The four hour bus ride from Dali to Lijiang provided some great mountain scenery on a single lane road without much of a shoulder – a reminder of some travel in Ecuador. Arriving in Lijiang, we gambled again on touts at the bus station to find a hotel room. We were brought in a mini van with other tourists to the top of a hill which marked the beginning of the Old Town of Lijiang, we visited with the tout, starting from the top of the hill down to the center of the Old Town, around five hotels before we found an acceptable room. We had read that the Old Town was a maze of small pathways. It was only once we started to navigate these walkways that we realized what the authors really meant. The walkways reminded Jenny of her old neighborhood in Shanghai. Even with two set of maps, it took us over two days to get familiar with some of the main walkways. Branded in 1997 as a World Cultural Heritage (UN), we quickly found the Old Town of Lijiang extremely touristy. Everything, namely hotel and food, were much pricier than other places we had visited to date. The walkways are full of souvenir stores and it got very difficult to walk in the evening due to the amount of tourist strolling around.
On Tuesday morning, we opted to change hotel and upgraded our room – as we were planning to stay two more nights in Lijiang. After lunch, we went to the long-distance bus station to purchase tickets for our upcoming Lijiang-Shangri-La bus segment. We wanted to make sure that we would get to Shangri-La as we had already purchased airfare from Shangri-La to Kunming. We later escaped the chaos of Lijiang’s Old City to explore another nearby Old City, that of Shuhe. Our visit started very nicely and after 90 minutes of walking around we stopped at a Tea House for some tea and snacks. We ended up sipping tea for more than two hours while we watched the first big downpour of rain since the start of our trip. Because of the rain, we cut short our visit to the Old Town of Shuhe and returned to our hotel by taxi. We purchased, near our hotel, a bunch of fruits (mangoes and logans) before returning to our room. Today was the first time we started to wear our nylon wind jackets.
After a late morning start from our hotel, we were determined to find a restaurant listed in our travel guide book which we had been unable to find the previous days. Even after Jenny called the restaurants for additional directions, we still had a challenging time finding this restaurant (Blue Papaya… as opposed to Green Papaya!). The long search for the restaurant was not worth it. In fact, the restaurants in the Old City have been quite disappointing. Although the stone walkways are very pretty to look at, they are very slippery to walk on. We felt sorry for anyone walking with high heels. In the afternoon, we visited the nearby Black Dragon Pool Garden. We ate at our hotel restaurant and later in the evening we ventured, one last time, along the maze of walkways in Old Town of Lijiang. For the last day or so, I had been battling a bit of traveler’s diarrhea… some of the inevitable pleasures of traveling!