In Lijiang and my first rest day to relax, doing laundry and exploring the old town of historical Lijiang. In many ways, it compresses all we imagine about south west China into one spot, with lots of traditional style, costumes, food and so on, all on an elevation of around 2,200 meters. While there have been storm warnings, today is all blue sky and sunny.
This is also a place, with not much tourism from outside China. However, there is always somebody who speaks English and Google translate gets the more complicated things done.
Let’s see what the day is bringing.
Walked through the old downtown, and yes, it is pretty. Well preserved and the municipality is doing their part to keep it like that, while still modernizing the houses and shops and hotels and so on. So I walked from the north gate to the south gate and ended up in a typical (wet)market, which could be the same in Chiang Mai or any small town in south east Asia. While 2,000 km apart, the culture and things are very similar, including the traditional costume wearing local women, coming to the market down from the nearby mountains and valleys. All mixed up with costume wearing Chinese tourists girls in all flowery gaudy. However, it all gives this place a very unique flair and pretty vibe.
I made it to the hotel of the two Indonesians, and had a good catch up chat with them. Talking bikers yarn and comparing route suggestions.
They will drive north to ShangriLa and into the mountains, while I’m turning North East towards Lugu Lake and from there further west all the way to Chengdu. They will take a more northern route and there is a certain chance we will catch up somewhere further North potentially at the western end of the Great wall.
While we had a good coffee together, we completely forgot to take a group photo, one more reason to try to bet at the same place at the same time. For some reason they will cross the border to Kazakhstan three days earlier, what means, they will need to cross the same distance in less time, which translates more days with long distances. Well, we will see.
One good outcome is, they offered me to get a CRF 300 from them when I want to travel through Indonesia what is one of my plans to get to Flores (where my grandfather was once as a captain with his crew, according to an old b/w photo) and to Sulawesi. As it is relatively easy to reach from Chiang Mai, this would be a great chance to realize this plan I had in mind for many many years.
Checked the weather forecast for tomorrow and according to it it is not getting sunnier with a chance for rain.
So I checked the route options and decided to take an alternative, faster route than the one I planned for through the mountains. While the planned route is one of the great favourites of many motorcyclists, it is packed with narrow switchbacks and is two lane all the way, which means sitting behind trucks and waiting for a chance to overtake, with the rain a good chance of landslides (I saw some really big one on the expressway yesterday with two lanes impassable. No appetite to get over that in rain on thin air. So I take the longer, but also faster motorway route up to Lulu Lake. One of the few regions globally, where a matrimonial society is still practiced today and where women also do not marry but chose a partner for a night when desired.
This stretch over the next five days all the way to Chengdu is one of the only recently opened regions of China with deep traditional societies, lifestyles, languages, costumes, spiritual beliefs and so on. There are over 50 minorities (hill tribes ) in China, and many of them are located here in Yunan and that adjacent part of Sichuan. Can only be interesting. Further North of Chengdu I will then enter the part of Gansu with the many Tibetan monasteries. Gansu is a province next to Tibet which is still under Tibetan influence but I do not need a special permit to enter it.
