The beautiful mountain

Old town, Lijiang has some nice architecture.
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RYAN...

Its enough to see most places in China in just one day. This is what we did in Lijiang. The Sleeper Bus from Kunming was much better than the one we took from Tonghua to Beijing that had pillows full of straw. Fuck, straw is not as comfortable as all those writers make it out to be!

Finally we are getting into the part of China that has heard of cheese!!!

Lijiang has great food. The Naxi (Na shee) people live in Lijiang and are one of the only practicing Matriarchal societies in the world. They also have the only writing system made entirely up of pictographs. Plus they have great food. Finally we are getting into the part of China that has heard of cheese!!! And grilled cheese on yummy bread at that!

The mountain shot was hard to get from Black Dragon Pool because of the clouds.
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The new city of Lijiang is just another city, but the old city is what the people come for. Being in China for such a long time, the old city didn't do much to impress me, as I have sort of seen it all before. The architecture is wonderful but the pulse of the place is all about tourism and shopping, not he beauty of the 700 year old town. We stayed about an hour in the old city and most of that time was trying to leave and getting lost. If Lijiang was one of my first Chinese cities I would have enjoyed it more and bought everything.

The thing that IO really took from Lijiang was going to the Black Dragon Pool (an easy 10 minute walk from old town) and getting my first glimpse into the start of Tibet. We were walking along the street to the Dragon pool and then all of a sudden we rounded a corner and there was this huge mountain staring at us from beyond the western edge of the town. This was not a kind of mountain that I had ever seen before. I was huge, jagged, snow capped and breath taking to look at. Really I am not being poetic when I say that looking at it took my breath away, it is a literal statement. Seeing that mountain literally made me catch my breath it was so amazing. I have never seen anything like it in my life. No photo can ever compare to seeing something like that for real.

The Black Dragon Pool had lots of Tibetan temples and cool things to see. We really enjoyed hanging out there for a few hours and just taking in the scenery.

Anyway we head to the foothills of Tibet tomorrow. It takes about six hours to get to Zhongdian, Yunnan which is the place where we will try to get into Tibet overland from.

Should be fun.