beautiful sight was this park where you could see Jade Dragon Snow Mountain reflecting in a pond.A lot of the locals liked to gather in the park in the mornings to listen to traditional music and do their group dance/exercise - kind of an odd site for the unitiated. Also in the park they have a Dongba Cultural Research Institute. It is an ethnic minority, the last group in the world that still read and write pictographs. There only 8 true Dongba shamans left in the world...

...and we had one of them prepare a wedding blessing for us on his traditional paper with traditional ink. It is prepared with "Chinese Medecine,"and should last for 1,000 years (if it shows up in one of the boxes we mailed home). We are officially married in the Dongba/Naxi tradition! After seeing some sights we set off for a real adventure, tapping some of the great info that Katie (friend serendipitiously met in Kunming) gave us.


We took a van to Lasha Hai, and rode bicycles around the lake, past many little villages, rice fields...

...some water buffalo...

...and a gorgeous temple.

Some kids were visiting the temple the same day, and as in much of the parts of Asia we had so far been to, they were very excited to meet some foreigners and practice their "Hello, what is your name?". That night we stayed with a Naxi family in their village. They were very kind, although we had no language in common.

It was harvest season, and everyone spent the evening sitting around talking, husking the corn that they had grown to feed the animals. It was great fun to join in and lend a hand. The next day we began a very strenuous hike up and over a 9,000' ridge with a guide who preferred straight up. The little old guy ended up carrying Char's pack and still leaving both of us in the dust. The altitude was not helping...
But it was well worth it when we arived at Wen Hai, a seasonal lake with a sleepy little village where we spent the next night. The following day we continued onward to the north with our guide...

...who you can see in front of Jon in the above photo. We descended back into some more populated areas. Our guide pointed us in the direction we needed to go to reach Tiger Leaping Gorge, turned back, and sent us on our way. We did find the Gorge, the next day.

We walked the high trail, spending a couple of nights along the way.

The trail is along a crazy steep gorge, rumored to be one of the deepest in China, or the world, or some other similar statistic.

The views were amazing, even though the 18,000'peaks that were above us rarely showed through the clouds.

We finally finished the hike, arriving beside the Mekong River. The Mekong begins in Tibet, and our next move was to head further towards its origin, in the far northwest of the Yunnan Province.

How do we eat and communicate?

Many have asked us howwe communicated with the Chinese people, and how we ate. We have gotten very good at sign language and body language. Kind of like charades, 24/7. We do have a Mandarin phrase book, but in Yunnan Province many people do not read or even speak Mandarin, as they have their own languages.

Above is a photo of us out on an overnight hike with our guide and a herder we met alomg the walk. Char is trying to communicate with our guide, who's message was interpreted as "I know a good restaurant when we reach town." To this Jon replied "the drinks are on me," although when we arrived we realized his intended message had been "stay with me at my house, and eat my food, for a small fee." Nice guide, of the Naxi ethnicity.

Jon buying beer. Fingers are pretty good for counting, although the Chinese count differently on their fingers than we do. Fpr example, two index fingers crossed means ten, and the hang loose sign is some other number, although we never figured out which.

Eating was often an adventure, although some places had the food displayed, which was quite helpful, as we could just point, and ususally knew what we would get.

A restuarant with food displayed was often where we would head for. Another strategy was to go where lots of people were eating and point to what was on someone elses table that looked good. The folks never seemed to mind, as the Chinese don't seem to expect foreigners to have even the slightest grasp of their language. It's hard! The food in China was delicious, and there were many different types of food to choose from, as there were so many ethnic foods, plus the people eat out a lot themselves. A good meal often cost only one dollar for two.

If the food didn't have enough of it to begin with, there was almost a jar of salt, "spicy," and MSG on the table from which we could supplement!

Er'Hai Lake, China

Dali is the biggest town around Er'hai Lake, and that is where we first arrived as we moved north from Kunming. It is kind of touristy (mostly Chinese tourists) but has a lot of charm.

It was "interesting" to see the farmers drying their rice, and other goods, in the streets.

There are some neat sites to see in Dali, such as the three Pagodas, which we stayed near.

There is also a massive restored temple and monastery complex in Dali.

One day we rented bikes and rode down to the lake. We got kind of lost, winding through narrow alleys between houses and paths through the fields...

...but when we popped out at the lake we were at a house/dock and the resident fishing family wanted to take us out on their boat to go cormorant fishing.

This is not fishing for cormorants, but rather using trained cormorants to catch fish. We went along and found it to be quite interesting. The fisherman tied a string around the neck of about 10 birds, and loaded them (and us) onto the boat. Once on the water the birds are kicked out of the boat and they begin diving for fish. They can swallow the little ones but the big ones won't go down so they bring them back to the boat. They do a pretty good job, as they know they can't go home until they get some bigger fish. Yunnan province is neat because there are 30 different ethnic groups in the province, many with unique clothing, house styles, and languages.

