Five Days in Shangri-la (1) By dandelion

2005-10-2

There are some kinds of traveling styles, some terms are invented by hikers, like Grade Corruption, Grade Self-Maltreated, Grade Challenge, or Grade Challenge Plus…The most terrible term should be Grade Suicide. Of course, it’s too ominous to use this term, so in fact, it is Grade Almost Suicide.

Which grade is our traveling? Fortunately, we’ll show the Grade Corruption.

I flew to Kunming, and then we flew to Shangri-la together. What we said Big Shangri-la includes the north-west area of Yunan Province. Narrow sense of Shangri-la means only Zhong Dian中甸 town (or Di Qing迪庆 district).Di Qing airport is very small. We spent RMB15 to take the taxi to town center.

On the way from airport, we found some flamboyant red plants. The taxi driver told us ,it was “Wolf Poison”狼毒. In fact, it’s innoxious. Such a ruthless name under their gorgeous appearance! I like.

When we arrived at the long-distance bus station, the early tickets to Di Qing were sold up. We had to wait for almost 3 hours to get onto the next bus of 12:00.

It would cost 6 hours from Zhong Dian to De Qin德钦. On the way, we past those spots:

l Pa La Sea帕纳海: It is a lake and many hikers didn’t recommend. By the way, people here haven’t been to sea, so they called lake as sea.

l Ben Zi Lan奔子栏: It is a station in “Tea-Horse Old Road” from ancient history till now. It is a small town. Many people, shops, transportation vehicles were here.

l The No.1 Turning of Gold Sand River金沙江大拐弯: The current is more and more torrential. He said if Lan Cang River was a docile young lady, then Gold Sand River was a violent shrew.

l Dong Zhu Lin Temple东竹林寺: It is a Tibetan style temple, but those Lamas seemed not so decent. They were sleeping or lying beside of road.

This was a poisonous plant named “Man Tuo Luo”曼陀罗. Its flower should be white, but was withered now, only spiny fruits left.

We took a taxi to the Viewing Platform, and spent RMB30 and 20 min. There were so many people, we were afraid of no vacant room for us. We asked several hostels. The price was more than RMB300, and no vacant or just one left. But we were lucky, the taxi driver helped us to find a new hostel, which was new-built and its location was not bad. The price was only RMB200.

Unluckily, when we were busy finding hostel, we missed the sunset of Meli Snow Mountain梅里雪山. Because of the bad whether, the sunset was not so splendid as I estimated.

It’s time for dinner. There were only several restaurants, Price was not low, and please don’t hope to get satisfying service. Only those local waiters were always smiling and smiling, maybe because of their natural optimistic characters.

We ordered a chicken hot-pot. As the time went by, food was more and more deficient. We got the last plate of lamb. The local cabbage tasted very sweet. No black spots on its surface, because it grew up on the cold place having no worms. He ordered some Qing Ke 青稞(a kind of local plant) wine too.

After dinner, we called the taxi driver of today, and asked him to take us to Ming Yong Glacier明永冰川. The price was RMB200, so expensive, but we had no choice.

Tips:

l If you are a single hiker, you may go to Seasonal Bird Bar. Someone arranged shift bus back and forth from Viewing Platform to Yu Beng. The MP is 13988747281.

l At this season, sunrise is about 7:12 Am, and sunset is about 7:10Pm.You don’t have to get up too early.

l Because petrol price is higher than before, so some prices mentioned in previous articles are not factual now.

(曼陀罗)