We had such a good time on bikes the first time that we rented bikes again and set off to circle the lake, spending nights in small villages along the way.

There were a lot of beautiful views, and this was the first time we got into some of the little villages.

Above are some people working the land, and below is a beatiful bridge and an small island with a temple on it that we passed on the ride.

After three days and two nights our behinds were happy to ditch the bikes, and soon we found ourselves up in the mountains adjacent to the lake walking the "Jade Trail."

In the above photo you can see some of the 10km trail, a well built path that hugs the edge of the cliffs. You can see straight up and down for thousands of feet.

The views were really amazing.

And we are happy to report that China remained incident free, for us.

Kunming, China

Well, we entered a different world when we arrived in China! Kunming is the capital of the Yunnan Province, the province in which we spent all of our time in China. It is a small city (by Chinese standards) of 4 million, but huge compared to what we were used to.

Lots of activity in the streets!

Before long we found some really cool parts of the city, like the old town market district.

There are some very strange things to be found in the markets!

We also really enjoyed the Green Lake area, near the University and Green Lake Park. It is a quieter part of the city with tons of good restaurants and lots of young people. Above you can see an art student practing his portrait skills.

On the weekends a lot of the people gather in the park to play music and sing. This was a lot of fun to check out (Ellen, you would have loved it!).

Anyway, we really enjoyed Kunming. It was the biggest city we visited in China, and we spent over a week there. A friend of Jon's, who described it as the San Francisco of China, has lived there for 4 years. Jon actually barely new her but we bumped into her coincidentally. We ended up meeting some of her friends and having a good time, not to mention getting tons of good travel tips for the rest of the Yunnan Province.

Jon's B-day, Car wreck, a Wedding (Goodbye Mongolia)

Well, it is probably time to move on and tell you all a bit about some of the other countries we have visited, but first various shots from Mongolia, one last time. Here is a mundane shot of the inside of the ger we lived in while working on the fish project. You can see the little wood burning stove that we came to really appreciate...

...as the weather turned cooler and the larch trees turned their spectacular yellow.

We visited a small monastery and temple about 20 km upstream from our field site on a couple of occasions. The monastery site has quite a bit of history, although the small temple there now (below) was built using donations from the fish conservation project - part of getting the local religious leaders on board withh the conservation project.

We learned about the monastery and its history from the caretaker (below) who studied with the monks there in his youth, before the the old monastery was destroyed when the soviets took over the country. Although the monastery is active again, the monks are only there seasonally and had left for the winter.

We didn't blame them, as it was beginning to get colder, especially on the river.

Only a very few die hards remain in the area where we stayed all winter, and soon signs of people departing became a regular occurrence. Below is a ger that had been packed up and was shortly hauled off to a warmer site.

The animals were leaving too. We prepared to leave, with mixed emotions, but were excited to have been invited to a wedding on our last day in the countryside.

Our mongol driver was away for the day but he had been training the camp manager, David, to drive one of the Fargons for a while, so that we could attend the wedding in his absence. We were on our way to the wedding over an icy double track through the woods, learning a mongol song that we would impress our hosts with, when the importance of having a mongol driver to drive the nearly-no-brakes-Fargon in the mongolian countryside became very clear. We hit a tree. There are no seatbelts so we all got tossed a bit, acquired some cuts and bruises, and were frightened. Fortunately Zeb, who was closest to the tree on impact, moved his legs up from where they may have been crushed. After taking some time to make sure nobody's injuries were too serious (keep in mind this was a month ago - we are all fine!) we did manage to hobble back down the road several kilometers to our camp, while one of us went on to inform the wedding party that we would not be making it.

As it turns out, this was also my birthday. Meega, one of the mongols in the car with us when it crashed, was great through all of this and even made me a nice card and gave me a candy bar for my birthday. We did notice, however, that once we were comfortably back at camp she kind of broke down. I think more than anyone she could appreciate how much more serious this could have been - having grown up nearby and probably seen first hand how hard bad injuries are to remedy out there.

Of all the injuries, David, our fearless leader and driver at the time, suffered what is likely the most lasting. He broke his tooth off on the steering wheel, only enhancing his local countryman look.

The wedding party would not take no for an answer, and later that day they made a house call and came by our camp, sharing their celebration and ceremonial vodka as they made their way from the bride's family home to the groom's family home.

The next day we all piled back into a (different) Fargon, on top of our luggage, for the 9 hour drive back to Moron, where we would catch a small plane to Ulanbaataar, where we would catch a plane to Beijing, where we would catch a plane to Kunming....